Facebook Ads are an integral part of your online marketing strategy. They not only help build your community on the platform itself, but can help build traffic to your website, and advertise sales and other offers for brick and mortar businesses. Beyond integrating with other online channels such as email, you can use Facebook Ads to integrate with your offline marketing channels, too.
Despite the fact that we get mailboxes full of junk mail in 2017, the reality is direct mail still works. A United States Postal Service study showed 60% of recipients also visited the promoted website – and first-time shoppers were the most influenced.
But this isn’t just the case for B2C businesses. In the B2B sector, one agency targeted companies making $30 million or more in revenue, and got a 25% response rate. It’s a different approach, which is the reason it stands out and gets an above average response rate despite the fact that it’s so simple.
Let’s talk about how to make direct mail campaigns work with your Facebook Ads.
Begin with Your Direct Mail
You can get direct mail pieces “off the shelf” from companies that are just a search away. But if you want something automated, you can use a company like Lob to integrate with a number of APIs and setup triggers to deliver direct mail to customers at prime times during your online marketing campaigns. Prices including the printing, mailing, and postage so you have a set and forget direct mailing solution.
If you want to create something custom, start by connecting with local commercial printing shops. They can help with design concepts and implementation. Whatever you come up with, make sure it’s specific, targeted, memorable, and personalized.
Figure Out How You’re Going to Track Everything
When it comes to tracking the results of a direct mail campaign, you have two options: unique phone numbers and personalized URLs.
The unique phone numbers are generally 800 numbers that go back to a major account, company, region, city, or segment of your audience.
With personalized URLs, you set up a variety of custom domains to make them easy to remember, and refer them to the correct place. This is the option we’ll focus on since the goal is to get people to your website, and to combine the tactic with Facebook Ads.
You can use referring domains to send people to a specific landing page you created just for their company. Or, you can send them to a case study or portfolio piece that focuses on the work you’ve done for a company just like theirs.
This way, you’re connecting with those hard to reach, specific companies and sending them back to a message you’ve crafted just for them. And you can track the entire thing, then retarget them.
Combine it With Facebook Ads
You should use this approach with a longer sale that takes a while to develop. After all, studies show it takes anywhere from six to eight touch points to generate a qualified sales lead.
Sending a single piece of direct mail isn’t going to be enough to turn that company into a lead. That’s why you need to follow up across multiple channels over time, to make sure you get results.
Add a Facebook Pixel to your website so you can track events and then use the Facebook Custom Audience to create an audience of people who have visited a specific page or URL. Create a custom audience for anyone who passes through the referring domains you’ve created specifically for your direct mail campaign.
Consider making a different campaign for people who bounce, people who stick around and look through your website, and for people who take the time to download your introductory offer or join your mailing list, and so on.
To create your own audiences, login to your Facebook Ads manager account and click “Audiences > Choose Audience > Lookalike Audience.” From there, you’ll be able to choose the source of the audience, such as the people who’ve already liked your Facebook page, or people who’ve visited the Thank You page on your website. Then you’ll choose your target audience size. The smaller you choose, the more targeted it will be. Each custom audience you create will be saved for use in future ad campaigns.
This retargeting approach allows you to automate the process of getting the second, third, or fourth touch points with your target prospects, so you don’t have to manually do all the work. This saves you time and money, while helping you grow your qualified leads database.
Tips for Success
You can use the mailing data from your direct mail campaign on Facebook, too. You can create a custom audience to show Facebook ads to your direct mail recipients who are also Facebook users.
Start by preparing your mailing data for import into Facebook Ads Manager. This means you’ll create a CSV file with as much data as you can gather. Facebook will allow you to create your target audience based on a number of factors, including:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Phone Number
- Email Address
- Age, Date of Birth, Year of Birth
- Location: City/State/Country/Zip Code
- Gender
- Mobile Advertiser ID
- Facebook App User ID
Since you’re working from mailing list data, you should have the zip codes and names at the very least, but the more information you have, the better you will be able to target Facebook users. Use Excel or Google Sheets to create the CSV file, and create a header row for each data point you have.
If you need assistance, you can download the sample CSV from Facebook, and you can learn about how to setup the columns and data.
Once your file is ready, it’s time to use it to create a custom audience. Open Facebook Ads Manager, then open the Audiences tool. Click Create Audience > Custom Audience. Then choose Customer File in the pop-up window. Click “Add Customers from Your Own File.”
Upload the CSV file you created with the mailing data. You’ll be prompted to match the fields in the file to the categories Facebook Ads Manager uses. Go through the list to make sure Facebook recognizes and maps the fields correctly, ignoring anything that’s not relevant. Remember, the more data you use, the higher the match rate.
Follow the rest of the prompts to secure the upload and process the audience file. Once this is done, you’re ready to start building the campaign. It could take some time for Facebook to build your custom audience, based on the size of your import.
At this point, you’re good to setup landing pages, or direct traffic to the landing pages you’ve already created.
Once you get the results of the preliminary campaign, you can segment your custom audiences to target your high-value segments of your list – particularly those who visited your landing pages but didn’t respond to your conversion points.
Make sure you coordinate the timing of your direct mail and your Facebook Ads You want to make sure there is time for people to respond to the mailer before you start serving them ads on Facebook. This way, recipients will be more likely to react since Facebook isn’t their first interaction with the campaign.
Allow one to two weeks after your mailers have gone out to ensure they are delivered to your audience and they have time to respond or abandon before you start running your ads.
Marketing Must Be More Than Clicking Boxes
If you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you can’t expect anything more than mediocre results with an average ROI. If you break out from the rest of the crowd, you’re taking a risk, but you’re likely to get better returns because you’re creating your own path, rather than copying what those ahead of you are doing. Take advantage of direct mail sine you know it still works, and combine with automated targeted Facebook Ads. You may be surprised at how effective it is at bringing you new leads.
Have you ever received a piece of direct mail and then started seeing ads for it on Facebook? Did it improve your impression of the company?
