Inactive Email List? Reactivate with Facebook Custom Audiences

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Thanks to a particularly interesting Facebook feature – Custom Audiences – you get to take full control over who sees your promotional campaigns, which you can use e.g. to reactivate your list of inactive clients. How do you do this? It’s easier than you’d think!

What exactly is Facebook Custom Audiences feature?

As you probably know, running your company profile on Facebook enables you to create various ads and promote your posts to reach new audiences and easily grow your fanbase.

Facebook ads make use of all the information provided by platform users in their profiles. There, you will find e.g. information about their favorite hobby, movies watched, preferred music genre, completed education, career, place of living, friends or even a phone number.

Custom Audiences lets you use this data whilst promoting your brand to specify exactly who and where is going to see your ad.

And I don’t just mean that you can specify the preferred country, age group, gender or fields of interest of your page visitors. You can actually narrow down your target audience to a single specific user who will be presented with your advertisement. Does that sound interesting? I bet it does!

How do you make use of custom audiences? All you have to do is import the file containing Facebook user IDs (only from mobile Apps or mobile Advertiser IDs), telephone numbers or list of email addresses of your target audience when preparing your promotional campaigns in the ad manager. Please note, that the minimum number of records you’re importing has to be above 100.

Once you have imported the list, you get to choose your specific audience for each and every promoted post you make via Facebook. You can choose e.g. to show it only to people found in the file or everyone except the ones listed.

Thanks to another great feature called Lookalike Audiences you can actually even target people that have similar qualities and interests as the contacts you have exported from your GetResponse account. All based on the information they have left in their own profiles.

How can I use this feature?

When optimizing your promotional campaigns, you need to be aware that every audience is unique. If your prospects or clients are different, it is only natural that you need to communicate with them in carefully selected and customized ways to encourage them to act accordingly to your plans.

Amongst your audience, I’m sure you’ll be able to find at least some of the following groups:

  • website visitors who didn’t purchase anything,
  • people who opted in to your mailing list but aren’t following your brand on Facebook,
  • prospects you want to reach out to using various communication channels,
  • all other groups you wish to promote your brand to.

There are plenty of other similar segments you’ll be able to find within your brand followers. All of them are specific, have separate motives and elements that inspire them to take action. Naturally, your goals for each of these groups will also be different.

Custom audiences feature is used most frequently to:

  • generate and attract new fans by targeting clients and prospects who haven’t liked your page yet,
  • generate sales and cross-sell to existing clients and those interested in the brand,
  • up-sell to clients who previously purchased standard products and who’d shown interest in premium products,
  • retarget and remarket website visitors who didn’t perform the desired action,
  • reactivate clients who aren’t engaged in the current communication.

As you can see, using this feature you can build your fanbase, extend the reach of your advertising campaigns and generate interest and sales amongst prospective and existing clients.

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How do I get started with Custom Audiences?

In order to make use of the Custom Audiences feature, you need to use the Power Editor tool (preferably using Google Chrome browser) with which you can create and manage your promotional campaigns via Facebook.

Facebook Power Editor
Facebook Power Editor

Once in the Power Editor, go to Ad Tools and select Audiences. Once you’re there, click Create Audience and choose Custom Audience. Now you can choose the method you wish to use to create your very own custom audience group. You can choose to integrate your own website or mobile app to track your users’ actions, import their phone numbers and of course email addresses using a .CSV file.

Facebook Power Editor - Audience settings
Facebook Power Editor – Audience settings
Creating Facebook Custom Audience
Creating Facebook Custom Audience

Having gone through these steps you should be able to choose your group of contacts when planning out your next campaigns. This way you’ll be able to reach your business goals even more easily than ever before.

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Application: reactivating your email list

If you’ve already run any email marketing campaigns in the past, you probably know that it is not uncommon to see some of your audience become slightly less active and engaged in your communication.

The lack of activity coming from your audience doesn’t necessarily mean that they no longer are interested in your brand and what you do. Perhaps they are just a bit busier than before and they haven’t had enough time to get accustomed with the messages you’re sending them. Or maybe they aren’t checking their email as often as it had been in the past.

In order to reactivate these clients you should target your ads or posts on Facebook using the Custom Audiences feature I’ve just told you about. Through this you’ll be able to capture their attention and remind them about your brand somewhere else than just their mailbox.

What you need to do is to find the subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked in any of your newsletters during e.g. last 3 months. You can do this by going to Search Contacts in your GetResponse account. All you need to do is specify the target campaign and other possible conditions. I’d suggest to use “Last open date” or “Last click date” – and choose the preferred time.

Search for inactive subscribers
Search for inactive subscribers
Exporting inactive contacts at GetResponse
Exporting inactive contacts at GetResponse

Once you have found your list, click Show contacts and Save your search in the actions tab to the bottom left of your screen. Then, export the .CSV file.

What’s next? Just leave the email addresses or phone numbers of your subscribers in the file and you’re ready to import it to your Facebook campaigns.

When running such promotional campaigns, make sure you always offer value to your audience. Give them something that will motivate them to take action and become active again. Show them that you still care about your bond and wish to continue building the relationship you once shared.

Consider offering a discount code, a coupon, special promo or even one-to-one consultations to prove to your audience that you value them. Make use of all the different communication tactics and methods, such as transactional emails, autoresponders or Facebook ads. Once your clients start returning to you, make sure that they’ll never ever want to part ways and will prefer to stay loyal forever.

Thanks to this, you’ll be able to run successful marketing campaigns and communicate with your audience in a better, more thought-through way. Think about employing the list hygiene management and continuous reactivation processes into your long-term marketing strategy.

How about you? What other interesting methods or tactics do you use to stay on top of the game with your clients and continue to build valuable relationships with them? Let us know in a comment. We’d love to hear from you!


Michal Leszczynski
Michal Leszczynski
Meet Michal Leszczynski, Head of Content Marketing and Partnerships at GetResponse. With 10+ years of experience, Michal is a seasoned expert in all things online marketing. He’s a prolific writer, skilled webinar host, and engaging public speaker. Outside of business hours, Michal shares his wealth of knowledge as an Email Marketing lecturer at Kozminski University in Warsaw. You can reach out and connect with Michal on LinkedIn.