How to Connect Facebook Ads and Email Marketing for Crazy Good Sales
by Cydney Hatch • March 30, 2019
As a business that is new to social media, you might naively think that marketing your business means that you spend most of your time posting things on Facebook and Instagram and that is what marketing is.
Although Facebook is a huge platform for marketing success and finding leads, Facebook is not a marketing plan.
Facebook is just a section of a comprehensive marketing plan that has lots of different channels and strategies, one of which is email marketing. Email marketing is the best strategy to pair with Facebooks ads in terms of ROI but if done correctly, it can drive constant traffic to your content, build consistent brand awareness and help maintain sales.
So, do you want to learn an effective way to get more quality leads? Wonder how to turn leads into actual paying customers? If so, Facebook ads and email marketing are your perfect pair to do so!
In this article, you’ll discover how to use Facebook ads with email marketing to improve your conversions and to keep your business “top of mind” for your intended audience.
Why Your Business Needs Facebook and Email
Many marketers make a huge mistake in focusing on being everywhere to reach new consumers and completely neglect and invalidate their existing customer lists.
The idea that Facebook is solely a tool for reaching new customers is completely wrong. In fact, let’s label it a marketing myth that will get you nowhere if that’s the mindset you keep as a marketer. Research has shown that 84% of followers of company Facebook pages are current customers!
I mean, it’s a whole lot easier to get a person’s email address that is already familiar to you via social media instead of just asking them to hand over their credit cards. By combining both email and Facebook, you can contact your audience again and again without having to spend whatever you’re charged on Facebook every time to engage.
The role of successful digital marketing is not just to get the email opt-in or a single Facebook like, the goal is to get both. The relationship between social media relationship building and email connection cannot be understated as when you ask for one you should be working towards the other.
They are almost marketing synonyms!
The main goal is to increase sales, but it’s important to understand the journey it took to get to that sale. So, there’s no better time than now to start managing your advertising spend better by utilizing your email list to deliver better Facebook ad targeting.
So how can you do this? In the next section, we will discuss ways you can collectively use both to increase your marketing success!
How to Combine Facebook Ads and Email Marketing
Believe it or not, a great place to start is to upload your email lists to Facebook and serve ads only to those people who have subscribed or opted-in for your content.
To start, you can segment your email lists into two main parts and go from there:
- Leads
- Customers
By starting with this simple separation of leads and customers, you can send specific and appropriate content to nurture or first-time offer people appropriately. If you place them in a single audience, your ad messaging becomes disjointed and audiences will see irrelevant ads which will definitely cause under-performing Facebook ads! Ekk!
To upload your customer list to Facebook, go to the ‘Audience’ section, click ‘Create Audience,’ and select ‘Custom Audience.’
From the list of options, select ‘Customer file’ and then import your list as a CSV file.
To target your email list in an advert, at the audience level select ‘Custom Audience’ and your email list will be there.
If you have a little bit of Facebook ad experience or work with large budgets, to get the best results you’ll need to breakdown your email list further based on where a customer or prospect is in your funnel.
Creative Facebook and Email Integrations to Try
In addition to uploading your email list to Facebook, there are several other clever tricks you can use to make the most of Facebook Ads and email marketing.
Generate a Lookalike Audience
There are many ways to use email and Facebook ad targeting, but one of the best ways to do so is to create lookalike audiences.
Yes, they are different than the ones we talked about above.
A lookalike audience is a group of people who have similar qualities to your source or target audience and with email integration, your audience will be the people in your email list. When you upload your email lists to Facebook, you can identify users in the system and produce a new target list for you based on the common qualities and interests shared by your email list.
That’s a whole new audience ready for you to convert, so lookalike audiences are a great way to build email lists who have room for potential! Do not fret if you do not have a robust list going into this, that is all right!
Creating a lookalike targeting campaign allows you to reach a much larger pool of prospects just waiting to be converted.
Here’s how to set up a lookalike audience:
1. Upload your email list to Facebook
Enter the audience section of your Facebook ad and create a new custom audience by uploading your CSV file. Facebook will then identify all the users in their system which match with your email address list and use these users to create an audience for your ad. Your email list must have at least 100 people at minimum, but Facebook suggests uploading anywhere between 1,000 and 50,000 contacts for best results.
2. Generate your lookalike audience
From the same tab as before, select ‘create a lookalike audience’ as shown in the image below. Select your source as the email list you have just uploaded and the country or region you want to target. Then you’ll need to select a percentage of that location that you want to target.
Be Top of Mind 24/7
If you combine marketing messaging and targeting on both email and Facebook, you are far more likely to reach your audience base and will be able to share more content. In fact, coordinating messaging across channels resulted in reaching customers who were 22% more likely to purchase than those only reached by email!
Leverage CRM to increase reach
Based on your marketing objectives, you can activate customer data, to create a customer list they care about.
In this case, this advertiser used the list to talk to their existing best customers with News Feed ads, extending the email campaign reach by 77%. Beyond targeting their existing customers, marketers can take the next step and build upon the data from their customer database through lookalikes—identifying their new best customers.
In this case study you can see the value a marketers’ existing CRM database is and how it can help better target customers by:
- Activating their CRM across channels to extend reach to their most valuable customers
- Coordinating messages across channels to build a seamless consumer experience
- Prospecting new customers by leveraging a marketers customer database
Direct Traffic to Landing Pages
If you want more conversions, you need a high-quality landing page to work in both your email and Facebook marketing. Most businesses fail to get conversions because either they don’t have a landing page that collects information or they do not send people from Facebook or other social platforms to these locations.
Start with a solid Facebook ad campaign that promotes your landing page to as many people as possible. Creating Facebook ads that can turn the heads of potential subscribers is only a part of the equation. You also need to design landing pages that compel your audience to take action.
Some elements to consider are:
- Highly focused and specific call to actions
- Collection of information/Opt-ins
- Share strong value propositions
- Minimal distractions in both verbals asks and visuals
- Specific audiences are sent to specific places
- Interactive elements
- Ensure mobile-friendliness
When it comes to email and social media marketing, you only have a short window to get pertinent information across. By having specific campaign landing pages, you can easily direct customers to make informed decisions by using landing pages that are simple, educational and interactive.
Powerhouse Marketing: Combining Email and Facebook Marketing
The hybrid marketing plan of email and social media advertising is extremely effective if you slow down, plan things out and connect the dots between social media and email content.
It will increase the number of people who see your offer, thereby increasing the number of sales over using email marketing or FB advertising alone. The added bonus is, you’ll get more website traffic as a result, which is always a good thing.
If you need some help with landing pages, Facebook advertising or email marketing, we would be happy to help! Reach out to us here or leave a comment if you have questions!
What do you think? Can you think of any steps to add that affect the outcome of a successful email marketing campaign? What strategies and tools do you use in your Facebook ads and email marketing campaigns? Feel free to voice your thoughts in the comments below!
