3 Ways to Use Your Email List on Facebook

My husband and I baked a ham over the weekend (it’s one of the only things that my husband, myself, and my two picky-eating children can all agree on). We had tons of ham left over so I started “Pinteresting” some things to do with it… you know, besides letting it sit in my fridge for a week and then throwing it away, which is my normal M.O.

I found a recipe for a hearty soul-warming, don’t-count-the-calories, cheese-laden potato soup that called for bits of ham in it. It was a hit and the extra ham didn’t go to waste.

Don’t you love that feeling?

When I can get multiple uses out of one item, I feel like some sort of uber-efficient multi-tasking rock star.

Since y’all don’t subscribe to this newsletter for recipes (but feel free to contact me at klemay@elitedigitalgroup.com if you want the potato soup recipe), I am going to give you 3 ways to make the most out of your email list on Facebook.

 

  1. Targeting or Excluding with Custom Audiences

The first, and probably most obvious way is to utilize your email list to create a good ‘ol custom audience to target. To do this in Ads Manager, go to Audience > Create Audience > Custom Audience > Customer File. Here you’ll be able to upload a spreadsheet, copy and paste, or import your customer list from Mail Chimp. Facebook will match up just about any criteria from your list (email address, snail mail address, name, birthday, etc.) with profiles on Facebook, so the more data you have, the better.

 

There are loads of possibilities:

  • Convert leads into customers
  • Upsell existing customers
  • Remind registrants of an upcoming event
  • Complete a customer survey
  • Get email subscribers to like your Facebook page
  • The list goes on…

On the inverse, you can also choose to exclude your custom audience. For example, maybe you are running a promotion you don’t want your existing customers to see. You can get more out of your ad budget by excluding them from ever seeing your campaign. Talk about being thrifty with those dollars!

Bonus Tip: LinkedIn allows you to export your connections into a spreadsheet (Yahtzee!). So then, you guessed it, you can upload that into Facebook as a custom audience to target.

 

2. Create a Lookalike Audience

After you’ve uploaded your custom audience you know have the capability to expand that audience and find other people in Facebook who are just like them. Amazing, right? Lookalike audiences identify the likes, habits and demographics of your list and creates an entirely new list of people with those same qualities.

Depending on the size of your list, you may even be able to create a lookalike of only your best, most profitable customers. To do this in Ads Manager, go to Audience > Create Audience > Lookalike Audience. From there, you’ll be able to choose the source (your custom audience that you uploaded) and what country you’d like to match with.

Your lookalike audience will likely be large, so when you are using it in a campaign you can choose other demographics and interests to pair the lookalike with. For example, a doctor’s office might create a lookalike audience of their patients and pair it with people who like Prevention Magazine within 10 miles of their office. A financial planner might create a lookalike of their top tier clients and pair it with an income requirement. By doing this, you’ve taken a cold audience and made it just a bit warmer.

 

 

3. Know Their Every Move

If you’ve never used Audience Insights within Facebook Ads Manager before, stop what you are doing and go try it (Plan > Audience Insights). Inside here you will find an incredible amount of data (and if you are into data, you are going to go “full nerd” when you see this). Audience Insights allows you to analyze any custom audience to gather information about everything from basic demographics to what kind of car they drive. And all this information is compared against the average Facebook user. Some data might be obvious (if you sell women’s shoes it will be no surprise that your audience is mostly women). But some data will be more surprising.

We recently ran Audience Insights for our own email list while trying to brainstorm some new targeting groups. When looking at the job titles of our email subscribers there weren’t many surprises, as we know we have a lot of folks in the “professional services” arena on our list. What we didn’t realize was that we have folks on our list in the Arts, Entertainment, Sports and Media category… 32% more than the average Facebook user. This was something we had not explored in targeting for our ads. And you best believe we added that as an audience that day ☺

Look for these little “golden nuggets” within Audience Insights and then pull them into your campaigns to reach your perfect prospects.

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