Three types of Facebook ads for Boosting Your Online Course Sales

No matter whether you have a tiny budget or millions of dollars to put into it. The minimal needed Facebook advertising budget is one dollar per day.

You're likely to be thinking "How could I possibly achieve any meaningful result for a few dollars each week?"

Let's take a look at some actual numbers.

Here's a screenshot of an advertising campaign that I carried out through my agency. These are results for the past 7 days.

You can see that we've paid $14.11 and that led to 3 course sales with a total sales value of $991.

It's not an error, we really are seeing a 7000% ROI from this campaign.

They are simple to put into practice and are extremely affordable.

Read on to find out what you can do to apply them to your own life.

  Focus on Points of Urgency as well as Scarcity  

Leveraging urgency and scarcity are two of the most effective strategies to improve your sales. In some cases, increasing sales by up to 332%.

Before proceeding we need to define urgency and scarcity.

Urgency is the time when a purchaser is compelled to take action quickly. If something is time-limited the buyer feels a sense of urgency because the buyer knows they must either act prior to a specified time or risk missing an opportunity.

Scarcity is the term used to describe something that is scarce and may soon run out. Let's say you open your class to twenty students. The course is then in a state of scarcity, because after all the spots have been taken, your course becomes no longer open to prospective buyers.

The most common reasons for the urgency and shortage to launch a course are usually:

• When bonuses are expiring
• When discounts are expiring
• In the event that you only have a certain amount of freebies to offer. As an example, the first 20 customers get a free 1-hour consultation phone
• When the cart is closing

With a few clever Facebook ads, you are able to highlight this issue of scarcity or urgency and increase your revenue.

Here's a great example by Sumo.com:

These ads also give you another channel to communicate with individuals who may not have opened your emails about an impending deadline or when you've almost sold out.

  1. Inform People of Bonuses or Discounts expire.

These ads work extremely well when you retarget people who are already engaged your campaign in some way.

For setting them up it is necessary to set up a couple of new Custom Audiences.

To begin, import the contacts in your email list who have engaged with your campaign to build a new Custom Audience.

To do that, head to the "Audiences" section within the Facebook Advertisement Manager and make a new Custom Audience.

It's assumed that you're marketing your course to your entire email list. That means you'll want to transfer your entire list to Facebook as an .csv file to create the new Custom Audience.

Now you'll need to upload the .csv, select those fields that you want Facebook to use to match your data to Facebook users. Then you're completed.

Now it's time to create the ad that will specifically target your email list. Audience.

Create the new "Website Clicks Campaign. Then, you can create an Ad Set within the Campaign.

While you're setting up your Ad Set, select your custom email list that you created for your Audience to be your primary. There is no need to choose a country or region for this instance, so just leave that blank.

If you have any offer that is due to expire such as a set of bonuses or a limited period discount, I would like to input the date and hour at when it will expire in the 'End Date' field. It will make sure that your advertisements aren't running long until the offer expires.

Finally, you need to design your advertisement that warns the people who are viewing it that your deal is running out and then links to the sales site. This is not difficult at all!

  2. Retarget Sales Page Visitors by utilizing Facebook Messenger ads

Have you visited a sales page and noticed the chat option on the right?

They are an excellent method to reach out to potential buyers who might be considering purchasing your item or service.

If you have someone on your sales page is evidently attracted. A quick conversation with you may be all they need to help decide whether to buy.

It's a great feature of this fairly new alternative in Facebook ads.

It allows us to set Facebook Messenger as the destination of your ads. If people click on ads that has Messenger as the destination it instantly starts a Messenger chat with the Facebook profile you have on.

Here's a sample. As you can see, after a user clicks on the ad on the left side, a brand chat with the Facebook page is initiated immediately.

Re-targeting your sales page visitors through an advertisement that allows users to immediately start a Facebook Messenger conversation with you is working extremely good at the moment.

When they click on the ads, you can answer their questions right there on Facebook messenger.

It's an excellent experience for your clients and it's an easy, low-cost solution to get it set up.

Due to the fact that audiences are typically small by Facebook standards, it would cost most people a few dollars to display an ad similar to this in a campaign.

Here's how you can set up your ad campaigns using Facebook Messenger as the destination.

1. Start a new campaign using the objective of Website Traffic

2. Create a custom audience on your site which includes all customers who visit your sales pages. Make sure you exclude your Custom Audience that contains your customers.

Once you select your daily budget it's time to create the ad.

This is just like creating the other Facebook advertisement, with the exception of one difference.

Instead of choosing the destination to be a website URL, you will need to select 'Messenger Text' as your destination.

When you select Messenger Text, you also have the option to enter a message. This message will be the initial message you exchange with your potential customer.

In the example, I like to just use something simple to begin the discussion.

After you click publish, your ads will go live and up and running.

A couple of important things to be aware of:

• It is essential to enable messages for your Facebook page in order for these ads to work. You can do that via the settings for your page (on the 'General' tab)
• The more quickly you react faster, the better chance of closing the deal. You should ensure that you have a person who is monitoring your messages on your website so that you can respond to prospective customers quickly.

  3. Testimonial Ads

After you've gathered a couple of excellent testimonials about your class, the next step is to add these to your sales page and the checkout.

Why stop here?

Let's look at an example of results from the testimonial ads we ran in conjunction with a major launch.

As you can see, 19 customers went on to buy the course once they clicked the testimonials advertisement. The cost was just $107 for the advertisement, but those 19 sales were worth over $56,000 in sales.

Here's how to incorporate testimonials to promote your Facebook ads:

Only show your testimonial ads to people who have already indicated that they are interested in the course you offer. That's where they will be most effective and deliver the highest ROI.

My preference is only showcase testimonials to customers who have viewed the sales page.

For this, all the first thing you have to do is create the Facebook Custom Audience that contains the people who went to your website for sales.

Once you've set up your advertising set, you'll be able to target your new sales page the user with a custom audience.

Prior to moving on to the ad creatives, there is one more vital thing that I would like to demonstrate when you look through the Ad Set options.

As we're targeting only a narrow, very particular audience You must ensure your testimonial ads are seen by as many of them as is possible.

It is possible to ensure that Facebook shows your ad to as many people inside the audience you wish to reach using the option  the option 'Daily Unique Reach' within the 'Optimization and Delivery' settings.

This instructs Facebook to display your advertisements on that page to as many people in your audience as possible, a maximum of once per the day.

Are you looking to display your advertisement to people more than once per day? Make sure to duplicate the set of ads. If you've got multiple testimonials, you can run each separately in an advertising set, so that your audiences sees a couple of them every day (this is my preference).

What should your testimonial ads be like?

The first step is to consider the type of testimonials that you've got. Are they video testimonials or written?

If you're using text-based testimonials (this is the most popular), then you can make a normal image ad like this example taken from Brian Dean:

You can also use a carousel ad to display multiple testimonials within a single ad.

Carousels can work well, but just know that you're quite limited for the text for each testimonial on carousels, making it tough.

To promote video testimonials An ad similar to that above, but using videos instead of an image is all you require.

If you're running video (testimonials or any other kind) You should include captions so that users can view videos with sound off. I use rev.com to get captions to my videos, and recommend that you follow the same procedure. With a cost of $1/minute, it's extremely affordable and increases your audience's engagement as well as the number of clicks you get.

  Concentrate on Facebook Ads that deliver the highest ROI  

Many people are focused on the use of Facebook ads to buy new leads or subscribers and ignore the ads that will bring the greatest return on investment.

If you're operating a huge ad budget or you only have a couple of dollars spend, these should be your first ads to create.

Go ahead and give them the test for your personal course. They work for both open/close launch courses or evergreen ones There's no reason to not test these out to see if they work for you.

Finally, if you're interested in getting a copy of the exclusive course launch ad blueprint that I use for my private agency clients you can click here to get it for free. It maps out when and where you should run ads to promote your course, including the ads I've listed above plus a few extras that I don't usually share.

Andrew Hubbard helps experts & online course creators scale their launch of new products as well as evergreen sales funnels from 6 to 7 figures by using Facebook advertising. Download his free Facebook Ad Blueprint for Online Course launches here.