How your email marketing can assist your paid advertising efforts

As much as we’re obsessed with the power of email marketing and what it can do to help you build your business, we’re not unaware that people like to focus on other channels too. We believe email marketing should form a firm part of your marketing strategy, but that it can also help you achieve greater success in other channels. Confused? Don’t be. If you’ve followed our thinking for a while you’ll see that we often talk about one of the major benefits of email marketing being that you own your list data. In social media channels you don’t own your follower data, but don’t be alarmed. Instead of getting into a debate about which marketing channel is the best, we’re going to use this article to show you how you can use your email list to help you reach your goals in other channels.

We’ll look at what you need to do in the following channels:

• Google Ads
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Google Advertising

Ever heard about Google Customer Match? In their own words: “Customer Match lets you use your online and offline data to reach and re-engage with your customers across Search, the Shopping tab, Gmail, YouTube, and Display. Using information that your customers have shared with you, Customer Match will target ads to those customers and other customers like them.” If you are running ads with Google Ads, you’ll definitely want to use this feature to your advantage.

It works like this:

• Upload a file of your subscriber list contact information.
• Set one (or more) of your campaigns to target customers from your uploaded data file. Please note, only Google users will be targeted.
• You’re done, you’ve created your Customer Match audience.
• When users in the audience sign into their Google account, they see your ads across Gmail, Google Search, Google Shopping, YouTube and the Google Display network.

Quick summary of the benefits of Customer Match:

• You can spread your message across different platforms.
• More placements mean more opportunities to convert or connect.
• You’re using your data to enhance your advertising.
• Improves the quality of your advertising as the subscriber signed up to receive information from you.

Lookalike audiences are very similar to Customer Match, but what this feature does is extract the data the subscriber has supplied and targets similar audiences based on this. This is a great feature to expand your reach and get in front of people who are more likely to buy from your business.

Quick summary of the benefits of Lookalike audiences

• More reach - you’re expanding your reach by targeting similar audiences.
• You could improve your conversion rates, by targeting similar audiences you are connecting with audiences that show similar traits to your current base.
• Easier campaign management.
• Machine learning helps you improve.

Social Media Channels

Facebook

Stats show that Facebook is the most used social media platform in the world, with Sprout Social stating that 2.79 billion people use Facebook. (SproutSocial). You can use your email list exactly like you would for Google Ads.

Facebook recommends that you prepare your customer list in advance. You can use a TXT or CSV file to upload your custom audience. This list should include identifiers such as email address, phone number, addresses, etc. For the best results, they recommend that you add as many identifiers as possible, so if you have gathered multiple form fields, you should include them.

1. To upload your list, you will need to format your file to conform to the format Facebook requires. You can easily download the file template from Facebook here.

2. Now that you’ve formatted your list you will go to your Ads Manager account. Select AUDIENCES> CREATE AUDIENCE> CUSTOM AUDIENCE > CUSTOMER LIST

3. Now select the identifiers you want to include and give your custom audience a name.

4. Now review your customer list to ensure that you’ve mapped the right identifiers to your list so there won’t be any errors. If you see a green checkmark, you’re all good to go. If you see a yellow exclamation mark it means that you chose not to select certain identifiers or you need to manually map them. It’s important to do this correctly before you upload your list to ensure that you build a better audience.

Now you can select UPLOAD and CREATE.

Facebook will hash your information in your customer list and will let you know when this process is complete so that you can create an ad to reach this new audience.

NOTE: Hashing the information means that your customer list will be unidentifiable at an individual level as a means to secure the information. This is a cryptographic security measure that turns your identifiers into randomized code. The process cannot be reversed. Therefore keep in mind, you can add information into the Facebook custom audience settings but not remove it.

Benefits of creating custom audiences in Facebook:

• You can retarget your audience. Perhaps they need a final little push to convert.
• You can target people who have similar interests to your existing audience.

Additional Resource: About Custom Audiences by Facebook

Twitter

Are you using Twitter as part of your marketing strategy? We know Twitter, the microblogging social media platform, may not be suited to every brand. If you do use Twitter, however, it is interesting to note that it had 192 million daily active users in the fourth quarter of 2020 according to Oberlo. That’s a large audience. Twitter offers many ad formats and also allows you to create a custom audience by using your email list.

1. Create your CSV or TXT file.
2. Navigate to TOOLS and then select AUDIENCES under the dropdown menu. Now select CREATE NEW AUDIENCE.
3. Drag and drop or upload your file and then wait for the upload to be complete. Do not close your browser. If you have a large list, rather break the list up into smaller lists and upload them one by one.
4. It can take up to 48 hours for a list to be uploaded in Twitter but you should see “Processing” under the audience tab. Once it is done processing you will see either Audience too small or Ready. When your audience says ready, you can set up your ad using your new custom audience.

Benefits of creating custom audiences in Twitter:

• Include or exclude certain audiences from seeing your Twitter ads on the platform.
• Use your email list to target set segments of your email list on Twitter, this can help you test how and where your audience engages with you.

Additional Resource: List Custom Audience by Twitter

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has 3 custom match options you can make use of. As LinkedIn is a tool for professional communication it can be super useful to use your email list to create a custom audience if you are in the Business-to-Business (B2B) space.

You can set up the following custom audience types:

• Retargeting
• Contact Targeting
• Company Targeting

Retargeting

Reach an audience based on a page visited on your website or an action taken on your ad

Contact targeting

This type of targeting may be perfect for your business if you run events, webinars, courses etc as you can contact individual LinkedIn profiles.

In this type of targeting you can import and integrate your subscriber list.

Company targeting

If you’re trying to run some account-based marketing strategies, this might be the perfect targeting for you. You can use your subscriber list (with company names) to target decision-makers.

A comprehensive guide to different match audiences for LinkedIn can be found here: Linkedin Matched Audiences Guide

Other ways in which your emails can support your other marketing channels:

A great way to get more eyes on your other channels through social media is to encourage it through your email campaigns.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• You can add Pin it buttons to your emails.
• You can highlight your latest social media posts.
• Run a competition on your social media that you can promote in your email campaigns.
• Use user-generated content on your social media platforms in your campaigns

Email marketing is a powerful tool that can help you in more ways than just one. With a bit of time and thought, you can use it to bolster your other marketing efforts.