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Having a rough time after Apple iOS update (diminished Facebook ads)
I just want to scream into the void a bit. I relied heavily on creating Lookalike audiences of my best customers for Facebook ads. This worked like gangbusters. It was like a combination of top of the funnel and pure sales. We were selling *to brand new people* every day. The ad started out costing me $4.90 per purchase and I ran it for *16 months* with very minimal tweaks. By the end of the 16 month run it was costing about $14 per purhcase but it was still worth it to me because it was a combination of a purchase + a new customer acquisition.
Since the iOS updates that cost per purchase has gone up to $30. That is way too expensive for me so I stopped running them.
Since then I’ve been doing some things that I kinda knew I had to do but put off because the Facebook ads were working so well (my own fault for procrastinating.) I finally started doing SMS marketing and paying more attention to my email list.
But in the meanwhile my sales have dropped drastically and I’ve already had to let two of my team members go (my biz had 8 employees, we’re down to 6.) And I might have to lay off one more.
The SMS marketing has a lot of potential, but I did a quick calculation and I’d need about 17,000 subscribers to replicate the sales results I had with Facebook. My sign ups are currently at 200. My email list is more robust at about 50,000 subscribers but the majority of them don’t open emails from me consistently enough to get the flow/volume of sales I was used to. I keep running discount sales to my email list to get a flow of sales going but there is some fatigue there.
I’m bummed and honestly I don’t want to be in this position again where I relied so heavily on a third party marketing platform that I’m screwed when they go under (prior to the iOS update I go 50% to 70% of my daily sales from Facebook.)
Just need to scream into the void for a bit. Anyone relate? How are you dealing?