My company creates and optimizes ad campaigns on social networks. But I’ll be the first to tell you that for a lot of businesses, email marketing is the main revenue driver.
If you send out an email to your list, you’re going to get a 10x-30x higher response than if you post it on Twitter or Facebook.
Email gets a 10x-30x higher response
If you’re already building your email list and are regularly sending out valuable messages, then let me give you a high five.
If you’re not, start today.
Or maybe you already have a decent sized list and are seeing pretty good results from it.
Well, I’ve got bad news.
No matter how well you think you’re doing, you could be doing better.
There’s a saying ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Screw that. If it ain’t broke, make it better.
So how do you make email marketing even better?
You can push its effectiveness to the next level with complementary Facebook ads.
Maybe you’re thinking,
“But Ben, I already have these people on my email list and can send them stuff for free so why would I spend money on ads to reach them?”
Great question.
25% – average email open rate
Right now, if you send an email out to your list, maybe 25% of people will actually open the email. Go check your stats in your email dashboard, it’s likely that your number is lower.
75% don’t open
That means 75% of your audience isn’t going to hear about your latest updates or promotion. No bueno.
That’s where Facebook ads come in.
Export non-openers: What you can do after you send out an email campaign is export this list of non-opener email addresses from your email service provider. This will give you an excel file of a few hundred or thousand emails.
Create a Facebook Custom Audience: Then upload the list into Facebook to create a ‘custom audience.’ Facebook will then work their magic and match those email addresses to profiles.
Usually they will be able to find profiles for 60-75% of your emails. Just keep in mind, not every email you have will have been used to create a Facebook account. (Example: maybe I used Ben@Biddyco.com to join your newsletter, but used biddyco@gmail.com to sign up for Facebook.)
Now you have a list of very targeted Facebook users who are on your list but didn’t open your latest email campaign. This is golden because you can reach a group who’s previously demonstrated interest in what you do.
Run your ad campaign: You can now serve them relevant ads as another touchpoint and direct them to your product, information, sales page etc.
With conversion tracking, you’ll easily be able to tell if the revenue you generated is higher than the ad expense so it’ll be an easy decision to determine if you should continue running more campaigns.
Are you going to want to do this for every email you send?
Probably not.
But for key messages that you want to get in front of your audience it’s a great strategy worth trying out.
Ben creates + optimizes advertising campaigns on social networks to drive leads, sales and downloads.
