How to Target Your Email Subscribers with Facebook Ads

Email and Facebook are probably the two most powerful marketing tools online today.
What’s even more powerful, is the possibilities you have to integrate them and put them to work together, for you.
You probably know that a Facebook Page can help grow your email list using custom apps, but today, we’re going the opposite way: How to create a Facebook ad campaign that targets your email subscribers.

Sounds technical? It’s not. I’ll give you each step of the process in this post.

1) Get your email list

 

The first step is to head over to your email service provider (ESP), I’m going to assume the majority uses either Aweber or Mailchimp, so I’ll focus on those two.
We’ll start with Aweber, the process will be similar if you use any other ESP. Mailchimp on the hand has a special way of doing this, we’ll come back to talk about this in a minute.
What you need to do is download your list into your computer, usually via a CSV file. You need to look for the option to “export your list” (if your ESP doesn’t offer this, you need to look for a new service).
On Aweber…

• You’ll have to go to the “Subscribers” tab on top
• Select “Manage Subscribers” from the dropdown menu options
• That will take you to page you see in the image below. You’ll find several options to filter your list by different criteria, in this case you’ll want to export your entire list, so there is no need for that, unless you want to run an ad campaign to an specific segment in your list
• Click on the “Export CSV” button right below the list. This should take a couple of minutes depending on the size of your list

Alright, now you should have a CSV sitting in your computer. We’ll come back to get it.

2) Create a Custom Audience

 

We’ll use Power Editor to import this list to Facebook.
For this you need to create a Custom Audience. In the top right menu of your Power Editor dashboard, select “Audiences.”

Once on the Audiences dashboard, select “Custom Audience” from the “Create Audience” menu on the top left of the page.

You have 4 options to create Custom Audiences:

• Data File
• Mailchimp (we’ll look at this in a second)
• Data from a mobile app
• Website Custom Audience, the latest addition to Facebook ads platform

We’ll use “Data File” to import the CSV file we downloaded from your ESP.

Next step is to create your new audience:

• Name
• Description
• Under Data Type select “Emails”
• Don’t forget to agree to the terms…

 

3) Import your List

 

The “Source” is your CSV file, click on “Choose file” and locate it. Once you do that, click on “Create Audience.”

This process may take up to 30 minutes depending on the size of your email list. You can click “Check Updates” at the top to check its progress.
When it’s done, the status will change to “Ready.”

You can go grab a coffee, I’ll wait…

Now we have an audience!

4) Target your new Audience with an Ad

 

Now that you’ve created a custom audience for your email list, all you have to do is add it whenever you want to target it with an ad campaign. Or you can exclude it too.

 

How to create a Custom Audience with your Mailchimp list

 

As promised, let’s go back to Mailchimp now. I know many of you use it.
The process to create a Mailchimp Custom Audience is actually a lot easier… Basically you are skipping the part where you download the list from your provider and have a CSV file to import.
Forget all that!
All you have to do is select “Mailchimp Custom Audience” from the “Create Audience” menu…



You’ll get this pop up to prompt you to connect Facebook and Mailchimp.



If you have more than one Mailchimp account, you will get an additional step here to select the right one, if not, the next step is to select the list you wish to connect here.



Once you select the list and click on “Create Audience,” it’s all done for you. The rest is the same, you’ll wait for Facebook to match the data with its personal profiles and you’ll get a notification when it’s done.

2 Important considerations

 

There are a couple of things you need to consider when targeting your email subscribers in Facebook.
The Match
You should pay attention to how many records Facebook was able to match from your list. What Facebook does in this process is look for a match between the email address you’ve provided and a user profile. In some cases, they don’t match because people use more than one email address. The same thing happens when you import phone numbers, not every Facebook user lists a phone number.
Update
You should do this periodically, your email list is probably growing. Set an alert to remind yourself to import a new list every month or every 3 months, depending on how fast is growing.

Thoughts?

 

So, what do you think? Is it valuable? Are you already targeting your email subscribers with Facebook ads? Or are you planning to do so soon?
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments section.