[For Shopify Pet Ecomm Businesses]
Are you in the pet-centric ecommerce space? When it comes to creating a profitable Facebook ads campaign to market your furry-loving product, we have created a short list of our top 5 tips you need to follow to double your ROAS and get more new customers! What isn't paw-awesome about that?!
The Problem
Simply put, pet product stores need more customers, and increased sales in order to turn an even bigger profit. Pet lovers will all agree that pets are like family. They require love, care and only the BEST products. Use our tips below to convince even the pickiest of pet owners that your product is purr-fect for them! If you're in the boat of wanting to improve your ROAS and if you're running Facebook ads for your pet-loving store currently or even if you never have, listen up!
1. A Good Offer To Attract Pet Parents: A good introductory offer is essential to getting the most amount of new customers for your pet products at the lowest cost.
Converting new customers is very challenging, therefore pet-focused businesses need to make it as easy as possible for a potential customer to make that first purchase. If you’re not strategic about this, it can cost a fortune to acquire a new customer and it could actually keep your short term and long term ROAS too low to start scaling. What’s one of the best ways to do this? A good introductory offer is essential to getting the most amount of new customers at the lowest cost. Businesses that prioritize great incentives at the top of funnel ultimately are more successful and bring in more revenue (and profit!) than those who are too stingy to offer a first-time customer promotion. We often hear “we don’t want to dilute the brand” or “once you start discounting, you can never go back,” and that’s simply not the truth. First-time customers are notoriously the most expensive customers to convert. Once a customer has already purchased from you and likes your products and trusts you, they don’t need a promotion to buy from you again.
It’s important to remember that it will always cost less to convert a current customer than a new customer. But a good promotion can actually dramatically decrease your new customer CPA. In fact, contrary to how it may seem, a great performing introductory promotion will often bring in more purchases and a higher initial ROAS than no promotion or a weak promotion. This is because a good promotion encourages more clicks to the website and provides more of an incentive for people to buy now instead of later. But there is not a one-size-fits-all promotion for businesses, so you must test multiple promotions to find the right one for your pet product. In our experience, we typically find that a minimum of 15%-20% off for new customers is a high-performing offer. But a dollar amount off and BOGOs can be very successful as well.
Here are some examples where we achieved double digit ROAS in summer 2020 with awesome introductory offers. ICEMULE offers 15% off for new customers and saw 10.53 ROAS in June 2020! 
PRO TIP: If you're running ads for a pet-centric ecommerce store and are struggling to get new customers in the door, start testing first-time customer promotions! Again, we recommend no less than 15% off, if you want to try a percentage off. Alternatively, you could test a dollar amount off, typically no less than $10 off. Other ideas include: buy one get one free, buy one get one half off, free-trials, a free item with any order, or free shipping. In addition to testing a first-time customer promotion, make sure to test MORE than just one promotion in order to find the most successful one for your fur-loving target audience.
Another business, Layered With Lace, offers their first month's subscription at just $10 and saw an outstanding 12+ ROAS in July 2020. WOW!
2. The Right Metrics On Your Pet Products Website: You shouldn’t run ads to a pet products website that isn’t ready to receive and convert traffic. It’s important to understand that Facebook ads will not be the secret sauce that will fix a broken foundation and allow a pet product store to make more sales. If your foundation is broken on the website, the Facebook ads simply won’t work. You MUST have some essential things in place on the site BEFORE you run Facebook ads and decide to scale.
The 3 metrics we evaluate to determine if a pet product Shopify store is ready to run ads or scale are the following:
1) Website conversion rate
2) Lifetime value of a customer and
3) Average order value.
The conversion rate tells you the amount of website visitors your website converts to sales. It tells us the effectiveness of your design, prices, incentives, products and checkout flow. You should have a website conversion rate of at least 1% when you’re running ads, but ideally 2%+, when you’re ready to start scaling your ad campaign. This number, along with the AOV & LTV, directly impact your return on ad spend (ROAS). If you have a low conversion rate (i.e. less than 1%), it won’t matter how much qualified/ready-to-buy Facebook ad traffic comes to your site, the low conversion rate will simply make the Facebook ad campaign significantly less effective. If you have a great conversion rate (i.e. above 2%), this will compliment the campaign, convert more traffic and bring in a higher ROAS. The job of the Facebook ad campaign is to find the right traffic who will click through to the site but the job of the website is to convert that traffic into sales.
The lifetime value of a customer tells us how much 1 customer spends at your pet products store during the duration of their time as a customer. The higher this number is, the easier it will be for you to offer an appealing first-time customer discount that will make it easier for them to convert. First-time customers are always the hardest and most expensive to convert; the majority of a customer’s revenue comes AFTER their first purchase. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to run FB ads to a store that has a low LTV. It just means that if your LTV is low and your AOV is low, this will be extremely challenging for you to make your FB ad campaign for your pet business profitable. In fact, it’s unrealistic to expect websites with an LTV below $80 to be profitable with Facebook advertising. Your LTV should ideally be above $80.
The average order value tells us how much money an average customer spends per purchase and generally this number should be at least $50. These numbers are by no means the only or #1 predictor of success for a FB ads campaign, but when they’re in the right range, they give pet businesses way more wiggle room with the ads at the top of funnel so that they can run a successful strategy that brings in the most revenue. In simplified terms, a higher AOV will allow for a higher ROAS with each sale you make on the site. An AOV of $50 or above is indicative of a store that has the right product prices and upsells in place to make each sale efficient and profitable enough to drive further success.
These aren’t hard rules but they are consistent with high performing Facebook ad campaigns for pet product stores. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t expect to achieve a 10+ ROAS with metrics that are less than those listed above. 
3. Pet Product Ad Copy That Gets More Clicks: When you’re running a Facebook ad: Clear and efficient copy is the most effective copy to utilize with Facebook ads for pet companies. With ad copy, your goal is to quickly and succinctly capture the attention of your target audience, reel them in with the promotion, and get people to click onto the website. People have super short attention spans in general and just want you to to get to the point in the body of the ad. There’s a reason for the TLDR acronym!
To craft an effective ad copy for a pet product at Shopify store, try this winning template used often by our team of experts: Start by refining exactly what the product does and for whom in under 1 sentence. You can create this on your own by brainstorming how to simply communicate what the product is or go to the product page and look at the product copy for inspiration. In fact, using the same or similar sections from the product copy is a good thing. If the product copy is good and super succinct, you will only benefit your ad by emulating that copy.
For example, for a dog harness, it could be: The ultimate comfy & safe dog harness for spoiled pups with dog moms who are extra picky. Then, if there are appealing features for the product such as 100% organic, available in sizes XXS to XXL, etc, you can add those as simple bullet points next (with emojis as the bullet points!) without going into full sentences.
Finally, make sure to clearly highlight any promotion for the product in the headline and in the body copy multiple times! If we had to put a formula together for stellar copy, it would emphasize the importance of efficiency, succinctness, and redundancy when crafting the perfect ad copy for your pet product. Here’s our full example all together:
4. Sufficient Budget: A sufficient budget for A/B testing all aspects of your campaign is a MUST to see any kind of true success. Simply put, utilizing full efforts and dedication to A/B testing is how we quickly achieve an awesome ROAS for the ecomm businesses we work with. If we don't test all aspects of the campaign, we are not quickly able to discover exactly what would make our ecommerce clients the most amount of money. We recommend starting your testing with a minimum of $60/day or $2000 per month in ad spend. With this budget, we will be able to effectively pinpoint:
✔️Which product images with text overlay are most appealing to your target audience.
✔️The ad copy (long, short, emoji's, etc) that generate the most amount of clicks to the website.
✔️Cold audiences that are most interested and ready to buy.
✔️The best performing placements (Facebook mobile, Instagram stories, etc.).
✔️The ad optimizations that bring in the most traffic at the lowest cost, such as add to cart conversion optimization and purchase conversion optimization.
✔️The links (product or homepage) which bring in the highest ROAS.
Facebook campaigns always require thorough A/B testing to discover which aspects of the FB ad campaign bring in the best results. Just as important as it is to discover what does work, you have to discover what doesn't work with the campaign. For example, you might discover that you have to pivot and thus A/B test an alternate strategy that will bring in the highest ROAS. A/B testing is how any business will be able to get the highest ROAS and CPA.
PRO TIP: We recommend budgeting for at least $2000 per month to spend on ads in order to effectively A/B test your audiences, ad copy, ad images, ad videos, placements, optimizations and more. You can spend less than this amount monthly but, to be honest, it will take significantly longer and be much more challenging to achieve the results you want to see. Trust us, after working on dozens of Facebook ad campaigns over the years, the patience required with less than $2k monthly ad spend will be brutal! 
5. Pet Images That Stop You Mid-Scroll:
Did you know that the picture used in an ad can affect the success of that ad by up to 70%? This is because it is often one of the first things people notice and thus it needs to be able to STOP people from scrolling through Facebook and Instagram feeds.
While A/B testing is essential for all things related to Facebook advertising, it is especially important for the pictures. If you only try out one picture with an ad, you may never discover the winning combination with your ad copy that could dramatically increase the amount of clicks to your website and ultimately a higher ROAS. Therefore, you need to make sure you test the following:
✔️Multiple pictures
✔️Pictures of pets wearing your product
✔️User generated content (with their permission)
✔️Text overlay that offers a brief description of your product
✔️Text overlay that only shows the promotion
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