Facebook Remarketing

What is it?

Have you tried out the ‘Custom Audience’ feature in Facebook? Are you familiar with remarketing? Remarketing is a common practice in the Google Adwords world but is relatively new in Facebook. The Custom Audience feature allows you to load up a list of email addresses. Once loaded Facebook will check to see which addresses actually match accounts in Facebook. You can then choose to direct an add campaign only to this audience. Further to that you are still able to use most of the targeting features you are accustomed to within your Custom Audience (age, sex, likes, etc).

When can I use it?

Great question. Did you ask permission from each user if you could remarket to them? Of course you didn’t. By that same logic however do we ask the thousands upon thousands of strangers we advertise to as marketers on a regular basis? Best practice would probably be to market to those who have double opted in for further communications. At the very least these people should have provided you with their email address directly. Buying third party email lists or scraping emails would definitely be something we suggest you stay away from.

Rules?

You bet there are rules. Rule #1 is use common sense. You should also be familiar with:

1) Facebook Rules and Regulations:  

https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/customaudiences/tos.php

2) Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation:

http://fightspam.gc.ca

Use cases:

SAASLet’s say you have a SAAS (software as a service) company and have hundreds of thousands of email addresses. The name of your game, typically, is some sort of user action. Facebook can be a great way to encourage user action. Being able to establish more touch points as a marketer is huge. Using custom audience you could run a Facebook contest advertising to a bunch of folks who already know you. Further to that you could attempt to get them to sign up to your newsletter.

Remarketing List
In most cases when you run a Facebook contest you have a few specific goals in mind: 1) Double Opt In Email Addresses 2) Fans 3) Impressions 4) Remarketing List Emails. This is achieved by a simple referral contest that is of course like gated. Consider that for some businesses the remarketing list could be the main goal. Remove the like gate, let everyone sign up and see how many more email addresses you can collect directly when that barrier is removed.

Google Combo
Over time your marketing efforts should steadily increase the size of your remarketing list (which should be thought of as another channel). As your reach extends through all your channels so will traffic to your website (assuming this is one of your goals). You can also setup Google Adwords to do remarketing at the same time. With a sizeable Facebook audience, good web traffic and a respectable remarketing list you are all of a sudden spending time marketing to a large amount of people who at one time actually showed interest in your products and services.

Is this starting to make sense?

Results
Our results have showed a 25% to 50% savings with respect to Fan cost (like campaigns), significantly higher CTR’s (click through ratio’s) as well as higher conversions per dollar spent on Facebook advertising.

How do we get there?
You need to plan, execute and measure every step of the way. Your marketing plan needs to be long term and strategic. That doesn’t mean you won’t be shooting for results today – but you will be working towards constant growth of all your earned audiences (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc) by planning creative, interesting and engaging campaigns that tell your story. So what are you waiting for – get going!