Facebook’s Best Kept Secret: Custom Audiences

This might at first sound counter-intuitive – paying to reach customers you already reach – but stay with me for a moment.

Let’s say you’ve got an email list. You email them regularly, but for most of the people on your list, that’s your only method of contact.

Remember the adage, it takes 7 contacts to make a sale? That’s not necessarily 7 emails. As you know, you can send your list 100 emails and unless it’s a special list, the majority of people on the list will still not have made a purchase.

This is exactly why it’s a good idea to contact these people through another medium such as Facebook. Using custom audiences, you can create a group of Facebook users based upon their email address. Or for that matter, you can use phone numbers, addresses or Facebook user ID’s. You can also create a group for people who have visited your website recently.

Back to the people on your list – by adding them to your group, you now have another way to reach them and interact with them. They’re already on your “warm” list, and getting them onto Facebook makes that list even warmer.

To set up a Facebook Custom Audience, simply log in to the Facebook Power Editor, click on “audiences” and select “custom audience” and follow the instructions provided.

Are your email lists segmented? For example, do you have a list of buyers and a list of prospects who haven’t yet purchased? Then you can target them individually for a better response. People who purchased your $17 traffic product are good candidates for your $97 traffic product, while those who haven’t made a purchase yet might be interested in a trial $7 product.

Do you have a list that’s ‘dead?’ That is, a list of subscribers who no longer open your emails? Using Custom Audiences, you might be able to reactive them with a “We’ve missed you” type of campaign.

Lastly, you can build a lookalike audience to reach Facebook users similar to your Custom Audiences. These are folks who have similar interests, have liked the same pages and so forth as your Custom Audience. Facebook will scan its membership to find these folks and you can then market to them.

Using these techniques, you can reach people who’ve already said they’re interested in you and your products, in addition to finding new prospects likely to be interested as well.