I wrote this with one of the subscribers of this newsletter in mind. She and I chatted the other day after a past client referred her my way. She runs an online calligraphy course and wanted to know if I could help her grow her revenue with Meta Ads.

After talking through what I share below. I told her not to hire me to run ads and instead to focus on email marketing to grow her business at this stage.

I feel we’re often drawn to what’s new versus what works. I get it. We see these headlines of big brands that “scaled” quickly and we want to replicate that same success.

While they can. Running Meta Ads aren’t promised to grow your business on the internet. If you do them before you’re ready, they can actually kill your business.

You’re not ready to run Meta Ads if…

​

You’re not leveraging email marketing.

Email marketing is the simplest marketing channel to succeed in. It’s also the most overlooked channel.

Using automated emails you can setup once and be able to send to people who are interested in buying from you for the first time. Being able to communicate at the right time with the right message is key to growing, not just revenue, but profits for an e-commerce business.

Once you start running ads to your e-commerce site and you have automated email flows running in the background to people who come to your site and signup for your welcome series, you’ll convert more visitors into customers.

​

You aren’t sure how much you can spend to acquire a new customer. ​
Knowing how much you can spend to get a new customer boils down to knowing your unit economics. Which is just a fancy word for how much it costs to deliver 1 unit of what you sell to your customer.

Knowing your cost to make & deliver your product to your customer will help you find your margin. (Price you sell it for - Cost to make & deliver = Margin)

Knowing how much you want to profit from each units margin will tell you what you can spend to acquire the customer. ( Margin - Net = Target cost to acquire a customer)

This second number is also referred to as your CAC target. This is the number you’ll use to answer the question, “Are my Meta Ads successful?”

Running ads without knowing your CAC target is like driving cross country without a GPS. You have a pretty good chance of getting lost, tired & hangry.

​

You don’t have time to invest in managing them.

Running Facebook Meta Ads will require time. Whether you’re learning & managing them yourself because you have more time than money. Running ads yourself can take anywhere from 10-30 hours a week depending on your spend, content creation and what you’re wanting to test.

If you’re hiring someone to do them for you, always make sure you know what your target CAC needs to be. Hiring someone to run your ads will save you the time it takes to set the ads up, but you should still be ready to invest 2-3 hours a week for meetings, communication and providing feedback on creative, performance and sharing promotion details. If you’re wondering, hiring someone to help with Meta Ads usually costs $1,500+ a month.

P.S. If you want to go more in depth on figuring out target CAC for e-commerce brands. I dedicate a whole section in my e-Commerce Fundamentals course where I walk you through step by step using a Google Sheet template I created.

Next time the question comes up. You’re now ready to answer with confidence. Am I ready for Facebook Ads? I mean, Meta Ads?

​