How Are You Cross-Selling on Facebook?
If you’ve been marketing on Facebook, then you’ve definitely been feeling the squeeze as fewer and fewer fans see your organic posts.
We’re all being pushed to pay Facebook to advertise, but it’s not such a bad thing once you realize how powerful Facebook’s ad targeting capabilities have become. In particular, the custom audience.
Facebook’s custom audience capabilities have been around since 2012, but I haven’t heard a lot of talk about this amazing feature among bank and credit union marketers. Imagine having the ability to show a targeted list of customers an ad that is tailored specifically to them the next time they are on Facebook.
Sound too good to be true?
Well it isn’t, and the best part is that these kinds of ads are just as affordable as regular Facebook ads. If you’re already advertising on Facebook or even thinking about advertising on Facebook, then you need to know about and use custom audiences.
What is a Custom Audience?
A Facebook custom audience is a list of people that you define based on pieces of information that you already have, like email addresses or phone numbers. However, you can also create custom audiences of people who visit your website or use your mobile app.
In a nutshell, a custom audience on Facebook allows you to determine who, specifically, will see your advertising messages. As opposed to picking people with certain interests.
This level of precision is great for experimenting with segmented offers. Let’s see how.
Custom Audience Types
There are four types of custom audiences in Facebook. Keep in mind that you can get pretty granular with your custom audiences and getting specific with audiences leads to an increased effectiveness of your campaigns.
Customer List
Is the type of custom audience we’ll be focused on in this post. A customer list is just that, a list of your customers or members email addresses or phone numbers. Something that you can use to personally communicate with them, and Facebook can use to identify them within the social network.
What’s really great about this option is that you don’t need to do anything to your website or app to make it happen.
You are free to upload your entire list of customers and Facebook will match email addresses with Facebook accounts and return a custom audience. An even better practice would be to upload segmented lists into Facebook, however. We’ll go over some ideas below.
Website Traffic
You can advertise to people who visited your website in the past 180 days if they were logged into Facebook. This type of custom audience will require some code to be added to your website, but once it’s been added you can target, or retarget, people with ads based on the pages they visited on your website.
As an example, you could target people that viewed a specific product page, like your HELOC, Auto or CD rates pages in the last 30 days.
Mobile App Activity
Similar to website traffic custom audiences, you can add some code to your mobile app and advertise to anybody who has used it in the past 180 days, as long as they also have a Facebook account.
Lookalike Audience
Facebook can create a Lookalike Audience based on any of the above custom audiences and some preferences that you set, (e.g. people who like your page or visit your website). A lookalike audience is a way to expose new people to your bank or credit union, based on the interests of your existing customers.
Custom Audience Limits
There is a limit to the number of custom audiences you can build in Facebook, but that shouldn’t be a problem at all. Here’s a breakdown:
| Type of Custom Audience | Limit |
|---|---|
| Customer List | 500 |
| Lookalike Audience | 500 |
| Mobile App Activity | 200 |
| Website Traffic | 10,000 |
In the case of the Customer List custom audience, 500 custom audiences is more than a enough to get started. So, what are you waiting for?
Setting Up a Customer List Custom Audience
Customer List custom audiences are pretty straightforward. You need either an email address or a telephone number and Facebook can use that information to identify profiles within the social network.
If you want to experiment with segmentation, then I would recommend starting small. The minimum size of a custom audience is 20 people, so you can get started pretty quickly with a super targeted list.
Pick a specific campaign, like any of the ideas listed below, and run with it. Depending on the size of your list, you will either want to copy and paste the list into Facebook or upload a .csv file that follows their format, a single column of email addresses or phone numbers with no other information.
After you upload your list, Facebook will work to match your customers’ email addresses or phone numbers to Facebook profiles in order to build your custom audience. Note that creating custom audiences is a manual process. You’ll have to remember to update your custom audiences on some kind of regular basis. Facebook doesn’t do it for you.
Compliance Disclaimer
As long as you’re following Facebook’s advertising guidelines as well as advertising regulations for financial institutions you should be ready to move forward.
Cross-Selling With Facebook Custom Audiences
Now that we know all about custom audiences, let’s talk about how customer list custom audiences may be used to cross-sell customers on Facebook. If you can already segment your customers from your core banking system, a third party reporting system or Core iQ, then adding a Facebook Custom Audience to your next outbound campaign should be a no brainer.
Especially if the campaign is targeting millennials, who want tailored offers and targeted communications that are specifically relevant to them, and don’t mind seeing them on their social channels.
Here are a few scenarios to get you started:
Indirect Auto Loans
We’ve learned anecdotally that the best product to cross-sell an indirect auto loan member is another auto loan. And the best practice seems to start your outreach between 18 months and 12 months to loan maturity.
This seems to be the lowest hanging fruit, as you could update this custom audience twice a year and monitor the results in coordination with your other outreach efforts.
High Net Worth Individuals
If you’re already sending out promotions to your high net worth individuals on a regular basis through email and print mail, you may also want to consider advertising the same promotions on Facebook.
HELOCs
Use your internal criteria for advertising HELOCs to segmented customers to build a custom audience and make sure that they are seeing your rates when they’re logged into Facebook.
CDs / IRAs
Setting an age and account balance criteria for a custom audience around retirement information could be a great way to get new deposit accounts. You may also consider advertising your rates on Facebook to individuals with CDs reaching maturity.
Credit Cards
Advertising your credit card consolidation offers to targeted individuals, along with promoted posts around debt consolidation education could be a great one-two punch toward attracting new credit card applications.
Start Small and Track Results
As with any advertising activity, it’s a good practice to start small with your experiments and track results rigorously. You don’t have to have a big budget to start to see results. As a matter of fact, you can get started with a budget as little as $5 per day or $150 per month.
The good part is that you may create and delete custom audiences at any time, and you can set the timing of your campaigns to completely control your spend.
So what are you waiting for? Build your first custom audience in Facebook and let us know about your results.
