Tuesday, February 11, 2014

4 reasons to target email subscribers with Facebook ads

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Only 20 percent of people open your emails, and 5 percent click. That’s 95 percent of your email subscribers who are not going to your landing page that you spent so much time optimizing!


So what are you going to do? Just let those subscribers (read: sales leads) go to waste? Well, read on. In this article I’ll show you how (and why) to reach and convert that 95 percent using Custom Audience-targeted Facebook ads.


I know that you may still have reservations. A lot of marketers think that spending their ad budget targeting people they have already acquired as subscribers is just throwing their money away. You may have already spent money on ads to acquire them in the first place. So why should you do it again?



Let me explain four reasons why you should target your subscribers with ads on Facebook:


1. Increase Your Click-Through Rate


Targeting people who already know you, and have shown enough interest in you to opt-in to giving you their email address, will give you a much higher conversion rate than converting people who don’t possess either quality.


You can utilize this recognition and trust by using your logo as (or in) the ad image, your company name in the ad copy, and your website URL, which appears automatically if you are running an ad that clicks-through to a page on your own website.


2. Lower Your Ad Spend


As your click-through rate increases (which we learned about above) you will need to show your ad to a much smaller number of people to get your desired amount of clicks and conversions.


Facebook allows you to bid for your ads on a CPM model, meaning you pay based on the number of people who see your ad (more specifically per thousand ad impressions). Using this bid model, as opposed to CPC, you’ll see your total spend drop to reach the amount of clicks (and conversions) you want to obtain.


3. Increase Landing Page Conversion Rate


Similar to an increase in ad CTR, the previous recognition and trust in your business will boost conversion rates on your landing page (which users are taken to after they click on your ad).


Visitors won’t be worrying about what your company is or if you can be trusted because they will have already gained that trust before they opted-in to your email subscriber list the first time.


4. Save Time


If you’re like me, you’ve spent hours, days even fine-tuning your Target Audiences for each campaign and landing page you’ve created. No interest category, demographic grouping or connection goes untested.


But what if you didn’t have to spend all that time? What if there was an easier way to find a great Target Audience?


Well, you already know that your email subscribers are interested in your business. In fact, they have already converted on one of your landing pages or web forms. So you know they’ll be a high-converting audience.


Simply using your email subscribers for your Target Audience will save you a ton of time both choosing audiences and testing different ones to find out who your business really resonates with. You will have even more information about them, from their form field responses on what they’re interests are or industry they’re in. This will help you save time thinking about the type of offer/gated content to use as the ‘bribe” to get them to click your Ad, as well as in writing the Ad copy itself.


How Do You Target Email Subscribers With Facebook Ads?


Targeting your email subscribers is done through Facebook’s Custom Audience targeting option. This option is accessible through Facebook’s Power Editor and 3rd party platforms like Wishpond’s Facebook Ads Manager tool.


With Facebook’s Power Editor rool you can use this option by following these steps:


1. In the top-left corner, click on “Create Audience” > “Custom Audience”


2. Next, a modal window will appear. In it there are three options for uploading your email list (including directly through Mailchimp). For this walkthrough, we’ll go with “Data File Custom Audience.”



3. This will open a new modal window, where you add some information about your list, and then upload the file itself, which must be in .csv or .txt format.



4. Once your Custom Audience is created, you will see it in your Power Editor (below) and have the option to “Create Ad Using Audience”.



This can also be done within the Ad Creation Wizard of Wishpond’s Facebook Ads Manager. All you need to do is copy & paste a single-column list of email addresses into the box provided (below). Soon you will be able to upload lists directly from email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, AWeber and Constant Contact.



How Does Facebook Target Your Email Subscribers?


When you upload your list of email addresses (either through Facebook’s Power Editor or a 3rd party platform) Facebook goes through its user base (yes over a billion accounts) to match the email addresses to Facebook accounts. As you may have guessed, this can take some time on their end (generally a few hours). Once the matching is complete, your subscribers are automatically shown your ad on Facebook.


One thing to note is that the email address you upload must be the same as the email address the person uses to login to their Facebook account. This means that you won’t be able to target certain subscribers on your list.


Nick Steeves is a Product Manager for Wishpond, a social marketing firm.


Image courtesy of Shutterstock.


Source: Inside Facebook



4 reasons to target email subscribers with Facebook ads

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