3 Clever Ways to Use Email Lists for Facebook Ad Targeting

Building an engaged audience from nothing is no small feat.

When your business is brand new, it can seem like an almost insurmountable hurdle. How do you get your content and your products in front of people?

Facebook ads are a great way to do this.

It's essentially the world's top social media platform, and nearly everyone uses it.

Their audience targeting options are incredibly diverse and detailed, and using Facebook Lookalike Audiences, you can get your message in front of exactly the right people.

When you're first starting to advertise on Facebook, you'll need to select an audience.

If you already have a Facebook presence, that works in your favor, since you already have people engaging with your brand.

You can also use other information, like your email list or demographic data, to create custom audiences to maximize your ad spend ROI.

In a recent post, AdEspresso offers three solid lookalike audience ideas that you can use to start experimenting with Facebook ads for your business.

Here are three ways that you can build Lookalike audiences when your business is just beginning to advertise on Facebook.

Idea #1. Create an audience from engaged users

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If your company already has a page on Facebook that gets a lot of attention, there’s a source audience with huge potential right in front of you.

People who have engaged with your company’s page by liking, posting, or commenting have already said it—they’re interested in your product! This group is a great choice for a Lookalike Audience, since the quality of the source audience really matters. The more confident you are that the source group is interested, the more confident you can be that that people in the Lookalike group are likely to be great customers.

Here’s how you’ll create this audience:

1. Create a custom audience based on the Facebook users who have already engaged with your Facebook page. It might be called “Call to action,” because these users have already followed a call to action.

[image source: AdEspresso]
2. Create a Lookalike Audience, and choose the group of people who have engaged as the source audience.

[image source: AdEspresso]
3. Choose the countries or regions where you want to find people for your Lookalike audience.

4. Select the size of your Lookalike audience on the slider as a percentage of chosen regions’ populations.

There are also other and more specific engagement metrics you can use both as a source audience and to create a Lookalike audience:

Page fans

Users who take certain in-app actions

Now you’ll have created an audience that looks like an audience that you know for sure is engaged. This gives you the power to reach an entire group of new Facebook users who haven’t been targeted yet but are likely to be good quality leads.

Idea #2. Create an audience from your mailing list

Even if you’re already familiar with marketing on Facebook, you’re probably not taking full advantage of how your email marketing strategy and Lookalike audiences can work together.

Your email mailing list can be a trove of customer data by using a system like Campaign Monitor to build up and manage personal profiles for your contacts. It creates a resource for promising leads who have already moved through the initial steps in your conversion funnel.

[image source: AdEspresso]
They’re already aware of your company, and they’re probably already taken the initial steps to show interest. Signing up for your mailing list indicates a definite desire to know more and stay in touch. This is why your email marketing system is such a powerful asset in generating high-quality audiences.

Creating this Lookalike audience based on your mailing list is a lot like creating a Lookalike from your source group of Facebook users:

1. Organize your custom contact information within your email marketing system. Create a custom audience from this list of contacts. This type of audience that comes from a list of customer contacts is called a standard custom audience. Facebook will match the user accounts based on the contact information.

[image source: AdEspresso]
2. Create the Lookalike audience, and choose your custom audience of mailing list contacts as the source group.

3. Choose the geographic regions to target.

4. Choose the size of the Lookalike group.

The process of creating the Lookalike audience is straightforward. But you need to put a lot of consideration into your source group. Without a large Facebook audience to draw from, your mailing list is a reliable and high-quality source of leads. If you target a new audience that looks like them, you have a great chance of getting good returns on your ads.

Idea #3. Create hyper-targeted ads for smaller audiences

One of the best things about Lookalike audiences is that there are so many different ways to approach them. You don’t know what will work best for your company and your target audience if you try it out, so there’s huge potential to test several different audiences and then double down on the strategy that gives you the most conversions with the lowest cost per click.

When you’re testing different audiences, it’s important to include smaller and hyper-targeted audiences. By using fewer data points, you pull a much more specific group for your Lookalike audience. It’s not inherently better or worse to use more or fewer data points—there are pros and cons to both.

[image source: AdEspresso]
When your Lookalike audience is united by more general commonalities, you’ll have to use more general messaging. When you target a smaller audience with more focused interests and strong similarities, you can tailor your ad copy, images, and messaging to speak directly to that particular audience.

Creating different ad campaigns around different buyer personas is one of the best ways to make your ads compelling and effective.

Test out smaller, more targeted audiences by creating Lookalike audiences fromsegmented groups within your mailing list. The data that you collect on leads through your mailing list can give you powerful information to separate these potential customers into buyer personas that you can target with highly personalized ads.

Here’s how you’ll do it:

1. An email marketing system like Campaign Monitor has specific segmentation tools that will let you group leads into smaller, more specific groups based on the information that they share with you. You can also create grouping based on how customers interact with your email content.

[image source: AdEspresso]
2. Once you’ve created your smaller and more focused groups of leads from your email list, create custom audiences from each of these groups.

3. Create separate Lookalike audiences with each of these smaller groups as a source group. Choose the geographic regions to target and the size for each Lookalike audience.

This allows you to create several different audiences. Once you’re done, AdEspresso can help you manage different audiences and adjust the copy, image, message, CTA, etc. that you use for each audience.

Iterating on these tests will help you figure out what works best for different types of leads to create an ad strategy that excites and inspires all of your best potential customers.