Enhance the Power of Your Email Marketing Campaigns with This One Trick

Lauren Owens - October 23, 2014

It’s digital marketing 101. When you want to reach customers who have already purchased from you, you send an email. When you want to reach new customers, you advertise.

But, what if you could enhance the power of your email marketing campaigns by using your email database to target your customers in social media?

Thanks to custom audience targeting (available in both Facebook and Twitter), you can.

How Custom Audience Targeting Works

Custom audience targeting (called Tailored Audiences in Twitter) is a paid advertising option in both Facebook and Twitter. Instead of simply targeting users based on interests or demographics, you can find and target users who have already purchased from you, or with whom you already have a relationship, by identifying those customers for Facebook and Twitter based on their email addresses.

In Twitter, this is done via CRM (they call the option CRM audiences). It works by matching the email addresses in your CRM with the email addresses of Twitter users. All email addresses are scrambled and not visually identifiable. This works similarly in Facebook, but it’s done via Open Graph – which means (among other things) it’s not as user-friendly as the Twitter option. This is not to say that it isn’t valuable – just that you might want to tap into a developer to ensure it’s implemented properly.

In Facebook, in addition to targeting users via email address, you can also target them by Facebook user IDs, phone numbers, app user IDs, Apple’s Advertising Identifier (IDFA), or Android’s advertising IDs.

In Twitter, you can also target users by user ID – but that would be for a different type of campaign, one targeting influencers, for example – not an email marketing campaign.

Using Custom Audience Targeting in Conjunction with Email Marketing Campaigns

There’s power in repetition, and the ability to show your advertisements to users in multiple places makes this repetition possible.

When you’re building your email campaigns, create custom audience campaigns to go along with them, using similar artwork and messaging. While it might not make sense to use this option for every campaign (you could run the risk of ad nauseam), it’s a good idea to use it for your big campaigns, and especially around the holidays – when customers are inundated with promotional email and it can be hard for your message to gain traction.

What a great way to stand out from the pack!