Optimizing Your Cold Email Campaigns with Facebook Group Data
Industry discourse often makes it seem like social media and cold email campaigns are in a stand-off for the best marketing channel. While individually, they’re both powerful but create a marketing juggernaut when combined.
With its 3-billion-plus user base, Facebook allows you to build an identity and then capitalize on it to create a community. It provides a unique environment, perfect for forming close-knit ties with your target audience.
But how do you convert social media connections into paying clients? Because when it comes to being contacted by brands, email, despite all its perceived ‘coldness’, is still the most preferred channel for customers.
Integrating the power of Facebook groups with cold emails cultivates meaningful connections and elevates your outreach game in one fell swoop.
Want to know how to get the best of both worlds? Read on to find out.
Understanding Facebook Group Data
If your Facebook group has 50+ members, you have access to an exclusive feature called Insights.
It provides statistics in four broad categories:
- Growth
Number of members, new requests, rate of membership growth
- Engagement
Views, likes, and comments on posts, popular times and days for posting, etc.
- Admins and Moderators
Activities of the admins and moderators are shown under this feature.
- Membership
The recent activity of each group member is shown under this.
The purpose behind providing the feature is to facilitate a greater understanding of your community. But the bigger and busier a group gets, the more difficult it becomes to analyze and utilize this data for cold email campaigns and other strategy implementation effectively.
Groupboss aids you in the collection of strategic information and the conversion of members into leads using Facebook group data.
Say you've posed a set of Facebook group qualifying questions to people intending to join your group. Groupboss populates their answers in a spreadsheet for you and kickstarts the lead-scoring process before a prospect has even become a group member.
If members provide their email address at the time of joining the group, Groupboss automatically adds their contact information to a synced email marketing account like Mailchimp, Getresponse, etc. See details from this video.
Based on the level and nature of their activity in the group, you can classify these leads as ToFu (Top of Funnel), MoFu (Middle of Funnel), and BoFu (Bottom of Funnel).
Aligning Group Insights with Your Cold Email Objectives
Your cold email campaigns’ objectives should align with the data provided by the Facebook group data. You can collect emails from the Facebook group members by leveraging Facebook group membership questions.
For example, Facebook group data helps you identify amplifiers – key influencers and thought leaders – that can spread your message on social media.
Tailor an email campaign promoting a new product line or contest specifically for them. Doing a proper email warm-up, before conducting an email campaign can be a good practice to get better reslut.
Besides recognizing and congratulating these top contributors via group posts, reach out to them over email with a freebie to kickstart the conversation.
Craft messages that highlight mutual interests and demonstrate how your product/service adds value to their conversations. Check in with them regularly and ask for their feedback to build long-term collaborations and partnerships.
With group insights, you have access to demographic data and engagement stats for each post.
Use them to decide what topics to cover in emails, who to send them to, and when.
If your previous cold emails have had low open rates, use group data to come up with subject lines that raise interest.
If posts shared at a particular time of the day have performed consistently well, schedule your marketing campaign emails accordingly.
Crafting Personalized Cold Email Messages Using Group Data
For personalization to be successful, it has to go beyond inserting first names in the intro.
Balance the group’s collective interest with the member’s individual preferences in your emails. Before anything, you should use an email lookup tool to find the right email addresses you need.
You can not only boost closer ties with the most active members of the group but also encourage the quieter ones to participate and remind them they’re equally valued.
Even amongst active members, not everyone is going to be vocal about their opinions. Some members may post and comment frequently. Others might express themselves by liking posts and comments or voting in polls.
You can view each member’s recent activity by clicking on their name in the list of members.
If your Facebook group targets cooking enthusiasts, tailor your cold email campaigns’ messages to highlight recipes or culinary tips relevant to a cuisine or dish they’ve shown interest in.
Members can also be sent weekly round-ups of group posts relevant to their areas of interest.
For new members, you can also make an email cadence of the most viewed and/or liked posts.
Ensuring Your Emails Hit the Mark
Almost, 60% of people check their email as their first task of the day. But it's their phone they read it on, not their desktop. Mobile-optimize emails to ensure high deliverability, open rates, and engagement.
Your emails must have content that’s above and beyond what you offer on social media.
On email, you’re not restricted by word counts or short attention spans. Use that to your advantage and send subscribers in-depth guides or opinion pieces. Conduct Q&A sessions to give them more of what they signed up for — you.
You can send them freebies like ebooks, quizzes, workshop invites, etc. in exchange for tasks linked to campaign goals. For example, if your goal is to build social credibility, giveaways can entice members to leave a review on your product page.
As discussed earlier, personalize emails with their Facebook group activity.
Refer to a comment they made on your last post, or a milestone celebrating the time they’ve been in the group to make them feel special. Create a unique connection by recognizing their individual contributions within the community.
Analyzing and Improving Your Cold Email Campaigns
If your emails aren’t being opened or read, it points to a mismatch between what you think your members want to read vs what they actually like.
Delve into the comment sections of posts that generate a lot of buzz. You might find trending topics to address in upcoming emails and blog posts.
Elevate open rates by incorporating group buzzwords in the subject line.
To improve click-through rates, incentivize readers with interactive email design elements.
A/B test your emails to know which subject line, copy, and design resonate the most.
You can use emails with high engagement rates as future Facebook post ideas and vice versa.
Segment your Facebook group members based on their interests and interaction level. Map their email activity and use this knowledge to do lead scoring more effectively. E.g., members showing high engagement both in the group and on email can be fast-tracked for cold email campaigns and ultimately lead nurturing.
Ensure healthy list growth by boosting your best-performing Facebook posts or running ads with an email list subscription as your CTA. Or add a sign-up button to your profile to generate awareness and subscriptions.
Connecting Your Strategies for Enhanced Results
The data and insights Facebook group automation gives you can be used to personalize and optimize email campaigns.
You can plot member activity as data points in a spreadsheet and use a marketing automation platform like Hunter Campaigns to personalize emails at scale.
Let's say your spreadsheet has columns containing
a. Post/poll that the member has commented on/voted on
b. Post that they liked
You can add merge tags to your email template that are to be used for the cold email campaign to create a personalized opener with the information in a. Something like, “I had no idea {winning option} was so popular.”
Via the information in b., you can identify a recent topic of interest for them. Then offer a free resource like a how-to guide or a case study related to this topic.
Enhance campaign engagement by:
- Setting up emails to be sent at a time and on a day of the week when member activity in the group is at its peak.
- Scheduling automated follow-ups in case of no replies and email sequences based on pre-defined responses.
Wrapping Up
Automation tools, whether they're for Facebook groups or cold email campaigns, are designed to squeeze the most out of the information available to you.
They make your lead generation and nurturing processes faster, more intuitive, and ultimately, more effective.
Blend the personal insights you have into your Facebook group members with cold email outreach.
Personalize email copy and offer wherever possible, and keep testing and analyzing campaign results.
You’ll have the warmth and acceptance of a community, with the autonomy and one-on-one intimacy of email.
And that's as close to unbeatable as it gets.
About Author
Antonio Gabrić
Antonio is an outreach manager at Hunter and a founder at Viralspy. For the last three years, he’s been helping SaaS companies grow their organic traffic and revenue through link building. At Hunter, Antonio is leading a link-building and outreach team to build backlinks that move the needle and connect with industry leaders. To get in touch and follow his experiments, say hi on LinkedIn.