Turn customers into repeat customers using Facebook Custom Audiences

We all love buyers, especially  the paying kind.

God knows they are hard to get and very often they do not come cheap. Costs of gaining new customers are rising all the time.

The costs of getting new customers should  be counted not just in terms of money  but in time and effort. Time, especially for owner managers is the most precious commodity of all and is not to be wasted. (At the end of this post we show you how to automate your Facebook Marketing and so hopefully free up some time for you.)

You buy traffic using  Facebook Advertising  , Google Pay Per Click  or through SEO.  All of these marketing platforms are constantly in flux ,new features been added, algorithms been updated.

What works today will not work tomorrow. You need to keep up to speed or get left behind.

( why not try our Facebook quiz to see if Facebook can get you new customers . You can see it on the right hand side of this page. Answer a couple of simple questions with a Yes or No answer and you will get a report specific  to your situation )

You then need to work your landing pages so they convert that traffic into customers.  Split testing new offers, changing the headline or sweating over some piece of copy.

You do all of this and more and many , no most still do not buy.

But some do, some do what we need them to do. They either pick up the phone or reach into their wallet and take out their credit card.  Bullseye , A RESULT.

You bask in the glory of the sale, you process the sale, Then it is back on the treadmill hunting  for more new customers.  Relentless.

A bird in the hand.

Let see if we can make that treadmill a little easier to bear.

Lets assume what you sold , the product or service did what it said on the tin. You delivered on your promise.

You now not only have made a sale but you have a customer. Even better than that you have a happy customer.  

Re-selling or Upselling to that customer will  nearly always be easier and cheaper than going out and looking for new customers and Facebook advertising can help you do just that.

The foundation of successful advertising is to ensure you are communicating with people who want  you product ,  need your product and can afford your product.

The one group of people you know who ticks all those boxes is your existing customers.

Facebook Custom Audience

Facebook allows you to create what are called Custom Audiences. These are in effect lists of Facebook users that have  particular characteristics.

Using the Facebook advertising platform you can target people on those lists with ads when they visit Facebook.

What you learn here will also be the foundation for finding new customers using Facebook Lookalke Audiences but I will cover that in a different article.

There are many types of custom audiences you can create in Facebook but today we will focus on those that will help you sell again  to your existing customers.

Email  Custom Audiences

If you have customers you must have customer details.  There is a very good chance you have their email address.  If you are lucky you have it organised in a CRM or email marketing package.

You may not be so lucky or organised.  These details may be in dairies , account packages or on the back of envelopes. But it is there somewhere.

Get them into a list. No names needed, just the email addresses.

You can then log into Facebook and upload that list. To do this you will need to be logged into Facebook using Google Chrome, This will give you access to what is called the Power Editor in Facebook.

Once in the Power Editor select Custom Audience from the Create Audience drop down list. You will then be presented with the following screen.

1. Give your list a meaningful name.
2. Add a description of the audience you are about to create.
3. Specify what type of data we are using to create this list , in this case emails.
4. Click button to browse to you email file , once selected  click Create Audience .

Facebook will then look to match the emails you have uploaded with the ones people used when registering on Facebook.

This may take up to 24 hours. How many emails will be matched ? The will vary depending on the emails you are uploading but in my experience to date it matches up to 70% of the uploaded email addresses against the ones in its database.

When you next run an ad on Facebook for a product you can now target this list.   The next graphic shows you the steps you need to take to use that list as a target for your Facebook Ads.

It is a screen from the power editor which can only be accessed using Google Chrome.

1. Indicate you are using an existing Custom Audience for targeting
2. Enter the list to target with your ads, use the name from No 1 in first graphic above
3. Enter list not to be used for targeting , this is a tad advanced and I will cover this at end of this article.

Apart from targeting current engaged customers this approach offers the following possibilities

1. You can target people who are on your email list but who have stopped opening your emails. Maybe a new offer delivered via a Facebook ad will re-ignite their interest in your company.
2. You can target people who have actually unsubscribed from your email list. You now cannot send them an email but you could direct an ad to them.  Again a new offer may get them to re-subscribe.

There is one downside to this kind of list , it is not dynamic.

If you upload 10,000 email addresses today but gather a further 200 email addresses over the next month you will need to upload the new email addresses to that list.

I created a video on this topic called Email Custom Audience. It  goes into more detail on using your email in Facebook and is worth watching.

“Thank You”  Custom Audiences

This tactic is most appropriate to situations where people buy or book something on-line. In most scenarios  when you actually buy or book on-line you end up on a page that says “thank you “.

This page can only be arrived at if you complete a purchase or booking so you know for sure that all visitors to this page are buyers.

Facebook allows you to create a custom audience of visitors to this page and then use that audience as targets for your ads.

As before when in the power editor select Create Audience and then select Custom Audience.. Now select Custom Audience from your web site as indicated in the graphic to the left.

Now you will be brought to the following screen.

 

1. Add the list name
2. Add a description of the list
3. Select People visiting specific pages.
4. You only want this to work for people who land on the thank-you page so put something unique here that clearly identifies that page.
5. Select how long you want to keep people on the site, the max is 180
6. Click Create.

You will now find  yourself looking at a list of all of the Custom Audiences you may have created

Copy / Paste the highlighted code into every web page on your site , best just before the </head> tag.

If you do not know how do this ask your web developer.

Facebook will now start creating a Custom Audience of all of the people who visit your thank you page and you can start running ads targeting those visitors.

Now one big advantage of this approach over the email custom audience is that this list is dynamic. You do not manually have to add to it. The code you put on your site will add new visitors to your list  dynamically.

Smart Marketing Combining Two Custom Audiences

Lets consider this situation. You sell product A which is a consumable. Your experience tells you that people will not need your product again or start considering a new purchase for 100 days.

OK so you have your custom audience setup but there is no real point in marketing immediately to somebody who has just bought.

Ideally you want these people to start seeing your ads in about 100 days. We can do this using Facebook.

1. Create a custom audience for the thank you page that keeps people on the list for 99 days.
2. Create a second custom audience for the same page that keeps people on the list for 120 days.
3. Name both with names that easily identify which is which.

Now when you go to run an ad campaign do the following

1. Select use existing targeting groups.
2. select your list that is 120 days for inclusion.
3. select your list that is 99 days for exclusion

 

The result of this is that Facebook will show your ads to people who are on the 120 days list but not on the 99 days list.

As people drop off the 99 days list only after been on it for 99 days you ads will only show to people who bought 100 days ago.

Bingo you are now in a position to advertise to people at their time of need.  if somebody then buys they go back on the 99 day list and so stop seeing your Ads. No money wasted advertising to people how have just bought and no time wasted, all of this running on auto pilot.