Category: Facebook Advertising

Obviously, the best set of people to advertise to in any business is your current clients.  They already know, like and trust you.  This makes any sale easier.
In fact, it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than keep an old one, so treat them like gold!

Step 1 – Create your list

To create this audience, your first step is to create a list of your current clients with their names, emails, and phone numbers (if available).  Save this list in a .csv file.  This list should contain at least 100 people.

You shouldn’t have to create this list by hand.  Most CRMs and mail automation programs have this exact step as an option.

Step 2 – Open The Facebook Audience Tool

Once you have your list created, go to business.facebook.com.  In the menu, go to “All Tools” and select the “Audiences” option.

Once you click on “Audiences”, it will open the “Audience” tool in a new tab on your browser.  This will display any audiences that you have created already.

Step 3 – Audience Creation Wizard

Click the “Create Audience” button on the left to get started.

In the drop-down, select the “Custom Audience” option.

Once “Custom Audience” is selected, this will open a new dialog box.  This box will allow you to choose the source of the custom audience.  In this case, you’ll select “Customer List” and click “Next”.

The next screen is a helpful explanation from Facebook that tells you exactly what information they will look for in your list.

Click “Next” when you are done reading it.

The next screen will ask if you are using a “Custom Value” column.  This is a more advanced technique that we will be covering in future blogs.  For now, we recommend selecting “No”, accepting the terms from Facebook and clicking “Next”.

In the next step, you can either upload the .csv file that you created of your clients, or you can copy and paste it in for Facebook.

In the example below, we uploaded our .csv file.  The file had four rows: email, first name, last name, phone number.  

Once the list is uploaded, you’ll want to name the audience something descriptive.  In the image, we named this audience “Client List for Company X”.

Side Note: There is a button “+ Description” that you can use as well.  This gives you an additional 100 characters to describe your audience if you’d like.  We would recommend using these descriptions once you start creating a lot of audiences and need more information to keep everything organized.

Click “Next” once you have completed both steps.

Facebook will review the data and attempt to identify the columns that you entered in the .csv file (or the pasted data).  If they can identify the column, they will show the information on the “Mapped” tab.  It normally can distinguish the email and phone number easily.  If it can’t tell what the data is, it will place the information on the “Action Needed” tab.  Then, you’ll need to go to that tab and ID the columns for Facebook.

Once the columns that you want the data from are mapped, click on the “Import and Create” button.

This creates the list and gives you confirmation, as seen below:

Click “Done” and it returns you to the main audience page.

You now have a custom audience of your clients to use when running Facebook Ads.