Creating A Custom Audience From Email Lists

Keep in touch with the people who matter most with Facebooks targeting technique.

What is A Custom Audience?

A Facebook Custom Audience is a feature that allows businesses to import customer, or prospect email address database into Facebook’s user match look up system. It matches the emails that you supply to its Facebook user records and tells you the number of people you share in common.

Without revealing who matched, you’ll then be invited to advertise directly to those users with retargeting on the social media platform.

Custom Audiences are an effective way for online businesses to make better use of their relevant users across multiple channels.

With Custom Audience targeting, all you have to do is upload a list of emails to Facebook which will then offer the specific ad targeting. Only people with whom you already have relationships will see ads.

In short, No more wasted spend, No more mis-targeted creatives trying to sell people things when they aren’t in buying mode, No more uncertainty about who is seeing your adverts.

Benefits?

Entice past customers back to you.

You’ve already done the hard part of attracting a customer, they are interested, why not stay in contact?

Re-connect and remind them of your services, increase the chances of people coming back to buy again, building up that relationship and keeping in touch with the people who matter most.

Focus Budget and make your existing ads more efficient.

By excluding anyone who has already converted on your website.

With custom audiences we can see who has already been converted, whether that was recent or a while ago, ensuring you aren’t wasting resources on people who you know wont make another purchase so soon.

Types of Custom Audiences we recommend:

Our experience tells us you’ll get the best results by creating multiple custom audiences targeting specific customers.

This way you’ll make sure you’re reaching a selection of customers tailoring your adverts to their behaviour you’ve gathered from the email list.

We’ve created a couple of example audiences for you, just so you can get a feel of what kind of targeting we will use.

People that purchased a car 3-4 years ago and likely looking at finance renewal – Past Customers.

Using this is a great custom audience as you already know they will be searching or at least thinking of searching for new cars and finances so it would make sense to target people who have already made up their mind and just need that push in the direction to show them the choices they have.

People due an MOT or service in the next 30 days – Current Customers.

Similar to above you’re targeting people who you know will need to make a purchase advertised or not but the aim of this to get them to you specifically again to get their car serviced this will help build up that relationship in hopes of them continually coming to get their car serviced by you, a trusted company they know (by their experience) they can rely on.

Lost sales from the last 60 days (exclude people who converted in the past 60 days) .

You’re losing so many potential customers by not following up on lost sales.

These people have already shown interest in the company they got lost on the way by using their email you’re chasing up on a lead – the hard part of catching their attention is over! Now you’ve just got to bring them in to buy and this is the purpose of the custom audience, exclude people who have recently gone through and made a purchase and focus on the people who are nearly there.

GDPR & Security?

Before.

Before this begins, under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), advertisers act as the data controller of any lists uploaded as part of data file Custom Audiences, uploading email list or contact information into a Facebook custom audience makes you a data controller.

There’s not much to worry about, so as long as you have consent from customers to use their email, then you (and us if you’re outsourcing the task) are legally able to include them in the custom audiences.

Without you getting the users consent we are unable to upload them into our targeting meaning we lose out on the detailed re-targeting we are aiming for.

After.

After the list is imported, Facebook hash the data you uploaded (like super techy paper shredding) and create the audience.

This encryption means your customer list is hashed locally on your browser and then sent to Facebook.

There, it’s matched against Facebook’s existing list of users hashed IDs and the matches are added to your Custom Audience where its created.

When that is all done the matched and unmatched hashes are deleted. No customer data is saved and there is no security risk of the data being used maliciously.