Although Facebook boasts an audience of 15 million active Australian users, meaning an endless pool of data for marketers, the platform is continually looking for ways to enhance advertiser experience – and more specifically they are looking for…you guessed it, more of your data.

Facebook has opened up Custom Audiences to pages of any size, and we here at Mustard think it’s one of the most powerful types of advertising targeting around. Custom Audiences allows you to strengthen existing customer connections by uploading user information to Facebook (for example, email addresses or phone numbers). Facebook then compares your data with theirs to help you find your customers. You can then advertise to this group.

Yep, they allow you to reach people who are more likely to convert, and with a heavily competitive news feed to contend with (there are now over a whopping two million advertisers on Facebook), that’s pretty damn important these days. We’ve cut through the fat (read: sorted through the plethora of boring technical articles on this topic) to bring you our top tips for making custom audiences work for your brand.

Use Custom Audiences to support your email marketing

As long as you have permission from your customers that you can use their email addresses for the purpose of advertising, you can upload your email database to Facebook. If these emails are associated with a Facebook account, you can then target them with ads.

A great way to complement your email marketing is to repurpose these emails into a social post. For example, The Body Shop sent out an email about their Vitamin C range and followed up this email with a social post, targeting users on their mailing list:

(Thanks to State Of Digital for this example)

With email only having an average open rate of between 21-23%, you can now reach people who wouldn’t usually open your email. To get even more specific, you could even upload a list of users who have not opened your emails, and then target your email advertisement to them via social media. It’s a world of opportunities, guys!

Unleash Remarketing and Dynamic Targeting to improve your conversions

Stay with us here – these tools are golden. You can build audiences from people who have visited your website, even specific pages, using the Facebook Pixel. Once installed on a specific page or pages on your website, the Facebook Pixel tracks users who click through to the pages you specify and puts them into a custom audience. You can then use this audience for remarketing.

Why remarket? 98% of customers who view something you’re selling online don’t buy. The average customer is going to interact with your page multiple times (the average is 7 times) before making a buying decision. As Facebook remarketing advertisements get 3 times the engagement then regular Facebook advertisements do, remarketing can be extremely effective in increasing website conversions; it can help shorten that viewing average and lead to quicker sales.

(Oh my God, I love everything about this. Courtesy of WordStream)

With larger businesses, especially those in the retail or FMCG space, we recommend setting up Dynamic Product Ads. You’ve probably seen these everywhere, and some look mighty creepy/ slightly stalkerish [“I KNOW YOU’VE BEEN ON OUR SITE”] but they are extremely effective (see previous paragraph). Here’s a cool example:

(Courtesy of Wishpond)

Create a Lookalike Audience to reach people who’d care about your brand

Lookalike Audiences let you reach more people likely to be interested in your brand because they’re similar to your own audience. Once you’ve uploaded your Custom Audience list, you can then create a Lookalike Audience that will compare data from your customers’ Facebook and match them similarly to other Facebook users. You can use this audience to build your Facebook community, to advertise to or just build brand awareness.

Lookalike Audiences work. Facebook says that Lookalike Audiences produce a lower cost per checkout, lower cost per acquisition, larger purchase size, and an increased return on investment. Using Lookalike Audiences, an online travel site reportedly saw 70 percent lower costs per action, and an online shopping site saw 94 percent percent lower costs per checkout – and that’s just a couple of the many success stories seen with this tool.

There you have it – our top tips for getting the best out of Custom Audiences. We suggest setting it up and a trial for at least 3 months before comparing it to your old advertising data. Trust us, you’ll be surprised. In a good way.

Need some help setting up Custom Audiences? Contact us at Mustard. We’d be happy to help!