You have a captive base of customers following you through email. But is email enough? When you know you can reach your customers in more ways than one, wouldn’t it be a good idea to target the same customers in more ways than one? Here we discuss the option of using Facebook and Instagram to target an audience you own (or even target a profile based on your customer audience).
The email campaigns are complicated enough. I have covered email campaign softwarein one of my early articles. Now that you are already targeting how many are opening your mail, how many are clicking it and probably even going to the second level of which demographies, what times are most successful for sending email, I am going to suggest combining Facebook and Instagram to your marketing muscle.
Facebook and Instagram are formidable forces when it comes to reaching out to your customers. You find followers and prospective customers both naturally, and through sites like Earthweb.com where you can buy your followers to make sure you look as desirable as possible to potential customers, clients, and service users. It is the easiest place to find the perfect target audience as people can find you through common interests and personal searches, or respond to ads that take their fancy meaning you’re more likely to get business here. So, here are a few statistics from Facebook, and a recent article (data – Mar ’16) in Hootsuite blog, if you need convincing :
- More than 1.09 Billion people use Facebook daily, 989 Million mobile users daily. (Mar – ’16); As of June 2017 Facebook has 1.32 Billion daily active users)
- 82% of online people in age group 18-29 use Facebook (think students, young professionals, young parents)
- 79% of the online people in age group 30-49 use Facebook (think parents of teenagers, exam prep, mid age professionals, home buyers etc.)
- 56% of the online people in age group 65 and up use Facebook (think products geared for old age assistance, etc.)
- 76% female and 66% male US Internet Users use Facebook.
So how does Facebook enable you to reach out to your customers?
Company X sends emails to over 200,000 users, mostly parents of senior high school students. The subscribers open emails at the rate of almost 2%, with an abysmal click-through ratio. With Gmail characterizing most of these emails as ‘Updates’ or ‘Promotions’ category, most of these emails do not reach the ‘Inbox’ anyway. The business is seasonal, which means the company does not have much room to experiment and correct itself beyond a few months before the season is already over. The company X would like to have a systematic approach to target active users and dormant ones.
The market has ample examples of such cases where companies are spending hundreds of thousands on getting new leads, ignoring the large lists of customers sitting dormant in their newsletters, CRM’s (customer relationship management software such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, etc.) and POS (point of sales solutions used by retailers).
Facebook allows for another way to reach out to these users that you send emails to. You can use Facebook’s People Based Targeting through Custom Audience option, which helps you reach out to customers who are already on your lists, through Facebook Ads. Seeing an email in Inbox, and later an ad on Facebook reinforces your brand and enhances your chances of conversion. This can also be combined with Instagram posts and campaigns.
Facebook also has a Lookalike Audience option where you can build your customer profile and reach out to new customers who are not on your list but have profiles similar to your customers in your lists, and are on Facebook. This is a very powerful option to generate new leads, where the powerful analytics of Facebook does the gritty work for you to preselect your customers you would like to reach out to, extrapolating from your current customers.
Facebook also makes it easy for Facebook users to share their data with you through ‘Lead Ads‘, where their information is instantly available to you, for download through CSV (read MS Excel) or for integration into your CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software such as Salesforce) through Facebook Marketing API(a software that helps connect your CRM to Facebook with developer input).
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Chandan is our Digital Marketing Specialist. He can be reached at [email protected]
