Did you know you can upload your email list to your business Facebook account and create a marketing segment to target your email contacts through Facebook? You can, and if you advertise on Facebook, you should. Even if you don’t plan to advertise in social media channels, if you have a list at least in the thousands, you may still benefit from creating a segment on Facebook that mirrors your email database.
What happens when you upload a list? Let’s say you have 5,000 email addresses. If you upload them to Facebook, the site’s system will look for any account associated with an email on your list. The result builds a segment, representing a subset of your list who also use Facebook under the same email address.
If you’re advertising on social media, you can use this segment to target existing contacts when you run ads. If you upload specialized lists like clients, prospects, or non-openers, you can create a segment for each list you upload.
Here’s one example of how you can use this. Let’s say you upload the contacts who have not opened an email in 90 days or more. Perhaps their address is valid, but your email is going to their junk folder. Now you target the same people on Facebook with a post about a new service. Some re-engage with you via Facebook.
Need another great benefit of this multi-channel targeting? Advertisers often find their existing list responds better to ads than a general audience, resulting in relevance scores from Facebook going up and the cost to run the ad going down.
I’m not saying Facebook advertising will or won’t work for you. The success of an ad campaign is dependent upon far more things, like the quality of your ad, your call to action and messaging. But the bottom line is this: if your strategy includes spending money in this channel then use your database to better target your audience when it fits your strategy.
What if you don’t plan to advertise on Facebook? Why would you bother uploading your list? If your audience match on Facebook has at least 1,000 contacts, use it solely for the audience insights tool to profile your list. Audience insights will tell you some basic demographic data like gender, income, marital status, spending habits and interests that you may not otherwise know.
If your list is at least 10,000 contacts, your report might return information on what other pages on Facebook your audience likes most often. Intel like this suggests other brands you can monitor and perhaps market with. The 10,000 list size is not a set rule. You might return results and you might not. I’ve created larger segments and Facebook has not found enough relevance to return results. But if they do generate information, you’ve gained that knowledge with little effort.
This is a free tool to learn more about your contacts, so why not try it and see if it works for you? Use advertising channels like Facebook wisely to target your audience in a multi-channel approach, but not to replace email. If someone subscribed to hear from you via email, be sure to continue the conversation to their inbox at the low cost of email.