How to Use Facebook Ads to Improve your Email Marketing

• Updated on: 2018-02-07
• Read original article here

Even though email campaigns can be personalized and sent to readers with specific interests, it can be difficult to create sales if your subscriber isn’t interested. Fortunately, Facebook Ads offer a great way to grow your email list to get subscribers who are interested in your products and services and reinforce your brand to get more email opens and click-throughs.

Here is how Facebook ads can improve email marketing:

Use Facebook ads to target the fans of a competitor’s Facebook page. You know they already have an interest in what you offer because they’ve followed your closest and most successful competitor. While you’re on your competitor’s page, make sure to like it so you can see what works for them. It may give you some ideas for new content and strategies.

The challenge is that people who sign up for emails don’t open 100% of the mail you send. In fact, every email list has “inactive” subscribers who don’t open your mail on a regular basis. Facebook ads offer a way to re-engage those subscribers through a different medium, Facebook. When your email subscribers see your Facebook ad you’ll reinforce your brand in their minds and they’ll be more likely to open your emails and purchase from you.

Another great advantage of Facebook ads is their ability to spotlight your very best content. You may have an excellent email campaign, but if people aren’t opening their mail, they’ll miss out. Facebook ads typically have a large feature image which grabs the user’s attention. They don’t have to open anything to see what you have to offer because it’s already there.

Promote your most viewed blogs. You already know people love them because they’re the most read articles on your site. Get even more readership by posting them on Facebook again and boosting your post to your fans.

According to a recent Salesforce study in conjunction with Facebook Marketing Science, users who saw both social media and email ads were 22% more likely to make a purchase. This shows how important it can be to reinforce your marketing efforts. Users who open your emails may not be in the mood to make a purchase at that time, and a subtle reminder in the form of a Facebook ad can help make the conversion. This is very similar to retargeting and gets phenomenal results.

The good news is that you can use your mailing list to specifically target your Facebook ads for greater success. In general, Facebook ads alone have a relatively low conversion rate, but when targeted to people who are already familiar with your brand, and used as part of a multi-prong approach to marketing, you can expect to see double-digit returns.

If you have a small email list it can be extremely challenging to do any type of testing. Use Facebook ads to test subject lines as ad headlines and images. The ad with the most clicks is the winner and will most likely get opened and click-throughs as an email marketing campaign.

Now that just about everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, it’s no surprise that your customers are accessing their email and Facebook pages from these devices. Depending on how your email is formatted it may be difficult for users to open and read content. Emails with lots of images or videos can be costly for user’s data bills. Facebook has done a great job of inserting ads into a user’s newsfeed through their mobile app. This keeps things looking clean and presentable, and takes the stress away from having to sort through a mixed up inbox to read emails on the go.

Email is still one of the most successful ways to reach your customers, especially since email lists can be easily categorized and targeted to specific demographics. Nevertheless, all email lists experience attrition as users become inactive and unresponsive to emails alone. The best way to kick up your game and get those customers back to opening your messages is to use your email list to create Facebook ads. Facebook ads grow your email list while also reminding followers that you have great products and services in store for them when they open their mail.

Have you used Facebook ads to improve email marketing? What type of results did you see? Were they as large as reported by Facebook and Salesforce? Let us know your real life results in the comments below.