How to Add Facebook Custom Audiences in Your Marketing Automation Mix

As online marketers, we know that marketing automation using email is one of the most popular ways to reach and nurture your database. Creating triggered emails based on website behavior not only creates a touch point at the right time, but it also nurtures your leads down the purchasing funnel. With the release of Website Custom Audiences (WCA), Facebook now makes it easier for businesses to deploy full-funnel marketing campaigns and lead nurturing through its native ad solution. Whether your goal is to acquire new leads, engage existing contacts, or drive more revenue from your existing customers, using WCA for lead nurturing can amplify your existing email marketing efforts across any stage of the funnel. We’ll walk you through how this is done.

Add the Pixel Across All Your Web Pages

Similar to the marketing automation tracking pixel that you’ve added to your site, Facebook has a remarketing pixel that you’ll need to add across all your web pages. This allows you to track website behavior such as specific webpage visits. To get the pixel code, go to Audiences tab in Power Editor.

Website Custom Audience

Create Audiences to Match Your Smart Lists for Triggered Emails

Defining your triggered events shouldn’t be too difficult. Simply use the same triggers that you’re using with your email marketing strategy. With your list of triggers, you can then create a  custom audience for each event. These defined events are just like email campaigns, except for Facebook Ads. Your tailored ad will appear when a particular visitor performs the action you’ve defined in your WCA.

In this example here, we’ve created a WCA for visitors who’ve browsed the pricing page but did not convert on a ‘thank you’ page.

Creating a FB Audience

Mirror Your Email Content into Social Ads

After you’ve created all of your custom audiences, you can start working on the ads. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. If you already have triggered email campaigns with content and specific call to actions for these audiences, create Facebook Ads that mirror that content. While you may need to resize some of your image assets and be a little more concise in your ad copy, this opens another channel to reach your target audience, syndicate your messaging, and drive more prospects toward the path of conversion.

For example, we’ve emailed a valuable blog post to our past visitors and syndicated it to the same audience on Facebook Ads. We’ve set-up our WCA to exclude ads served to those who’ve already visited the URL/read the blog post.

Email & Social Ads

Set a Realistic Budget to Maximize ROI

These types of campaigns are for more narrow audiences and can be very specific to the user’s website behavior. Given the limited reach, you won’t need to set huge budgets on these campaigns. However, if you do see more conversions from these ads, you can always increase your bids and budgets over time. Depending on the size of your custom audiences, I recommend starting out with a smaller daily budget (under $10) and increasing it as you see more success.