Doing an email blast to your LinkedIn contacts is considered spam and is not permitted. But you can actually export your LinkedIn emails and use them as the basis of an advertising campaign on Facebook. Then you can take them to an email signup page, where you can send them your newsletter. Remember, the idea of a Facebook ad is not to try to sell them something. The primary purpose is to get their email address. Yes, you already have their email address, but you don’t have their permission to send them sales messages. you need to offer them so compelling, that they will not only gladly share their email address with you, but they will want to share your information with others. This is a great way to establish a know, like, and trust factor with your LinkedIn audience. This is not only permissible, but if you have an active LinkedIn presence, it is something I’d recommend (in fact, I encourage it in my book, The Influencer effect.”)
You can use this same technique with purchased or rented email lists, which like LinkedIn, those emails do not belong to you. Since they are likely your target audience, you need a way to reach out to them and offer your free product so that you can get them on your own list. Here’s how.
Start by going to your LinkedIn account. Choose “Privacy and Settings.”
Scroll down until you see “Download your data.”
Click on “Pick and choose” and select “connections.”
Now head over the the Facebook ads manager. Select your marketing objective, such as “Traffic” (after all we want to get them off of Facebook and onto a landing page on your site where they can sign up for your eamils.)
Create a new “Custom Audience.”
To create this audience, select “Customer File.” This will be the file you downloaded from LinkedIn.
Click on “Add customers from your own file…”
Now click on “Upload File.”
Once the file is uploaded, click on “Next.”
The email address should already be mapped. Go ahead and map any other fields you can, such as first and last name. the click on “Upload and Create.” Yes, Facebook makes you do lots of clicking.
If you have a fairly large file, it may take a few minutes to upload your data – be patient.
You need 2,000 emails minimum for this to work. You will notice that 17,842 emails were uploaded from my LinkedIn data, in spite of the fact that I have about 23,000 LinkedIn connections. This difference is caused by two factors: some of my connections have a LinkedIn account, but either don’t have a Facebook account, or they use a different email for their Facebook account than they do their LinkedIn account. It could also be that some of the LinkedIn customers are outside the United States, and in my custom audience I am targeting US customers only.
Finally, click on “Done.” You can now finish creating your ad and only those people who are your first-level LinkedIn connections will see that ad on Facebook. This is a great way to target people from one social media platform (LinkedIn) and guarantee that they see your message on Facebook. You can use this advertising technique to target other lists as well, such as if you rent a list from a trade show you attended. Until those people sign up to receive your emails, you can’t spam them, but you can advertise to them, and this is a great way to do that.
If you need help with your digital advertising, please contact WebStores Ltd. at 877-924-1414.
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