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Despite the chatter around its dwindling reach, Facebook remains hugely popular. It has twice the number of users than Instagram, for example, according to Sprout Social.

But gaining users’ attention on Facebook via advertising can be difficult. In this post, I’ll offer tips to optimize Facebook ads with better images and copy.

Images

Even the best copywriters will say that images are more important than copy when it comes to ads that convert. Spend the bulk of your advertising brain power on producing show-stopping, scroll-busting images, or videos that your audience can’t ignore.

Here are a few ideas.

Text overlay on the image. Placing text on images can help emphasize benefits and features. The New Yorker’s ad, pictured below, does this with an easy-to-read offer: “Get 12 weeks for $6, plus a free tote.” Remember that Facebook has a 20-percent rule: the text overlay cannot occupy more than 20 percent of the photo.

Photos of faces. Photos of everyday humans appear native to the platform — they look like a post from a friend! So people are more likely to stop scrolling and read.
Otherwise, a stock photo of a friendly, smiling face can’t hurt.

Photos of the product. Ecommerce merchants can always put their products front and center. Note the example below from the jeweler PD Paola. The earring photo is attractive, crisp, and clear. This strategy may be better suited for an interested audience that’s searching for products like yours.

Headlines

Headlines make or break an ad. They need to be painfully obvious and captivating. The average headline of Facebook is just five to eight words.

Consider these pointers:

• Benefit. What’s in it for the reader? Save money? Get fit? Look good?

• Who’s it for? Everyone? Marketers? Entrepreneurs? Don’t be afraid to call them out directly.

• Who’s in it? Can you include a celebrity or brand name for authority?

• What is it? If a dominant feature is important to your audience, say so specifically.

Many headline factors depend on where your audience is in the purchase journey. For example, a warm lead — such as someone who has visited your website or abandoned a cart — would likely respond to a discount offer. The headline example below from Your Super superfood blends offers an enticing discount: “Pre-order today & Save €10.”

Older audiences may require more explanations in the headline. I wrote the example below for a yoga course. The benefit is clear (“Improve Your Posture & Flexibility”), as is the how (“in Under 15 Minutes”).

Body Copy

If the image and headline prompt them to stop scrolling, users will likely read your body copy — or body text, as Facebook calls it.

Start by asking something that has an obvious answer, such as “Looking for breakfast that keeps you full all morning?”

Or try something out-of-the-ordinary, such as the example below from the same yoga ad. The quirky term “wet noodle” grabs attention. Then I tease readers with the question: “What is ‘wet noodle’ and how can it help you unlock your tight hips?”

Instagram ads tend to be short and choppy. But Facebook ads are often longer. They offer a good opportunity to experiment with extended copy, as users otherwise encounter lengthy posts from friends and Facebook groups. Breaking up long text with punctuation and emojis can make it easier to read.

The example below from Love & Light School of Crystal Therapy uses emojis to separate the text. The emojis are crystals, which accurately represent the company and could grab readers’ attention.

Remember a key element of copywriting: The goal of the first sentence is to entice the reader to move to the second. The second sentence promotes the third. And so on.

Calls-to-action

You’ve got the hook and the line. Now here’s the sinker: the call-to-action. The whole point of running an ad, after all, is to get someone to take action. Go for the ask.

The CTA in the image above is “Click to get started NOW.” These should always begin with a verb that suggests a command, such as “join,” “get,” “grab,” “sign up,” or “buy.’” Including the link directly after the CTA makes it extremely simple to understand what to do next and why.

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You need to accurately calculate shipping costs to keep margins fair and customers happy, but do you know the four factors that impact shipping expenses?

The post How to Calculate Shipping Costs for your WooCommerce Store appeared first on WooCommerce.

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Last year, payments giant Stripe announced that it would donate $1 million of its own funds annually into companies that are building technology to remove carbon from our environment, with the recipients of that investment announced in May of this year. Now, it’s expanding that commitment with a new product aimed at getting its customers to invest, too.

Today, the company is launching Stripe Climate, a new tool that companies using Stripe can integrate to set up automatic contributions that are made as a percentage of each transaction — the company can set the percentage itself — with the proceeds feeding into an add-on pot on top of Stripe’s own investments in carbon reduction companies.

Currently there are four companies on that investment list: CarbonCure (which collects carbon dioxide and recycles it for other purposes, among other things); Climeworks, which is building carbon removal plants; Project Vesta, which has worked on projects like “green sand” to remove carbon on beaches; and Charm Industrial (converting waste biomass to bio-oil). It’s likely there will be more added to the list over time. And for now, companies don’t get a chance to choose how their contributions get invested: they basically mirror and follow the path of those being made by Stripe itself.

Stripe Climate is free to use, and Stripe said that the 25 companies testing out the service in a closed beta — the list includes Flexport, Substack, Flipcause, and OpenSnow — have already contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the effort.

“We built Substack because, while it’s easy to be depressed about the current state of the media business, we think there’s tremendous opportunity for those daring enough to be optimistic. We feel the same way about climate change,” said Chris Best, Co-Founder and CEO of Substack, in a statement. “We’re done with defaulting to depression. We want to help show the way to a better future—and better yet, we want to give all Substack writers the opportunity to join us. Stripe’s climate initiative is a gift because it removes all barriers to positive action. This program makes it easy, and valuable, to do the right thing. We’re proud to be part of it.”

Stripe Climate is playing on some important themes at the company.

Stripe — now valued at $36 billion — has made a name for itself primarily through a simple payments service that site and app developers can integrate by way of APIs, using a few lines of code. That has helped the company grow fast and pick up a huge number of users, from sole-trader outfits to much bigger businesses.

The company is using the same low-friction principle here with Stripe Climate: the idea is that while companies and individuals might in theory be committed to making investments in environmental causes, many don’t know where to begin, or how to do it in an efficient way. This gives them that way, having it integrated as part of its existing payments flow.

“A lot of the social issues dealing with right now are collective action problems,” said Nan Ransohoff, Stripe’s head of climate, in an interview. “Climate change is a collective action problem. Coordinating can be complicated and expensive. So can we make it easy to bring Stripe businesses together to make the whole bigger than the sum of its parts? If we can do it even a little bit we as a planet we will be in a better place.”

The second theme of this is how it fits into what Stripe is building on a more strategic level. Basic payments may be the company’s bread and butter, but on top of that it’s been adding a host of other services for businesses, from tools to help them incorporate their operations in the US, through to fraud prevention and analytics, and money advances and credit based on their existing activity on the platform. And the other week it also made its largest ever acquisition, buying a startup called Paystack in Nigeria, to enter more comprehensively into new geographies like Africa.

The idea is not just to make more money from their customers through value-added services, but to increase stickiness with customers, who might be less reluctant to switch out a simple API if that data is also integrated into a number of other parts of their business and how they operate.

Stripe Climate isn’t going to make Stripe or its customers any money — in fact, it’s a way for its customers to give money away — but it’s a very strong goodwill gesture that could go some way to building more loyalty and regard with its customers.

Ransohoff said that the plan will also be to expand Stripe Climate into a tool that these companies can also in turn offer to their own customers at checkout — not unlike the many offers you might already see these days to contribute money towards good causes when you are hitting “buy now” on any number of sites.

Amazon.se has officialy launched. Starting today, customers in Sweden can start buying items from the local Amazon website. Amazon Sweden currently offers over 150 million products across more than 30 categories.

Thuan Pham, who in May stepped down as Uber’s chief technology officer and longest-serving top executive, has a new job in South Korea. Coupang, the country’s largest e-commerce company by market share, announced today it has hired Pham as its new CTO.

For Pham, joining Coupang, a SoftBank-backed unicorn that holds a 24.6% market share in South Korea, the fifth-largest e-commerce in the world, is a departure from his original post-Uber plans. In an interview with Bloomberg after leaving Uber, which Pham joined in 2013, he expressed relief about his decision, describing leading the ride-hailing giant’s technology division as “a very heavy burden.” After leaving, Pham intended to spend his time teaching university students and mentoring entrepreneurs instead of joining another large tech company.

“I thought that there was a slim opportunity that I would take on another operational role again, but the bar for that would have been super high,” Pham told TechCrunch. “It had to be even more interesting than what I did at Uber for me to jump in.”

After meeting Coupang chief executive officer Bom Kim, who founded the company in 2010, however, Pham said he was intrigued by the opportunity to apply his experience at Uber to a company in a different sector.

Coupang is known for its very fast delivery services. This includes Dawn Delivery, which drops off packages at customers’ doors before 7 AM, including fresh groceries, if ordered by midnight. It is currently available in Seoul, where Coupang is headquartered, and several other cities. Pham said Coupang’s ability to guarantee early morning deliveries was a major hook.

“I thought, holy smokes, this is actually really innovative. Maybe it’s not a technology innovation, but it’s a business innovation, and of course technology has to enable that at scale,” he said.

Pham said he wasn’t interested in working at another ridesharing company, but “a lot of the concepts are similar” in on-demand e-commerce. For example, both have to route drivers to pick up passengers (or, in Coupang’s case, packages) and drop them off as efficiently as possible, and both need to use dynamic pricing to respond to demand and supply, which Pham said is especially relevant to deliveries of fresh groceries.

“There are a lot of challenges that you have to worry about, from the talent perspective, technology perspective, logistics process perspective and so on,” he said. “I figured a lot of things I learned at my previous company could really be applied to help, even though it’s a different domain.”

Despite Coupang’s position as the largest e-commerce player in one of the world’s largest e-commerce markets, Pham said he thinks the company is “still in the very early days.” For example, there are opportunities for building out its logistics infrastructure, inventory and verticals, including its third-party marketplace, which includes warehouse and fulfillment capability for sellers.

Pham, who recently spent five weeks in Seoul before returning home to California, rode along on a night delivery shift to get a feel for how Coupang’s logistics chain works. One thing that impressed him was the density of Seoul, which creates unique challenges and opportunities for on-demand e-commerce companies there.

“We have a few hundred items on the truck and the truck was in a very small radius area. Sometimes we enter an apartment building and we deliver to two or three homes in that building,” he said. “That kind of density is a huge advantage for a logistics company, compared to where I live in the U.S.”

Using tech to address working conditions

After it launched 10 years ago, Coupang initially relied on third-party carriers before building a network of in-house fulfillment centers. This included in-house trucks and drivers referred to as “Coupang men” who also served as customer service representatives.

As the company scaled up, however, it began relying more on third-party logistics providers again. Pham said Coupang currently employs tens of thousands of full-time employees for delivery, but also relies on flex workers in order to meet spikes in demand, for example during holidays. This is one of the areas where Pham said his experience at Uber can benefit Coupang.

“A bunch of the stuff I worked on and the problem I solved at the previous company is really applicable because everything there was flex,” said Pham. “But here you have a set of workers who are on-demand, if you will, and how do you make sure that the proper incentives are there? If you have huge demand and not enough capacity, then you have to pay a higher price for people to take those jobs, those routes and those time blocks.”

But for many companies whose business models are built around on-demand services, the convenience for customers can come at a cost for workers. Like Uber and Amazon, Coupang’s working conditions have also come under attack, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically increased demand for deliveries.

During the pandemic, Coupang has been criticized for not doing enough to prevent infections at two of its logistics centers. Working conditions at it and other logistics companies, including CJ Logistics, came under scrutiny after worker deaths, which labor groups attributed to overwork (in response, a Coupang official told the Korea Times its delivery and distribution center personnel are all limited to working 52-hour weeks).

Pham said that Coupang has spent heavily on COVID-19 safety precautions, including disinfectants, increasing the spacing of goods in its warehouses and using automated systems to track, pick up and pack inventory in order to maintain social distancing.

To improve working conditions for delivery workers, Pham said the company is continuing to hone the algorithms that direct drivers to customers’ addresses.

“I know this firsthand from Uber, that the clearer the routing instruction, the less stress it puts on drivers mentally,” Pham said.

While riding on an overnight route with a delivery driver, for example, he realized there is room for improvement in Coupang’s packet sorting system, so drivers spend less time looking in bins for small packets when they reach their destination.

Pham said that ultimately, he believes Coupang’s technology can give drivers more control over what they do during their shifts, either decreasing their workload or allowing them to perform more deliveries to make more money.

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