Are you trying to get a jump start on Likes of your new Facebook Business Page? Or maybe you feel like there’s a big disconnect between your current Facebook fan base and your current customer list?

The good news is that it’s easy to upload a list of your customers or prospects into your Facebook ads account to advertise specifically to them.

*As of Fall 2018, you have to use Business Manager if you want to advertise using one of your email customer audiences.

How to Create a Facebook Custom Audience from your Email Contact List

From your Ads Manager account, click on the Audiences icon. 

Next, choose Custom Audience from the dropdown.

Then Customer list in the Use your sources section.

Now Facebook will give you some more information as to the type of customer information you can upload, how the customer data is handled, and options to download a template for your data or import from Mailchimp. You can advance past this by clicking on the Next button.

Decide whether or not you want to assign a value to your email subscribers, then click Next. Whether or not you assign a value will not impact your ability to create this custom audience.

It’s great that Facebook makes it as easy as possible to upload your customer email list into your Ads Manager account in order to create a custom audience to advertise to. You can import from MailChimp, upload a .txt or .csv file, or simply copy and paste your data into a field provided.

Often the most common type of customer data a small business has on its customers and potential customers is and email address. Facebook allows for several identifiers in your data file, however. Choose between uploading a .csv file or copy/pasting your email list to continue. Make sure to give your new email custom audience a name, too. I recommend including the date so you can easily keep track of each uploaded customer email audience going forward. If you have steady growth of your email list, you’ll want to periodically repeat this process throughout the year to make sure you always stay up to date.

Once you’ve either uploaded your .csv file, or copied and pasted the data into the provided field, Facebook will show you how many records were successfully mapped.

It will take some time for the uploaded list of customer emails to be matched with existing Facebook users. Expect the number in your custom email audience to be less than the number of people in your original customer email file. Facebook users need to have the data you are trying to match associated with their account in some way. In the case of email addresses, many people have more than 1 email address, and some users may use a different email address on Facebook than what they’ve provided to you.

Also, if your business is B2B instead of B2C, the match rate may be even lower; not as many people are as likely to have their work email address associated with their Facebook profile. You can periodically check back in your Audiences section for a status update on the size of your custom email audience.

Visit this Facebook Help Center link to read more about best practices for improving match rate and to download a sample customer list .csv file.

*Updated: 4.20