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Many eCommerce businesses find Twitter a challenging social platform to market their products on to increase sales and generate revenue. Twitter has a unique style of its own, and many people believe it has considerable limitations when it comes to text length and the use of other posting elements. However, Twitter is an excellent eCommerce marketing channel that offers outstanding results and great ROI if utilized correctly.
In this article, we will provide you with everything you need to know about Twitter ads for eCommerce. Read on!
Table of contents:
- Why Should You Consider Twitter Advertising?
- Getting started with Twitter ads for eCommerce
- Twitter advertising best practices
Why Should You Consider Twitter Twitter ads for eCommerce?
Twitter has over 395 million users with a wide variety of interests and demographics. In new research that Twitter published; they stated that four out of 10 Twitter users made a purchase after coming across a product on Twitter.
They also explained that the probability of a Twitter user carrying out a purchase increases by 2.7 times after being exposed to a tweet from a brand. Furthermore, Twitter found out that, on average, Twitter users shop online 6.9x a month compared to only 4.3x a month for non-users.
Twitter advertising is a great way to increase brand awareness and engage the user through the buying funnel, not just direct conversion.
How to get started with Twitter ads for eCommerce
Setting up your Campaign objective and ad format
Twitter offers different campaign types based on the objective. This objective of the campaign determines the cost. Brands only pay for the actions that align with the goals of each campaign. Let's explore those objective-based campaign types:
1- Grow your Twitter followers
If you want to build up your database of followers to later target them more with content about your brand and your products, this type of campaign would work best for you. Make sure you provide valuable reasons as to why people should follow you. With this campaign type, you choose where you would like your tweet to appear; either on the users' timeline or on the "who to follow" pages.
2- Drive website clicks or conversions "Website cards"
This campaign type is connected to direct conversion. If your objective is to get people to visit your website, then this campaign would be the right fit. Most eCommerce marketers rely heavily on this type known as "website cards".
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What is a Twitter website card?
A website card allows you to include a web page within a tweet. This is a great way for you to highlight your products and drive conversions. To set it up, make sure you include an image, your desired website page URL, and your call to action.
3- Increase tweet engagement
If your engagement rate is low and you want to boost a certain piece of content that you worked hard on, you can set up this campaign for your tweets to show nicely on users' feeds. Improving your engagement rate will increase your brand awareness and brand trust.
4- Drive app installs "App Cards"
Another direct conversion campaign is to drive app installs. If you have an app for your online store, this campaign type will be an excellent opportunity for you to grow your customer base. This campaign type is also referred to as "app cards".
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What is a Twitter app card?
A Twitter App Card lets users check out an image of your app, and see the app's ratings, and it comes with a call-to-action button. This type of ad appears in the timeline feed, but only if the user is on Twitter from their mobile phone.
5- Generate leads "Leads cards"
Twitter can be a great place to find leads for your eCommerce business. Twitter offers the option to directly capture the info of the people who are genuinely interested in your products through the 'Lead Generation Card'.
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What is a Twitter lead generation card?
It is a built-within-the-tweet option for users to be able to provide their email addresses. Through a leads card, you can encourage prospects to sign up for an account, subscribe to your newsletter, receive a copy of content, or whatever it is you want to offer them after submitting their info.
Twitter ads for eCommerce best practices
Next, we will go through 8 Twitter advertising best practices to maximize your return on ad spend.
1- Keep it short and simple
On Twitter, the caption length is only 140 characters, so the shorter the message is, the better. Twitter reports that tweets with shorter than 120 characters witness, on average, an 8% engagement boost, and those with less than 100 characters see an 18% engagement increase than those with 140 characters.
2- Use visuals
Using visually appealing images and other forms of visuals in your ads scales up results. According to BigCommerce, adding an image or other rich media to tweets can result in a 52% increase in retweets. Even more impressive, tweets using GIFs saw a 256% increase in engagement.
3- Use a friendly and conversational tone
Twitter is best known for conversations and personal touch. Set your brand tone, and don't be scared to add humor when possible. Always write in a friendly way, and open a way for a conversation.
4- Keep the conversation going
Related to the above point, if you successfully start a conversation with your audience, don't waste this victory. Keep the conversation going by replying to your mentions. Twitter reports that people who respond to @handles mentions only 1x per week witness an 18% engagement jump above those who do not respond to their followers.
5- Don't hard-sell all the time
Don't make all your paid Twitter ads hard sell. Try to use paid ads to increase engagement with educational and entertaining content for your audience. You can also generate leads by offering educational content like blog articles and e-books.
You can refer to your products and generate website clicks or app installs through branding content; in other words, through storytelling and showing real value.
6- Consider the buyer funnel
Don't always create ads for the evaluation and conversion phases of the funnel. Explore advertising options that are good for the awareness phase and consideration. This could be promoted tweets with educational content or promoted video tweets telling your brand story and explaining your value proposition.
7- Create segmented campaigns
Segment your audience by gender, interest, location, and past activities. For example; certain category purchases, cart abandoners, or based on products viewed. This will help you maximize your ad spend and achieve better results when focusing on segments and creating customized content. Explore advanced customer segmentation with Converted.in.
8- Monitor and Automate your Twitter Ads
Monitor closely how your ads performed and do more of what worked great for your business. Adjust whatever needs improvement and repeat. Converted.in helps you get customized insights from your social media platforms and retarget customers for higher ROIs. Request a demo now!
