How to add new users to a Facebook custom audience. From your CRM, using Zapier.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of audiences in Facebook Advertising Manager, here’s a quick recap:

You have basically 3 types of audiences:

• SAVED audiences which you can create based on all the data from Facebook’s Open Graph (users’ interests & other demographic data)
• CUSTOM audiences which can be created via the Facebook pixel, in-app events, engagement data (e.g. people who viewed more than 50% of a video, people who engaged with your FB page,…), offline data (brick & mortar retail purchases, reconciled either via the email or the phone n° of the customer) or customer files, usually uploaded to Facebook in CSV format.
• LOOKALIKE audiences, which will be based upon a custom audience, to help you find potential customers beyond your own prospecting list.

For this snack tip, I’m focusing on CUSTOM AUDIENCES generated from a customer CSV file.

Once you get started with FB ads, a good practice is to upload your customers’ list and prospects’ list to Facebook Audiences, to create two separate custom audiences.

You’ll be able to use your FB custom audience based on existing customers to exclude them from prospecting campaigns or to focus on them for new promo campaigns (upsell).

And you’ll use your prospects’ list to (re)target them in the Facebook feed and to create a lookalike audience which will broaden the scope of your prospecting efforts.

You can upload new users to both lists manually every now and then but it’s time consuming and you’ll probably forget to do it after a while. It’s much easier to feed your lists programmatically each time a new user enters one of both segments. How do you this? Using Zapier, the essential tool for all marketers serious about multichannel automation.

Among the applications available on Zapier.com you’ll find one called FACEBOOK LEAD ADS.

It’s a bit misleading because you might think that it’s only relevant for leads collected via Facebook’s own lead gen forms. Actually, at the “action” level (as opposed to “trigger” in Zapier terms), this app can be used to add emails to a custom audience, which is exactly what we want.

You can have a simple zap which adds an email to a Facebook custom audience each time a new deal is created in your CRM (the user being a new prospect) or each time a new user makes a purchase on your e-commerce site (the user is then a customer).

When a zap will be successfully completed, you’ll see a new line in the activity feed of your custom audience in Facebook Business Manager.

This is a very powerful automation feature which will save you hours of hard work and will ensure that your custom audiences are always up to date, in real time.