OREANDA-NEWS. November 09, 2015. Email marketers face a number of challenges today that advertising can help with, including the need to:

  • Grow your email subscribers list. You are always working to grow your email subscribers, because every new subscriber is a potential revenue opportunity.

  • Reengage your unengaged subscribers. Overall email open rates are about 30% according to eMarketer, and every unopened email is a lost revenue opportunity.

  • Use all of the content you have in limited space. You are given tons of content from different teams, and have to prioritize what to include in each email campaign.

  • Test creative to find out what works best for your audience. While you can do variant testing of campaigns in the first few hours of their launch, there are natural limits on your ability to do more complex tests of copy and images.

Here’s how advertising, especially on Facebook, can help you:

Grow your email subscribers list. On Facebook, you can directly bid for “website conversions” to pay when customers give you their email address for a new offer or promotion. A recent report from ACCENT Marketing Research found that two-thirds of consumers use Facebook to find good deals and promotions, including 80% of Baby Boomers, so your Facebook audience is primed for this type of engagement with your brand. Facebook Lookalike Audiences are a way to target consumers for this goal. With Lookalike Audiences created either with Salesforce Active Audiences or directly on Facebook, you can target people who haven’t subscribed yet but who are in a group of the one to 10% most similar to your (best) existing subscribers.

Reengage your unengaged subscribers. If you have inactive email subscribers who have not opened your emails recently, you may choose suppress them from all future campaigns in order to improve your open rates. However, if you serve these unengaged subscribers social ads, you can drive them back to your website and get them to login. This makes them active, and suitable for future email campaigns. In a study, a leading online retailer found that when active and inactive subscribers were sent the exact same Facebook ads, the inactive subscribers were more likely to click than the active subscribers, implying they were inactive not because they didn’t want to hear from the brand, but because they didn’t want to engage in the email channel.

Use all of the content you have in limited space. With Facebook ads, you can serve more of your great content to both your email subscribers and audiences who look and behave like your subscribers. These ads include detailed analytics and reporting from Facebook as a supplement to your email campaigns.

Use Ads to Test Your Email Creative. With large email campaigns, you have a limited opportunity at the start of a campaign to test which creative will work best for a major initiative — whether subject lines, images, or body copy. With Facebook advertising, you can test dozens of different variants in advance of your big campaign and use which ads had the highest engagement to help determine which smaller group of versions you will test in your email campaign.

Dive deeper into how an online retailer proved ROI with advertising to inactive subscribers. Download the joint case study with Facebook!