7 Easy Steps to Grow Ecommerce Sales from Instagram

If you feel like social networks, such as Instagram, are difficult marketing channels for ecommerce, you’re not alone.

According to our research, social traffic has the worst Conversion Rate for online stores.
In addition, organic social traffic is dwindling fast. According to Instagram itself, people miss 70% of what happens in their feeds.

But as we all know, social media is where people spend most of their time online, and Instagram’s monthly active users number is 700 million. That’s a huge pool of potential revenue.

How, then, can online stores leverage Instagram for profitable growth?

The answer is to use Instagram Ads to distribute your content and Retargeting to close sales.

This is a much more secure approach than trying to create viral posts or paying influencers to share your products.

If you’re already using Instagram for your store you can create a free acquisition report with your Instagram metrics here.

In this article, we’ll show how this strategy can bring followers, likes, comments, and online sales growth. All you have to do is follow these seven easy steps:

Distribute Engaging Content First
You are on Instagram to sell, but Instagram users are looking for fun or interesting content. So how do you reconcile these two opposing interests?

The solution is to generate value to visitors that aren’t in a “shopping mood” by using ads to promote engaging content that fits with your store.

Instagram Ecommerce

Real engagement ad from Compass’ Instagram campaigns

Add a retargeting pixel to the campaign’s landing page in your site, then run ads targeting this audience in both Instagram and Facebook featuring promotional and sales content.

This may seem like an extra step, but it’s an effective way to filter your audience and show your products to those who will most likely be interested in them.

Sending someone straight to a product page and asking them to buy on their first visit is like asking someone you just met to go to bed with you. Earn their trust and affection first, then propose a sale.
Here are more examples of this strategy:

Instagram Ecommerce

You might find engaging Instagram content to promote in your feed by running a free report from Simply Measured: https://simplymeasured.com/freebies/instagram-analytics.

Instagram Ecommerce

Or, if you have a business account, Instagram provides insights for each post:

Instagram Ecommerce

You can also create a brand new piece of content for your customers. It could be in the form of:

Webinars
E-books
Guides
Podcasts
Videos
Classes

Watch Your Click-Through Rate
The quality of an advert can be measured by its Click-Through Rate (CTR).

CTR is the percentage of people that click on an advert they just saw in their feed. You can monitor the CTR of each advert in your Ads Manager.

Instagram Ecommerce

Most ecommerce adverts on Instagram generate a CTR of 0.6%. The number is low because most marketers try too hard to sell at their first “encounter” with the customer.

Engagement adverts, like the ones above, normally have a much higher CTR since they provide value upfront.

You’ll know very quickly if your target audience is seeing value in your content if your CTR is above 2%. If not, create a new piece of content and try again.

Keep Bounce Rate Low
A bounce happens when a user leaves your website without performing any action. That implies they didn’t like what they saw and left right away.

A Bounce Rate higher than the 60% mark is a sign that you need to improve your landing page.

You should add UTM parameters to your ad links to measure their bounce rates via the Google Analytics’ Campaign report (Acquisition > Campaigns).

In the case of the Compass advert above, the URL with UTM parameters was: http://report.compass.co/ecommerce-analytics-guide/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Ecommerce+Analytics+Guide

Instagram Ecommerce

Improve Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors that convert into buyers.

At first, it may seem that taking users from an advert to a content piece, instead of a product page, would be bad for Conversion Rate. But it becomes easier to convert shoppers with a retargeting campaign later on, once they engaged with a piece of content from you.

If your Conversion Rate from Instagram Ads is too low, you need to work on improving your retargeting campaigns.

You can find the Conversion Rate from your Instagram campaigns in Compass’s Acquisition report, if you remembered to use UTM parameters in your links.

Keep Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Below Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is how much you spend on Instagram Ads to make a sale.

Monitoring CAC for every channel is important, but could be tricky if you’re running multiple advertising campaigns.
https://compass-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/06/Compass_-Acquisition_Report-_June_2017.png
Compass calculates this automatically. It also takes LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) in consideration to show if your ads are generating profits.

https://compass-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/06/Compass_-Acquisition_Report-_June_2017.png

Instagram Ecommerce