Marketing • Business
How to Personalize Your Marketing Across Email and Social
16 Jan 2019 • 6 min read
SmartrMail’s Josh Reyes shares his expert tips for winning more sales across both social and email and how to get more out of your paid social budget.
Personalization is the key to ecommerce success, with over 75% of consumers saying they are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases, or knows their purchase history. While there are easy solutions to do this on individual marketing platforms, replicating your message across multiple marketing channels remains a challenge for most retailers.
While we’ve made email marketing personalization easy with SmartrMail, social media is one channel where some ecommerce marketers are left pulling out their hair with frustration. This is because advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, when done well, can generate massive rewards. But it’s also very easy to burn through lots of money running ads that struggle to achieve even a modest bump in traffic to your site because they’re not reaching the right people.
There are lots of different ways you can refine your targeting to address this, but one of the easiest and most effective ways is to sync your email segments with Facebook Ads Manager. In essence, this lets you create a custom list of people to serve ads to on Facebook and Instagram. You can then not only send personalized and triggered emails, but also run hyper-targeted ads that get served to your customers and prospects at exactly the right time.
While the number of personalization strategies you can use across email and social are endless, common use cases you might want to consider are:
In SmartrMail, you can easily set up a ‘Smart Segment’ of people who haven’t purchased from your store for a while and send them a triggered reactivation email.
But to really boost the effectiveness of this campaign, sync this segment to Facebook Ads Manager and advertise to these people on social. This entices them to come back to your store and make a purchase. The ad below is a good example of this in action.
How you welcome new subscribers and customers to your brand is one of the most important actions you’ll need to take as a merchant. This is when your customers are most interested in your brand and most likely to buy.
The excitement leads to them opening your emails 4x more often and spending 8x more than through regular promotional emails – so now it’s time to make a hard push with email and social to get your first sale with an introductory offer. Make your offer clear and don’t overcrowd your message with branding; the customer has already seen a brand snapshot when on your site. Your one and only goal with your first email and social campaign is to make the first sale.
Basing product recommendations on what people have purchased in the past can be a great way to increase sales. You can now use SmartrMail’s Smart Segments to easily sync a list of people who are likely to be interested in a certain product and run ads for this product to them. It’s well known that Amazon does this in email, but their trick is doing it in Facebook and Instagram as well. Amazon attributes 35% of their revenue to product recommendations, so why not replicate their strategy yourself!
You can also run ads targeted towards people who might have left items in their cart. Include a coupon code in your Facebook ad as a thank you or extra incentive. Syncing these up with your automated abandoned cart emails will turn you into a cart-recovering superhero.
| Related Reading: How to Create Emails That (Actually) Convert
SmartrMail has always been about making email marketing easier and smarter for ecommerce stores and getting you more sales in the process. Now we’re extending this aim to making it easier for ecommerce stores to manage their Facebook and Instagram ads too.
We now let stores using SmartrMail seamlessly sync their Smart Segments to their Facebook Ads Manager. This means that you’ll be able to start targeting ads on the Facebook platform to people on your email list without having to manually export customer lists and import them into Facebook. These audiences are also updated automatically. So if someone is added or removed from a synced Smart Segment, this change is automatically reflected within the Facebook Custom Audience.
Learn more about the integration
By combining the power of email marketing with Facebook and Instagram marketing, you’ll develop a stellar ecommerce marketing strategy. When you target your ads on these platforms well, you’ll drive traffic to your online store and improve your conversion rate, getting you more sales at the end of the day.
If you’ve tried advertising on Facebook or Instagram in the past, but didn’t see a decent increase in sales as a result, now might be a good time to give it another crack. If you’re not already using SmartrMail as your email service provider, you can sign up for a 15 day free trial. This gives you the chance to test out our new Facebook integration and see if running more targeted ads will yield better results.
Neto seamlessly integrates with SmartrMail to deliver highly personalized email marketing based on sales data from your Neto store. Try it out.
