Having a dropshipping store is
great. No inventory and no worries on how to send a package to your customer.
The one thing you do need to really focus on, besides great customer service, is marketing your products.
Do you know the problem with this
if you’re just a beginner?
It costs a lot of money!
Even if you just focus on just 1-3 products at
the same time when you’re just starting out, you will still have a
so-called learning curve. You will need to learn from your mistakes
and keep on going!
You will make
advertisements which will look hideous when you look back in the future.
But don’t worry,
I’m here to teach you how to quickly test products so that it won’t cost you
that much money before knowing if you should continue advertising that product
or not.
Testing products to find
winning products
With most
dropshipping stores, profits will come from a few products. That’s why testing
products are so important. It’s to find yourself one of these so-called
“winning products”.
Winning products
are products that your target audience loves and that sell like crazy.
These products
will give you the confidence to keep on going and not give up.
This all might
seem really easy right now, but I’m here to tell you that’s it not. It takes
time and effort to succeed with dropshipping! And last but not least, you need
to keep on going even though every piece of your body is telling you can’t do
it and you need to quit.
Why quickly test products?
So why should you quickly test
products?
Well, because time is money. Every
day that you let advertisements run that are not working, you lose money.
This is definitely something you don’t want if
you’re on a tight budget. You don’t want to just throw your valuable money away.
But you should still test products. Even
though you’re scared to lose money.
Reason? Because most people need to test a lot
of products before they find one that sells. Especially if they don’t have much
experience yet with marketing products to potential customers.
So, that is where quickly testing products
comes into place.
This method will let you quickly test products
so you know if it works or not without spending a lot of money.
Of course, after you’ve tested a product and
you got some sales and you think, “Hey, this works,” you still then need to
test a lot in further campaigns.
Instagram
or Facebook: Which one should you choose if you have not made a choice yet?
Before I begin, I
suggest you start with Instagram if you haven’t started with marketing your
dropshipping store yet, or if you don’t have any prior experience with
marketing.
Facebook is a big
beast which can be incredibly profitable, but it takes time to learn how to use
it correctly. That’s why I suggest you start with Instagram. Basically, with
Instagram, you can just find an Instagram page in your niche or the niche from
your product.
Then contact the
owner (or so-called influencer) to ask if they sell shoutouts and how much they
are.
One thing
to note is that this will not be a guide on how to market your products
with Instagram or Facebook, but how to quickly test products. This is still
marketing, but I won’t go over the basics here.
Quickly test dropshipping products using instagram
Now that you know
testing products quickly is important, it’s time to learn how to do this by
using Instagram as your marketing platform.
To start off, I’m
using Facebook mostly to quickly test products – that’s why I have much more
information on that for you below!
But that doesn’t
mean that Instagram isn’t a great way to quickly test your dropshipping
products.
How
do you use Instagram influencers to quickly test products?
First, find out what kind of niche
your product (or store) falls into.
If you know that then it’s time to
start finding pages around that niche. This way you have a great opportunity to
advertise your product to people within that niche!
If you’re on a budget and want to
quickly test products using Instagram influencers, then I suggest not spending
more than $20 per page.
Just make sure that the engagement rate of
that Instagram page is good. Preferably above 3%.
How
many Instagram shoutouts at the same time?
If you have more than one
influencer shoutout lined up for testing a product, don’t do them at the
same time! Or if you already know how that page performs for you; otherwise,
just don’t. The reason is that you will not know from which Instagram page the
traffic came from.
This will be important to know if
the product or niche is working well for you and if you’ll want to try more on
that Instagram page.
How
do you know if you need to continue testing that product?
After the influencer post is
almost finished, just look to see if you got comments on that post and if so,
if they are positive.
Then look at how many
visits you got and what they did on your product page. Did many people Add To
Cart? Did people buy?
All that information can tell you
so much!
What’s even better is to have something like a Heatmap to
see what your visitors do on your website.
Analyse all that
information and see if it’s worth testing on the second Instagram page. At your
second test, you can also try different variables like images, captions, and so
on.
You can find all
the different variables to test in a list above in “Why quickly test products?”
Quickly
test dropshipping products using Facebook
So, you’re ready for Facebook? Or
maybe you’re already using Facebook advertisements for your dropshipping store.
Either way, it’s time to learn how to quickly test products using Facebook Ads!
Alright, let’s get started.
What I do when I want to quickly
test products when using Facebook is I create PPE ad’s for that product. PPE is
short for:
Page Post Engagement; if you use
this as your campaign objective it tells Facebook that you want your ad shown
to people who are most likely to engage with it. This means likes, shares, post
comments, and so on.
Why
use PPE to quickly test products?
The number one reason that you
need to use PPE to quickly test products is that it is cheaper than let’s say,
the purchase (conversions) objective.
The CPM (Cost Per 1000
Impressions) for PPE will be around $5. While the CPM on all my purchase
campaigns were around $8-$15 or even higher.
So this means that it will be a
lot cheaper to see if your ad works on your target audience.
I hear you thinking, but why should I do purchase objectives later on then? Can’t I
keep it on PPE to spend less money on advertising?
No.
Facebook will show your ad to
people who are most likely to engage with it. Not who is most likely to visit
your site and go through the whole checkout process.
While purchase (the conversions
objective) might be more expensive, it will give you the kind of people you
want. At least, if you’re like me and want sales!
Conversions objective is
Facebook’s most popular campaign objective as it is optimized to deliver you
new leads or purchases.
Conversion ads are aimed to
increase sales, sign-ups, purchases, or other desired actions on your website,
and Facebook’s auto-optimisation works really well.
How
do I use PPE to quickly test products?
Alright, so you have a product you
want to test. First, you need to create an Engagement Campaign.
What you do now is create 3-10 ad-sets
in that PPE campaign.
Why 3-10? Well, I usually do
around 7-10 so you have a greater chance of finding that winning ad-set (an
ad-set that the target audience reacts well too).
But if your budget is tight, I
suggest you keep it lower, to around 3-5 ad-sets.
Just don’t make a lot of ad-sets
because you need to. Make them because you want to test different things, like
targeting.
Now your goal is to get 1000
impressions on each of them. What I do is I set the budget to $5 per day. Then
usually when I look the next day it got the 1000 impressions! Because like I
said above, 1000 impressions are around $5.
So, now you have all the
information you need for that one ad-set for $5. Now let’s say you had 5
ad-sets for this product. You now only spend $25 to know if a product works or
not. And not only that, you got all this information in one day!
How
do I know if I need to continue testing that product?
Great, now that you’ve made your
PPE campaign, 3-10 ad-sets, and waited till you got around 1000 impressions on
each ad-set (which will take around a day if you set your budget on $5 per
day), it’s time to analyse your ad-sets and see if your product is worth
continuing testing with the conversion objective. Which is more expensive,
but you will get the right people who are most likely going to View Content,
Add to Cart, and so on.
First, look to see if there are
many link clicks and how much you’re CPC (Cost per Link Click) is.
Then look if you have some Add to
Cart’s, Purchases, and so on. This is a great indicator of if the audience of
that ad-set is loving your product or not because these people are usually only
liking, commenting and visiting your store.
They usually do not go through the
whole checkout process. That’s why your CPM is so cheap (Cost per 1000
Impressions).
Also, don’t forget to look at the
comments that you got. Look at how positive they are. Do you have comments
like: “I need this (Tagged Person)!” Or more like: “Why would anyone need
this?”
If the comments are positive then
you could test it with the conversions objective! Now you know how your target
audience is reacting, in this case: positive.