Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
How To Clone Your Best Customers & Increase Sales
- January 21, 2019
- , 12:46 pm
How To Clone Your Best Customers & Increase Sales
What if we told you that you could clone your best customers?
And that you could double, triple or even quadruple your sales?
Sounds interesting right? Well, in this blog post, we will explain how to do this through Facebook’s Ad Platform with custom and lookalike audiences…
The Different Audience Types On Facebook You MUST Know About
It’s important to know that there are 3 types of audiences on the ad platform. They vary depending on the targeting, positioning and the message you are looking to get across:
Saved
Custom
Lookalike
The primary audience type is the saved audience option which takes the demographic information as well as the detailed targeting feature to target people from their likes and dislikes. This audience type will be a cold audience and will still be unfamiliar with your product/service.
After this, you have custom audiences which include people that engaged with your business on Facebook or on your website. This audience type could be classed as lukewarm or hot audiences because they may be familiar with your product/service.
Lastly, we have lookalike audiences and just like saved audiences, they are cold but the difference is that they are targeted more effectively. They will use a source audience which you can control and find new customers that share the same characteristics by using a scale of 1-10.
First Things First...
Before you clone your audience, you will want to create a customer file custom audience.
This is where Facebook will try and match the people that you have just uploaded to their profiles on Facebook.
Your potential sources for lookalike audiences include:
Website traffic – People who visited or took a specific action on your website
App activity – People who launched or performed an action within your app
Engagement – People who engaged with your business on Facebook or Instagram
Customer file – Upload customer email addresses
Offline activity – People who visited your business, called or interacted with you through an offline channel.
In order to get the best results then we would recommend uploading a customer file which contains customers who have bought from you previously;
Click on the Audiences tab under Ads Manager
Click create audience
Select custom audience
Select customer file
Then you can select a manual upload, MailChimp integration or a customer list custom audience that features the life time value of customers
Get Your Data Ready For Optimal Match Rate
To optimise the file you are uploading, you need to prepare it to maximise the match rate.
In order to do this, you can include 15 different identifier fields and the more you include, the higher your match rate will be because it makes it easier for Facebook to match data.
Make sure each identifier you want to match has its own column and this applies to First Name and Surname columns. The country location filed is particularly important because even if all your data is in the same country, Facebook matches data on a global scale.
Note – your customer file needs to be in a .CSV or .TXT format because they are the only two file types which Facebook accepts when manually uploading data to create a customer file custom audience.
Upload Customer File and Map Identifiers
When you’ve prepared your customer file and used the formatting tips we’ve discussed above, you then want to map your identifiers.
For each column in your file, select the relevant identifier and once you have mapped all of the relevant identifiers, click ‘Upload’ and ‘Create’.
After this, your customer list will be hashed locally on your browser and then sent straight over to Facebook. Facebook will match this with your existing list of their users hashed IDs and the matches are added to your custom audience. You should then see your customer file custom audience appear in your audience dashboard.
Using Customer File Custom Audience As The Source For Your Lookalike Audience
When you have created your customer file custom audience, you will be given two options which are:
Create a lookalike audience
Create a campaign which will use the customer list custom audience
Pick the first option and the lookalike audience window will appear and the customer list custom audience will be automatically selected as the source audience in the source field. Then you will need to choose the country you want your lookalike audience to be in.
You will have a 1%-10% sliding scale to select your lookalike audience size. Even though the 1% is a smaller audience than your 10%, it will be more closely matched to your source audience. To reach more people, move the slider up the scale.
Note – To improve your lookalike audience quality, you will want to increase the size of your source audience.
The Right Time To Use Lookalike Audiences
A lookalike audience is technically a cold audience who probably won’t know your brand or service, therefore your ads can’t go straight in with the hard-sell. You need to build trust and gradually move people down the sales funnel and join your most loyal customers.
*Remember, the most important reason to target a lookalike audience is to find people who are similar to your current buyers.
Summary
As long as you have the database of customers, then we highly recommend you take the time to consider lookalike audiences because it may be more effective than targeting customers through their interests.
If you would like to find out how one of our Facebook Advertising Experts can help you clone your best customers and increase sales then why not schedule in a call with us?
