In the dynamic world of digital marketing, no one fixed strategy will ever bring you results. Instead, to be successful you need to adopt a combination of multiple strategies at a time. Building a digital marketing strategy is quite similar to cooking a dish. The best dishes require multiple fresh ingredients that you pour in the right balance to create a tasty mix.
Social media marketing and email marketing are two extremely popular and fresh ingredients that will add a spicy flavor to your digital marketing efforts. They will tingle your revenue stream just like the French cuisine that tingles your taste buds to nirvana.
Linking the Facebook Ad Manager Account
You can link your Facebook Ad Manager account to your email to create a segmented list of potential customers. Using marketing automation tools, you can import and export the complete lists to the Ad Manager in the form of a .CSV file.
Here’s how you do it.
- Go to the ‘Audiences’ section in the Ad Manager of your Facebook account.
Make sure that you use your commercial/marketing product account and not a personal account to carry out these changes.
You can do this by going into the ‘All Tools’ section under the ‘Assets’ section of the Ad Manager tools.
- Now, you are ready to create your custom audience list. You can do this by selecting the ‘Custom Audience’ section under the ‘Create Audience’ drop down.
- Upon doing this, you will now have to upload the .CSV files of your email lists which you can get from the CRM and marketing automation tool.
Remember, all email IDs may not match the Facebook profiles immediately since a few people might use a different ID for their Facebook account.
- Once you have uploaded the complete list you can now create a lookalike list to target a specific audience based on the interests, demographic locations, age, gender, etc.
Here are a few tips you can use to combine these two ways of marketing to create the perfect mix.
Shift the Balance of Focus
It is important that you focus on both the email marketing and Facebook marketing prospects equally. You should keep shifting your focus between the two to get maximum results out of the mix. While the Facebook marketing helps you reach more people at a time the email marketing gives the effort a personalized twist.
An ample focus on both will help you acquire new customers quickly as well as retain the existing customers for a long period.
Use Custom Email Lists
Having a customized email list is always beneficial over having a generic one. With the Facebook Ad Manager, you can create lookalike lists based on criteria that you have the freedom to define. You can easily create highly customized lists based on gender, demography, likes/dislikes, etc.
This practice will allow you to run the ad campaign in a highly focused manner. The following short example will help you understand the importance of lookalike lists better.
Let’s say that you are a teenage boy who is into video games and loves to play football. If you had the option to choose anything from an eCommerce store, you would probably buy a PS4 and the FIFA 2018 game. Now if the owner of the eCommerce platform shows you these items on your Facebook Ads as a thing on sale, you will definitely go for it, right?
On the other hand, if the ads show barbie girls and coffee mugs as well as toys, they will not catch your attention at all.
With custom email lists, you can segregate and define your audience extremely well for focused targeting.
Send Highly Focused Content
The importance of focused content should be pretty evident by now. However, you can leverage the importance outside the Facebook platform too. With the right measures, you can get one-on-one attention from the potential customer. This is where direct email marketing comes into the picture.
We know that all email ids will not match the Facebook email ids. In fact, usually, less than 70% of these will effectively match the Facebook profiles. So, what do you do with the rest 30% of the email ids? Do you discard them? Not a chance. This is extremely valuable data that can bring you a large amount of business.
With the rest of the data, you can run nurturing campaigns with email marketing. You can launch mass email campaigns with slightly generic content to capture the attention of the audience. Under such circumstances, you might not be able to get all the information about the likes and dislikes of the prospects. So, you can launch generic campaigns that intrigue all types of people. Campaigns like a massive online sale or a festive season offer will definitely raise a few eyebrows.
Use Marketing Automation Tools
The marketing automation tools are your best friends when we talk about both Facebook as well as email marketing techniques. In the world of eCommerce, we deal with a huge number of customers. If you own a decently popular eCommerce platform, you will see at least a few thousand visitors checking out articles on your website every day.
Now, you cannot lose the opportunity to convert each of these visitors into customers. You also need to think about the upsell, cross-sell and resell opportunities with each customer. The marketing automation tools let you do all this and more. You cannot send a personalized email to each person on your website. You need to come up with a way to tackle thousands, or even millions of emails every day. The automation tools help you personalize the emails fairly so that you can reach out to more and more customers every day.
Create Aesthetically Appealing Templates
Providing real value to the customers is a really big part of the game. However, only value addition will not help you acquire the biggest share in an open eCommerce market. You need to combine this value with aesthetically appealing content.
By creating beautiful templates you need to make sure that your ads truly attract the attention of the prospects. Using bright and vivid colors with GIFs or videos will help you attract the attention much more than just a conventional poster design. Hiring a renowned digital marketing or graphic designing agency for these templates will give you an edge over conventional marketing techniques.
Use a Regular Balance of Both
It is important that you use the Facebook Ads wisely and regularly. While you should focus on using them regularly, you need to control the aspect of it. Instead of bugging the prospects with the same boring design and ads, you need to surprise them with interesting content. Hiring a content developer for the creation of powerful content will help you truly win the hearts of the prospects.
A regular balance of Facebook Ads and personalized marketing campaign techniques will help you make a memorable impression on the minds of your prospects.
Launch Campaigns Simultaneously
A/B testing is the best way to assess the success or failure of a campaign. It is a good idea to launch multiple campaigns simultaneously for the assessment of the best possible ads. With a controlled testing environment, you will be able to check the conversion rates of the campaigns side by side.
Upon analysis of the results, you can then make changes to the campaigns and run the ones that produce the best effects more often. Make sure that you do not explicitly focus on the most successful campaign for a long period since it is prone to go stale after a while. You need to develop fresh and engaging content for the audience to keep them in the loop for long.
Segment Your Audience
Without the proper market research, you are just shooting arrows in the dark. The right market research will help you curate the data that will help you segment the audience correctly. With audience segmentation, you can easily create highly focused content that will increase the chances of conversion by exponential amounts.
Take a small example here. If you want to buy a new TV this summer, would you rather see ads on the latest smart TVs or check out microwave ovens instead?
Use an SMM Platform Mix
Using the right mix of top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. will help you capture a large segment of the audience quickly. Showcasing your products on other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram along with Facebook will help you create a more memorable brand image in the minds of the customers.
The SMM platform mix will help you truly make a mark on the internet.
Using the email data to your advantage on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter will open new opportunities for you. This will not only increase your organic traffic but also your conversion rates by a significant amount if you use it judiciously.
