Those who consider social media and email marketing to be separate entities are probably leaving a lot of money on the table. While it’s true that email has been with us since the dawn of the Internet Age and is viewed by some as a slow, ponderous, hopelessly anachronistic relic of the 1990’s, smart marketers realize that they are different sides of the same coin and can be a powerful business force when combined. The good news is that it probably won’t be difficult to tweak your current social media strategies to include good, old email. Here’s how.

The Miracle of Facebook Audiences

Okay, maybe miracle is too strong a term, but it’s pretty amazing how this Facebook feature can supercharge the amount of demographic data available for collection on a customer. Let’s say you sell a service or product online. Anytime a purchase is made using a credit or debit card, you likely end up with the email address of that customer. Most email marketing companies like Mailchimp or Aweber allow for the export of of these lists to a .csv file, which can then be uploaded into Facebook under the Audiences section of the Ad Manager dashboard.

Facebook’s software will fiddle around behind the scenes and spit out a new list with the raw emails you entered matched up to (with a hit rate of 20-70 percent) actual Facebook users. As you probably realize, Facebook is an insatiable collector and aggregator of demographic information and, once you can put a user profile together with an email address, you have struck gold when it comes to being able to more precisely target your marketing efforts.

Create a Lookalike Audience

Would you like more customers? That’s exactly what another Facebook feature - the lookalike audience - can provide you with. Using Audiences, you’ve gleaned a ton of demographic information about people who are already customers based on email addresses alone. When you ask Facebook to create a lookalike audience, the software goes to work again, searching its massive database to create a list of users who have similar interests and demographics. It’s a mirror audience of your customers with a crucial difference; they probably haven’t bought from you yet and might not even know you exist.

So what are you going to do with this lookalike audience? Put on the mantle to look at? Not hardly. You’re going to market the heck out of this new list because, since they share characteristics with people who have already bought from you, there’s a good chance at least some of them will respond favorably to marketing by buying your product or service.

Launch a Simultaneous Campaign

This next idea gets into the real nitty gritty of creating a two-pronged Facebook and email marketing approach that takes advantage of how people interact with each medium to gain maximum exposure for your next campaign. Most people check their email first thing in the morning. Use a drip email campaign that starts several days or even a week before the big sale starts. On launch day, that last drip email arrives promoting some sort spectacular deal you’re offering. For the rest of the day, take advantage of humanity’s tendency to frequently check their social media feed with follow-up reminders posted to Facebook several times. This is a synergistic way to use old (email) and new (Facebook) social media together for a bigger bang.

Use Facebook as a Funnel

An old sales adage tells us that it takes multiple exposures to a sales message to turn a potential customer into an actual customer. Trying to do this with Facebook alone is a hit or miss proposition because Mark Zuckerberg and his minions control the game. Even if you buy advertising through Facebook, there’s no guarantee your ad will show up in any particular person’s feed, which makes it hard to complete that whole ‘multiple exposure’ idea. What you need to do is post content to the social media giant that encourages people to click a link leading to your website. Once there, your primary goal is to get them to give you their email address. A common tactic is to give away some free digital information. This is how you build that all important email last that YOU control and can market to at your leisure.

The Bottom Line

The big idea here is to stop thinking of email and social media as cats and dogs that can’t get along without a big fight. Instead, concoct strategies to take advantage of the inherent power of each so you end up with marketing campaigns exponentially more robust than using either alone.