How to Target an Email List as a Facebook Ad Audience

Whether you’re a brand new company that’s just getting its feet on the ground or a long-standing, well-oiled machine, you probably have a list of email addresses that you use to contact current customers, potential customers, or friends and family of your brand.

Did you know that there’s more you can do with that list than send them email after mundane email? You can actually use that list as a target audience to deliver Facebook Ads!

Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to Ads Manager and click on “Audiences.”
2. Choose “Create Audience,” and select “Custom Audience.”
3. When the pop-up appears, click on “Customer File.”
4. Then, you have a couple of options depending on where your list of email addresses is saved. You can either:
   1. Upload an Excel document or copy and paste emails from an Excel document.
   2. Or, if you use MailChimp, you can import directly from there by providing your MailChimp login credentials.
5. For Excel:
   1. First upload or copy and paste your list.
   2. Name your audience and select “Next.”
   3. Click “Upload & Create” if the columns are mapped correctly to the corresponding identifiers. (e.g., the “Email” column should be mapped as “Email”)
   4. Then click “Done.”
6. For MailChimp:
   1. Log into your MailChimp account when prompted.
   2. Select which of your saved MailChimp lists you’d like to upload (it can be more than one), and then click “Create Audience.”
   3. Save a name for your audience.
7. Note: It may take a little time to match the email addresses with their corresponding Facebook users.
8. Once complete, you can start targeting the audience like you would with any other Facebook ad!

Keep in mind that your audience must include at least 20 people for it to be a valid audience to use. Also note that Facebook matches the email addresses you provide to users in Facebook. If for some reason a user has signed up for Facebook using a different email address than the one on your list, it will not match up.

If you don’t have a list or are overwhelmed by the process of making one, uploading it and producing ads, let us know. We’d love to help!