Free Dropshipping Course: Strategic Planning To Get Maximum Results [Part 3]

Welcome to the third part of our Free Dropshipping Course and in this part, we will talk about strategic planning for maximum results.

In the first part of our free dropshipping course, I showed you how to create a Shopify store from scratch and how to setup important stuff for it to be conversion optimized. In the second part, I showed you different ways to find your first winning product.

In the third part, I’ll show what to do next after we have a store and a winning product – Because you probably understand that without planning and strategy, the money you will invest on ads will go to waste.

So if you’re looking to maximize your campaign results and actually have a chance to get sales, then this article is for you!

 

1. Looking For Existing Video Ads For Our Winning Product

The first thing you should do is to look for already existing ads for the winning product you chose. Let’s say the product is the Flying Fairy Toy and we chose it because a lot of kids are now home. So it’s a good idea to sell them toys in general so their parents can keep them busy 😉

Now, I want to find ads for this product so I can see if anyone else already selling it. I want to see the reactions their ad gets and what kind of ad they did so I can do something similar or even better.

It’s important to do this and not just blindly go “all in” and launch our ads – We should check how their video ad is structured, what comments they receive and maybe find something the original seller didn’t think about.

For example:

Some time ago, I was checking a pretty viral ad for a product I wanted to sell too. The ad itself was amazing and same for everything else, but when going through the comments I saw some women wishing this product was customizable.

So instead of creating a new ad for the same exact product, I decided to look for an option to add customization and it didn’t take me long to find a solution. Once I had everything figured out, I launched ads for an “upgraded” version of the same product and made really good sales.

Just a quick example of how checking the comments helped me getting sales.

Another reason is to check if this product has an actual chance to sell – Personally, If I look for video ads for a product I chose and find it did sales(lots of views, comments, shares, etc), then it just gets me more excited because I know I can sell it too.

But if I barely find any video ads and the ones I find barely have any views, then I begin to doubt if this product can actually sell.

For this, if you’re doing it manually then you have to really conduct a good research. This fairy toy sold like crazy and I remember seeing ads with lots of engagement on them but the search results on Facebook show me some random video ads with almost no views.

So if someone is new to dropshipping, he might think this fairy toy isn’t doing well to others and move on to a different product. But if he researched better, he could find videos with a big amount of engagement that show this product is actually selling.

Like this video right here:

I used Ecomhunt and there I have a link to the actual ad on Facebook.

This is my preferred way to find winning ads for products I’m about to test – saves me a lot of time manually searching for it on Facebook. If you still want to manually search for it, you can try different search keywords like:

“fairy toy get it now”, “fairy toy goo.gl/bit.ly”, etc. Just be creative, play with the search filters, and hopefully Facebook will give you better results and show you much more popular video ads from what we have here.

You can also use Google search and type something like “site:Facebook.com Fairy Toy” to find video posts selling this fairy toy.

 

2. Looking For Stores Selling Our Winning Product

It’s important to find stores selling our product so we can see what they’re doing and copy what works best for them. If the original seller is doing great and he uses quantity discounts to increase his AOV(Average Order Value), then we should consider doing the same.

If the original seller is selling it for a pretty expensive price(and is doing good), then we should lower ours or just understand that this product, with the right ad, can be sold for much more than we thought and try to sell for the same price too.

If the original seller is has one of the colors chosen by default and some he doesn’t even bother to show, then he probably already knows what colors sell the best and we shouldn’t try selling colors that don’t work.

In Short:

We need to spy on successful stores to see what they’re doing right so we can learn from them. If you’re new to dropshipping, spying on good dropshipping stores can teach you a lot and it’s one of the ways to avoid possible mistakes that will cost you money!

How to find dropshipping stores?

One of the ways is to just click on the link in the video ads we found on Facebook – This of course doesn’t guarantee the Store is well optimized so be careful learning from bad dropshipping stores. Another way is to use google search and type something like “intext:shopify.com *product name*” to get a list of Shopify stores selling the product we need.

My preferred way is again to use Ecomhunt.

Because on top of a winning video ad, I also get a good, well optimized Shopify store I can check out and find even more cool products I can dropship.

 

3. Figuring Out Our Target Audience

Most of us have a limited testing budget and we must spend it wisely to get maximum results.

It’s important to really give it a thought and understand who are most likely to buy our product. Don’t just type the first thing that comes into your mind and pick the first interest suggestion Facebook gives you.

Let’s look on the Fairy Toy:

It’s a toy designed for girls(even boys) and the most logical thing to do is target parents with small children. But I also added “married” and that’s because married women have more buying power. If she doesn’t have the money, she can always tag her husband and ask him to buy it for her.

So by targeting married women with children, I increase my chances of getting a sale.

I know a lot of newbies who will just target “toys” without even thinking about targeting parents. And the reason to that is because they have no idea you can target parents and even pick the age of the children.

You HAVE to plan ahead and do a good research so you don’t waste your money on audience that will never buy. If your page is in English and you want to target people in Germany, then translate it or target people in Germany who speak English.

If you’re targeting Worldwide, make sure to pick countries where the people can make a purchase online – Some countries don’t have PayPal or credit card access.

We’re on limited budget and we can’t afford throwing money away!

 

4. Pricing, Deals and AOV

Everything from your ad to your store needs to be perfect – That includes the product price, the deals around it, and a plan to increase your average order value(AOV). If the price is too high, people will skip your product even if really like it. If the price is too low, people might think this is a low quality product or even a scam.

So it’s our job to price it correctly – Not too high or too low.

How do we choose the correct price?

1. By spying on other stores selling the same product and checking out their price.
2. By doubling the original cost + shipping – If product price on aliexpress is $20 with shipping, we can easily price it for $40 or even $50.
3. By checking out recommended selling price on Ecomhunt.

If you struggle to find the same product anywhere else, look for something similar online and see for how much people sell it.

Now that we have the price, make sure to show your customers the original, much higher price. If you look at the screenshot, I usually show a 50% discount and that works just fine. if you think 50% OFF is too much or cliche, feel free to use 40% or even 35%.

Just remember that people love deals so don’t show a clean price on your store or a really low discount like 10%.

The next issue is the shipping price – Is it better to offer Free Shipping or make the customers pay for shipping?

Well in most cases on ads I saw on Facebook with products making thousands of sales, they all offer free shipping. It’s what I like to call, a “safe” plan… You can’t really make a mistake by offering free shipping, especially if the product isn’t cheap.

But sometimes, a product with a shipping fee will sell much better than a product with free shipping!

I remember selling a cheap product for $19.99 with free shipping and I wasn’t getting good sales… I knew my ad and targeting were great, so I decided to play a bit with the price. So instead of $19.99 + free shipping, I priced the product for $16.99 +$2.99 shipping.

This edit in my pricing changed everything and I started getting some pretty cheap sales!

Long story short – Free Shipping isn’t always the best solution. Play with your price a bit, ask customers what stopped them from buying(if possible), etc. You can even duplicate the same product and change the price. Then test both of them and see which price gets better results 😉

After figuring out the product price and shipping, it’s time to think about some deals to increase our AOV.

Quantity breaks or an upsell? Or maybe just keep it clean?

It all depends on the product:

If there’s a need for more than one piece, then we should always offer quantity discounts – If we’re selling this fairy toy, offering people to buy more than one is a no-brainer. Parents with multiple small children will gladly buy 2, 3 or even more.

But if the product we sell is a Valentine’s gift for the wife, then the chances of getting more than one piece are really low. So instead of quantity discounts, we should offer another product which has to be in the same category too. If you’re selling a Rosey bear, don’t offer a baseball hat as an upsell.

Sometimes it’s better to keep it clean – If the profit margin is high, just let the customer checkout as fast as possible without any offers that will make him think more. Converting an already existing customer is much easier than getting a new one to buy from your store.

I usually offer quantity discounts and that’s it – I prefer getting the customer to purchase as quickly as possible so I don’t like offering him other products as an upsell. This just leads him to spend more time on my store thinking if he really wants to make a purchase.

If my product is a 1-time single purchase, I just keep it clean. Later, I can use email marketing and squeeze more sales from my customers 😉

 

To Sum It Up:

Once we checked out our competitors ads and stores, we can move on and choose the right targeting audience + pricing strategy. We now have some understanding on how other people tried to sell this product, what works and what doesn’t, and a possible plan to do it much better than they already did.

The next and final step will be to launch our ads and start getting sales!

Hope you liked the third part of this free dropshipping course.

Good luck!

 

Struggling to find good products to sell? Not sure who’s your target audience? Tired of losing money on products you were sure were “winners”?

Then Ecomhunt is what you need! Find hot winning products that are added daily, spy on their ads & stores and import them into your store in 1 click and Start Selling Today!

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