One of the Facebook features that gets very little blog or media coverage is their “offers” objective, and up until now, there was a good reason why.
While the objective at its core is a great way to get customers to claim your offers directly off Facebook, in reality very few people actually used them and the whole process was cumbersome to manage, difficult to monitor and hard to execute successfully. This resulted in very few people redeeming the offer.
In August 2016, Facebook revamped its offers objective giving brands more control, and added a few cool features to ensure those who claimed your offer end up using them.
If you plan to go wild over the holidays with insane offers, here’s what you need to know about the new Facebook offer objective.
How It Works
With the new offers objective, you can create online or in-store offers which can be shared using the offers objective through Facebook ads, or directly inside a Page post.
When a user redeems an offer, along with receiving an email barcode of their offer, it will also be saved in their offers bookmark tab. The next time they login to Facebook using a desktop, they will be alerted with a push notification of the offer they claimed previously.
This is extremely useful for anyone who claimed on a mobile during their commute to/from work, their lunch break or any other point in the day where they didn’t have enough to time to redeem the voucher right away.
With the old offer objective they’d most likely have forgot about your offer, but with Facebook’s new pop-up alert feature you can re-engage with the prospect when they are on their personal computer.
If a coupon has been claimed but not used, when it’s getting close to expiry (all offers must have an expiry date), Facebook will alert the user that their offer is about to expire, giving them another nudge to claim your offer.
If the voucher is for an in-store purchase, a user simply has to open their offers tab on the Facebook mobile app and the cashier can scan the barcode directly off the smartphone. For online offers, once a user clicks on the offer and is sent to your website, your offer code is placed at bottom of your website like a footer while they browse your online store:
Offers Tab Page Feature
Along with the new ad features, Facebook has updated its Business Page by inserting a new offers tab which can be viewed by users who visit your page. Since all offers must have a start and end date, they will only be able to see current offers, and you’ll be able to highlight certain offers to make them stand out more.
How To Use Offers To Win More Business
Offers can posted on your Facebook page reaching your fans organically, or combined with a Facebook ad to target your customer list, lookalike or custom audiences.
Think about creating an offers ad based for specific audiences. For example, if a customer has just placed an order for a new laptop on your website, serve them a time-based offer for a carrier case, mouse, speakers or other additional items to upsell.
Utilizing the expiry date of the offer increases scarcity of your upsell leading to more sales.
For non-transactional audiences, offer prospects who have only read a blog post or viewed a video free shipping on their first order or $10 off. If in the last few days they have read content on your site, you’re fresh on their mind and a well throughout time-based offer can tip them off the fence and into a customer.
For online offers you can optimize your bidding strategy for conversions if you have setup pixels.
There’s More To Come
One obvious flaw with Facebook’s offer objective is that people can setup fake accounts and keep redeeming your offer, or post it on a deal or coupon site where you’ll end up getting more claims than you can handle.
When running an offer, there is only one voucher code you’re able to distribute to everyone, making it difficult to track who is and isn’t eligible. Facebook mentioned its coding team are working on a way to offer unique vouchers to each individual user in the future.
This will be extremely useful if you want to give offers to certain audiences.
For example, if you want to run an offer for customers, in the future you will be able to upload your customer list and instruct Facebook to allow only customers to claim the offer.
Facebook didn’t mention too much about planned upgrades to their offers objective, but I feel some sort of integration with email lists and audiences isn’t too far away.
Summary
Already businesses have seen as much as a 31% increase in sales from running the new Facebook offers.
To run a successful offer ad, along with doing everything right at the ad set and ad level, you also need to have a killer offer, this is something many brands overlook.
You can target the right audience and use the best ad copy, but if the offer is lame, people won’t claim.
How will you be using Facebook offers during Black Friday, Thanksgiving and the Christmas Holidays?