Augment Your Email Marketing with Facebook Custom Audiences

A frequently quoted marketing truism, “Email is the most effective marketing channel because it produces an impressive ROI,” has withstood the test of time, making good on its promise year after year—but could stand for a bit of readjustment when looking ahead. What should be touted instead is that email, and all the things that come with it, have the potential to produce an even bigger return for your business.

Among those things are social media, and specifically, Facebook Custom Audience targeting.

A Second Chance to Reconnect

To increase its effectiveness (i.e., reach, influence, magical powers of conversion), social media has integrated with email marketing campaigns—a strategy being utilized more and more by the hour. And while this could change in the future, Facebook is the most popular platform of choice right now.

It could be Facebook’s sizable audience of 1.52B daily users that makes the prospect of advertising so appealing, but it is more than likely Facebook’s seemingly endless supply of data on audience preferences that wins everyone over (93% of all marketers, to be precise).

But just how all marketers aren’t the same, their campaigns, and their success rate, also differ. What separates the winning and losing lot is their use of data to target their intended parties. Marketers who use their data to build custom audiences can create ads with alarming accuracy, by uploading subscriber lists and letting Facebook do the heavy lifting of matching known accounts to the email addresses imported.

The age-old problem of not knowing what to do with inconsistent, unresponsive, and DNC subscribers is no more—you can now target those erstwhile subscribers through a different medium (Facebook) or people like those people who were once interested in you, with lookalike audiences. Demographics, geographics, psychographics, all of that is considered, as we marketers are a real savvy bunch.

Facebook Custom Audiences, in short, allow you to reach people who already know your business. This applies to current customers, past customers, website visitors, and email subscribers.

The Five Types of Facebook Custom Audiences

1. Customer file custom audience

These are your current subscribers, past customers, and virtually any leads that you’ve acquired contact information from. You should have their details such as email address and/or phone numbers stored in your CRM or auto-responder and download the to-be audience as a CSV file. Then, upload the downloaded file into Facebook, and it will create a custom audience based on the details.

2. Website traffic custom audience

These are the visitors coming to your website from search engines, social media sites, referrals, and other channels. You can capture their information a number of ways: Google Analytics, gated content, Facebook Pixel, or UTM parameters on your website. The Facebook pixel specifically tracks visitors’ information on your website and sends it to Facebook.

3. App activity custom audience

Your app users’ data can be sent directly to Facebook with the help of Facebook SDK. You can create a custom audience from that information and target those parties who have used or downloaded your app.

4. Offline activity custom audience

These are customers who have purchased a good or service from you in a brick and mortar store.

5. Engagement custom audience

These are social users who have interacted and engaged with your content on Facebook and Instagram.

How to Create a Facebook Custom Audience

Option 1 : Manually export your list(s) and upload them into Facebook using this article as a guide. Doing this every other day or even daily, depending on your traffic, could mean a lot of trips back and forth.

Option 2: Sync your CRM with the Facebook Custom Audience using LeadsBridge, and save yourself the trouble with automatically updated lists. LeadsBridge refreshes every 6 hours to keep the list updated and pushes those leads directly into Facebook. Their app will automatically check, recheck, and create the custom audience from your list which means you don’t have to worry about time-consuming manual uploads or having mismatched data.

Why This Matters

You’ve worked hard (and still do!) to obtain the leads you market to, so squeezing out every bit of return only seems right. Getting each drop means considering the channels that make the most sense for your business, and for a lot of our customers, email and social media are two very viable options that work especially well in tandem.