Price is what people use to decide if they are interested. Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) messaging for ecommerce is a powerful tool to drive interest in all forms of digital advertising. As a brand manager, understanding how to leverage BNPL or As Low As (ALA) messaging in digital advertising, especially on platforms like Facebook, can be a game-changer for your brand. ALA is a force multiplier in advertising. It leverages price psychology to drive customers further down the funnel. A lower price changes how a product feels. It helps the customer rationalize and justify a purchase. It’s the catalyst for new consideration and ultimately conversion.
What is BNPL
Buy Now, Pay Later is a payment option that allows consumers to purchase products immediately and pay for them over time. Often, these payments are interest-free if paid within a specified period. BNPL solutions are offered by various providers, each with their unique terms and conditions. In most cases some of the cost is shifted to the retailer as transaction processing fee. For example, if a typical credit card transaction is 3% a typical BNPL transaction might be 6%. The retailer ends up capturing more sales overall which offsets the small additional expense.The provider takes all the risks on financing and generally pays the retailer quickly.
The Growth of BNPL
BNPL’s popularity has surged due to its flexibility and ease of use. Adobe reports that for Black Friday 2023 BNPL use was up 73% year over year. BNPL appeals to a broad demographic, particularly millennials and Gen Z consumers, who often prefer alternative payment methods over traditional credit cards. Many younger consumers saw the effects of their parents holding debt during the 2008 financial crisis. They want to avoid traditional types of credit card debt. The rise in BNPL’s popularity also coincides with an increase in online shopping, making it an essential feature for e-commerce businesses. Providers like Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay, Sezzle and Katapult make easy website plugins to make cart integration a low lift for online retailers. It’s simple and accessible.
BNPL adoption is going mainstream, with sales increasing year-on-year and growth up across all age groups. While Gen Zers and millennials continue to lead the charge as the primary BNPL users, older shoppers are also choosing to use Afterpay to budget for their lifestyle and make everyday purchases. As of March 2023, the number of Afterpay orders made by Gen Xers and boomers increased 16% and 12%, respectively.
Integrating BNPL in Meta Advertising
Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are some of the very best places to feature BNPL advertising. Meta’s advantage+ campaign type is built on AI that detects interest and scales campaigns based on how human interest impacts conversions. One of the best ways to get people interested is showing the “As Low As” price.
Meta Advantage+
Catalog ads or Facebook DPA are now part of the Advantage+ campaign type. Advantage+ can dynamically show users products they might be interested in using interest signals. Instead of making look-alike audiences for retailers, Advantage+ makes look-alike audiences for every creative. When people respond to a creative, Advantage+ is able to rapidly scale results.
Advantage+ is Meta’s response to Apples intelligent tracking prevention. Instead of tracking users by ids, Meta now uses the response to creative or human interest as targeting. The mantra of many Meta media buyers is “Creative is the targeting.”
With catalog ads and a tool like Waterbucket you can dynamically overlay the BNPL price on every product leading to better creative with more .
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is one of the most popular email marketing tools. One of the best features of Klaviyo is the ability to dynamically show customers the products they have viewed on your site. One of the most popular flows is abandoned carts.
In an abandoned cart flow it’s typical to offer a discount to encourage the customer to come back to the site and complete the purchase. Price being such a strong motivator for behavior. A BNPL approach can either replace the discount tactic or enhance it buy adding one more email to the flow. The lower price triggers additional consideration, and rationalizations that lead to more purchases at the bottom of the funnel.
The way this works is with a custom catalog. Waterbucket or a similar tool can replace the standard catalog with images that have an “As Low As” overlay with the starting installment price.
Programmatic
Programmatic display advertising is the ability to run banners across audiences or contextual websites where your audience may be. Platforms like The Trade Desk, Xandr, Amazon DSP and Google 360 can utilize feeds to populate creative via Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO). Dynamic creative continues to be one of the most effective tools for programmatic. Allowing users to see products that are the most relevant to them.
Within that programmatic environment product ads are generated on the fly from a product data feed. Waterbucket can provide the feed that includes accurate and up to date “As Low As” price overlays on the products, significantly raising interest and effectiveness of programmatic banners.
Connected TV
A good offer is what can make connected TV work well for performance marketers. Many users are now watching streaming television while on a second device they can use to learn more or to convert. A BNPL offer can bring the level of attention needed to take action. Bold BNPL offers and a QR code for immediate action is a best practice for retailers that want connected TV ads to convert.
The other benefit of CTV is household targeting. Since CTV devices don’t use cookies, they won’t be subject to cookie limitations or deprecation. If you can target you can personalize, and personalization of products with “As Low As” pricing can magnify the impacts of CTV.
Affiliate
Many respected publishers like Forbes, The NY Times, and Discover Magazine have turned to affiliate content as a primary source of revenue. If you search Google for reviews for any item you’re thinking of buying you’ll find pages from major publishers with affiliate offers. Many of these pages use dynamic product feeds to keep pricing accurate. These feeds can feature BNPL prices to make your product stand out from the crowd.
Google Ads
Google has strict rules against overlays in Google Shopping, however, it is possible to add additional images to products that will fire in PMax, Discover Feeds, and remarketing. These additional images can add context to the products with BNPL.
Pinterest, TikTok, Snap, and more
Wherever a retailer can leverage a product data feed to populate ads they should test using BNPL price overlays on images to see the impacts. Pinterest, TikTok, and Snap can all ingest a product data feed to with Waterbucket images that feature the “As Low As Price.
AI Platforms
Bing and Google both have generative experiences that summarize descriptions, reviews, and other product data. The way it works now is by gathering information from across the training data, making inferences, and combining that data with the data from a live product data feed for accuracy. In the future, BNPL will be an important part of this data stream and may be able to win attention as search begins to shift to AI
The Reason to Use BNPL
The first price people pay is attention. BNPL can get people to pay attention. Attention leads to interest, interest to consideration, and consideration to conversion.
The catalyst is always the offer. With BNPL the offer always looks better.
Consider a camera retailer that is constrained by MAP prices. They have to show the same final price as everyone else. How can they stand out? What should they do to gain market share? With “As low as” messaging that retailer can show a lower price than their competitors without violating MAP or lowering their final price.
We advise clients that the ability to use BNPL in advertising is more powerful than it’s ability to extend credit. Extending credit is a powerful tool, but not nearly as powerful as grabbing attention.
Why Waterbucket?
Waterbucket’s patented platform is the first and best way to include dynamic BNPL prices in advertising feeds.
Compare Waterbucket enhanced DPA capabilities to alternatives like: Marpipe, Socioh, Hunch, Confect.io, Smartly.io, and see why Waterbucket can drive more results at a lower cost.
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