How to effectively engage with your Email List

If you’ve been doing online marketing, even just for the shortest amount of time, you have definitely have heard that building your email list is really important.

It’s a great thing to get people off of a social media platform and onto your email list. That is an asset that you have and you can email them at any time and when you come up with any program, product or service. You can just promote it to that list and “CHA-CHING!” you’ll make some internet monies by them buying from you straight away. It’s truly fantastic.

The problem is that over the years, the open rates have been steadily decreasing. For every hundred people that you may get onto your email, only 30 of them may open an email from you. As time goes on that could drop down to maybe about 20.

So potentially only 20 percent of people are engaging with your email list. That is really sad, especially when you’ve invested money into Facebook ads

Let’s say that you spent 20 dollars, and you got two dollar leads. That means you’ve got 10 people on your email list.

Out of those 10, three people have actually opened your email. So now your two dollar leads have actually turned out to be six dollar to seven dollar leads because three people have opened.

So your two dollars leads have tripled in cost.

Now, if you’re spending the six dollars a lead, it will take 60 dollars to get 10 people on your email list, and the same math will apply… Out of that ten, three people will open your email.

So now your six dollar lead has turned into a 20 dollar lead. And most likely, if you were doing a Lead Gen campaigns and you saw that your leads are coming in at 20 bucks a piece, you would probably be turning those ads off.

After investing for people to get onto your email, for a variety of reasons they are not opening your emails. Nowadays, most of our traffic from Facebook ads are coming via mobile, so it’s no real surprise they are not opening your email.

They see your ad on their phone, and they click and fill out the opt in form. But after that it is too much of a hassle to go from Facebook to their email.

Or they may think they will come back to read it later, but as time goes on, more and more emails will flood their inbox and it pushes your precious email down even further.

So it’s not that they’re not interested, it’s just life gets in the way.

In order for us to maximize our efforts and recoup that initial investment, it’s really important to follow up with a Facebook marketing strategy.

Now, that’s easy to do when they have just opted in.

Ideally, you’re creating an audience of everybody that’s landed on your thank you page. You can do this by placing the lead pixel or complete registration pixel.

Then you can create the custom audience for people who have landed on the thank you page and retarget this audience with other content pieces. These content pieces will then invite them onto the next step of the journey, walking them through becoming subscriber then becoming a student (if it’s an online course or a group coaching program).

The pixel is incredible by enabling us to create these systematized audiences, but what do you do with all these people that have been on your list for some time?

With our pixel, we are limited to only retarget people who have landed on those pages in the last 180 days, which is around six months.

But if you have people that have been on your list for longer than six months, you may be wondering how do you re-engage those guys?

Let’s say you’ve got 10,000 people on your email list and if we are being generous, 5,000 are engaging, so half your email list.

If only half of the people on your list are opening your emails, this will begin to affect your deliverability. Because you are sending out emails to all these people who are not engaging with your content. When deliverability gets affected, you are risking losing that interaction with your audience that actually IS engaging and opening your emails.

You can fix this by removing the people who are not engaging with you on that email list and move them into another email service provider or CRM.

This way it is not affecting your deliverability and you can still attempt to engage with them.

By getting the people who are not engaging off your main list and putting them on their own CRM, you can get back traction by implementing a re-engagement campaign and they can re-subscribe and join your main list again.

When it comes to Facebook ads, what we want to get back in front of the people who have opted into our email list. Usually people will export or download their email list and then upload it to Facebook, but the problem with this approach is that you lose the systemized ability to walk them through a journey.

You would normally just add that list to a particular ad, and they will see that same ad for as long as you keep running it. Eventually they will get worn out from ad fatigue, and if it goes on for long enough, they can hide your posts and give you negative feedback on your ads.

Those actions will only hinder your ad campaigns.

What you can do instead is create facebook custom audiences that dynamically update over to Facebook. It’s fantastic, this is what I’ve set up for myself for my clients.

Using this method allows you to create an audience and set them up on retargeting ad stacks. Which means they are being retargeted but with different ads displayed at the right time, to walk them through a journey. This also means they are not seeing the same one ad for 60 or 90 days straight.

You can retarget them based on when they viewed your thank you page, so within the last 7, 14, 21 days etc.

This is super easy to set up, I actually put together a quick video that will walk you through the process. You can catch that training over at SocialCharlie.com/activecampaign.

On top of the video walkthrough, I’m going to provide a link for this automation that has all of the pieces you need to put this into action. You just need to hook it up and put your tags in to launch!

Full disclaimer (because we don’t want any Fyre festival issues going on here :) )

This is an affiliate link, and you can try active campaign for 14 days free trial through this link.

If you’re looking for a CRM, I really recommend active campaign hands down, it’s what we use for ourselves and our clients.

There are high level automations, segmenting and tagging capabilities available and it’s a really great CRM to use.

So head on over to SocialCharlie.com/activecampaign, where you will see a video to show you exactly how to set this up as well as the automation that you could just plug in.

I’ll walk you through the automation now to get you started.

1. First step is to hook up active campaign with your Facebook account, and it is super easy.

Go down to integrations or settings, you’ll select Facebook and then you just select the ad account that you’re wanting to hook up with.

2) Next, you’re going to create an automation and that’s where you’re going to create the custom audiences.

Go to select the audience, you’ll just say Facebook custom audience. You can easily add to Facebook custom audience, and then you can remove a subscriber from a Facebook custom audience.

An example of our retargeting stacks, is where we target them based on a certain number of days. For example, the first one is 10 days, and then days 10 to 20, and then 20 to 30.

We’ll have people progressing through this automation and they’ll be in a Facebook custom audience for 10 days.

After those 10 days, it’ll say remove from Facebook Custom audience for 10 days. Which means all of these people get taken out of the 10 day audience, and then they get added into the 20 day audience, and then they get pulled through to Facebook.

Now they’re in the 20 day audience, where they wait there for another 10 days and then they get pulled out, by saying remove from the 20 day audience and put them into the 30 day audience.

On top of that, you can select the people you want to put into this custom audience, so maybe people who are on your list for longer than 80 days.

I know it sounds very complex, but it’s actually super easy.

So be sure to head over there to SocialCharlie.com/activecampaign, and you’ll be able to see how it’s all done and grab that automation yourself.

I hope that this has been useful because it’s extremely powerful and effective to re-engage our audience with Facebook ads, and you can just do it for a dollar a day.

It doesn’t have to be very expensive.

You’ve already invested heavily. Your biggest cost is getting people into your list to start with. By just investing a dollar a day, to continue to nurture those guys who otherwise would go cold or haven’t been able to follow up, you can avoid the dreaded spam folder and stay on top of mind.

If you’ve got any questions about this, please feel free to leave a response.

Happy to come back and answer them for you and until next time, happy Facebook marketing!