Spend less budget on new customers - and nurture existing ones!

Many companies focus on getting more new customers through the sales funnel.

But in reality, there is great value in prioritizing your budget and resources on existing customers.

Several studies show that it costs up to five times as much money to get a new customer as it does to maintain an existing one. At the same time, only about 18% of companies today actually focus on that part of the customer journey. ( invespcro)

Social media marketing is one of the most effective channels for just that discipline. 

And Facebook DPA campaigns in particular have (almost) endless possibilities for segmenting and personalizing based on behavior based on your products

Unfortunately (or fortunately for you) very few companies take advantage of the low-hanging fruit here.

Read on and get smarter.

Take advantage of the many customer-retention options

Start by considering what you want to achieve/offer with the "retention phase."

Do you want to offer your existing customers special offers and discount coupons for loyal customers? Or supplementary products to the product they have already bought? Reactivate customers who have not bought in x number of days? Or something completely different?

Once you have established your focus, test whether it actually works for you and your business.

Let’s look at a concrete example.

Customer service

In the example here, the products that the user has already purchased are sold. It is segmented so that the user has purchased a product within the Apple IPhone category—and we now present relevant accessory options.

That way, you can achieve a really nice ROAS with the right combination of a product combined with accessories, supplements or the like.

In this specific case, we saw a marked improvement in ROAS compared to other DPA campaigns.

It makes sense to consider possible compositions in your product catalog. Are there any products that are typically combined with others, are there any special products you would like to promote?

This helps to increase your customer loyalty, customer-life-time value and not least your revenue.

How do I get started?

But how to, then, set up a DPA campaign in the retention phase?

Let's get started.

First and foremost, you need to keep track of the division of your product catalog.

Here it’s recommended you make some different product sets similar to what you would like to offer.

If you want to showcase all your promotional products, you need to set up a product set that includes them.

If you want to showcase relevant accessories instead (as in the Apple example above), then of course you need to have a product set with those products.

Once you’re clear on what you want to achieve, you can also easily create the product sets that suit it. Keep in mind that what you place in the product set are the products that will appear in your ad.

So pay attention to whether you can just use the classification according to the classification of your website (product type), or whether you have to segment it manually.

Sometimes you find that an accessory product placed in the category on the page does not always make sense for the ad.

You create the campaign as a normal DPA campaign. And you can also easily create it as an ad set in an existing DPA campaign.

When it comes to choosing options for your ad set, there are just a few points to keep in mind.

• Choose the right product set—here you choose which products you would like to be promoted in connection with the ad. In the example here are the iPhone accessories.

• Select the appropriate targeting criteria

Next, you need to choose which targeting criteria to meet for the given target audience. Here we choose which product set it is to be defined based on.

In the given case, we would like to include all the purchases where the Apple IPhone product set has been involved.

Thereafter, you choose how long a period after the purchase to look back on.

In the example here, 30 days have been selected and at the same time the user must not have bought the last 2 days.

In this way, we can set a delay in relation to how long after the purchase the user must be promoted for further advertising.

The number of days is not something that is set in stone—it is an example and will depend on just your company, your products and shopping trip in general.

Test what works for you and use, if necessary, Facebook Analytics to get indications of the customer journey in general.

The "cross-sell" function can also be used in this context, but if you want a more defined segmentation, you can use "custom combinations."

Tip

If you want to offer your customers a discount coupon, you can select the option "offer" and thus put together your offer and discount coupon. For example, saving 10% on your next purchase can be a great way to reactivate your previous customers.

Once the settings are in place, you can start creating relevant ads that match the product set. Feel free to test several variants and find out what works for you.

Test, measure, learn

As I said, there are endless opportunities to take advantage of the retention phase of DPA advertising. It's about finding out what works for you and constantly testing different options.

The retention phase is not necessarily a format that must run constantly from the same model. After running different variants, you will probably find that some things just do not work in practice as in theory.

It’s about taking on the learnings and building from there.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that you will be able to lift your performance by releasing some of your marketing budget for the retention phase, so it's about finding the right formula that works for you.

But now that you know that it's five times cheaper to retain an existing customer compared to getting a new customer in, it might give you new inspiration to try and prioritize differently than now.

Good luck with your tests in the retention phase.