[New] MailChimp Facebook Integration – 5 Feature The Grand Tour
Earlier today, 31st January, MailChimp announced its newest feature. MailChimp Facebook Integration
The announcement was not an email feature, oh no. MailChimp has integrated Facebook Advertising into its toolset. Wow. An ESP using Facebook Ads. The shock and horror of it all. Let us see how this work… Yes, very interesting. Here is my grand tour and views as I dug deep and explored 
Update: December 2020, This post was updated for content, readability, speling, gramer, syntext, context and the continuous updating and understanding of Digital Marketing.
MailChimp Facebook Integration – Get Started
See this Mailchimp article for further details Start in the ‘campaigns’ section as normal. Click the Create Campaign to create a new campaign.
Don’t worry, I am Urban Renström, there is always science and research involved in everything I talk about, teach, and demonstrate.
This opens a new window with all the campaigns options available, including the new Facebook Ad campaign.
Choose the Facebook ad to as stated ‘Crate and post a Facebook Ad to engage new audiences. When clicked the main ad creation window opens.
The look and feel are MailChimp, naturally.
Note the simple interface with 4 sections. Choose the Facebook page selection, Audience, Budget, and Content section.
On the right-hand side is the estimated reach window.
MailChimp Facebook Integration: The Facebook Audience Selection
Let us choose an audience for your Facebook Ads campaign.
Three choices for audience targeting
Contacts on a list; People similar to your list, aka Lookalike audiences; and audience based upon interests.
Limiting is the building audience interests. Targeting with deep demographics, behaviours, or more categories is missing.
Also, the option to narrow down or exclude interests is missing. Access to any saved, WCA, or LALs audiences is not possible.
When choosing an email list as the audience, Facebook ‘hashes’ the list. Meaning Facebook finds people on Facebook that match the email address from your chosen list.
Note:
Not every email in your email list matches with users on Facebook. The reason is simple, people use different email addresses for ‘business’ and their Facebook profile. Normally expect a 50-85% match. My test showed a 50% match. And as always your mileage may vary.
Facebook Ads Budgeting
Choosing a start date, the default is the day you create the campaign, for me the day is 31 January.
Choose an end date either one week’s time, two weeks time, one month, or end on an exact date.
Not able to think clearly as the morning coffee has worn away.
But, not sure about the use case of running a very basic ad campaign for 30 days. At the 5er a day… hum the math are 5 x 30 is 150. Hum…not sure about that or the expected results from a €150 spend.
Note the minimum budget of €4.76 per day.
The campaign objective for the MailAds is a ‘Clicks to Website’ as per MailChimp “the ad will be optimized to spend your budget towards clicks”. Whereas a Boosted post from a Facebook page is a PPE, a post page engagement objective.
MailChimp chooses ‘Clicks to Website’ campaign objective as the default objective.
A positive move sending people to your website, instead of spending money to get ‘engagement’ which a Boost post does.
The good news stops there.
Without the Facebook pixel installed on your website, to track people from this MailAd campaign and all campaigns you are only wasting money.
The fun is more enjoyable burning a pile of ’20s in the BBQ pit.
In this post, I discuss the differences between the 15 Facebook campaign objectives if PPE and the Click to the website are not clear.
We are not given any optimization or bidding choices.
The Mailchimp Facebook Integration – The Ad
Creative interface, very MailChimpish, naturally. We get to choose CTA buttons for the ad. However, the ad is a link ad, with no carousel, video options.
Building an Ad using this Mailchimp Facebook Integration is an improvement on the ads manager interface; the boxes are where they should be and in order.
Eight different CTA buttons are on offer.
Press Save And Close and presto and and
Behold! The finished article. Beautiful no? Do you like my ‘best ultimate stuff’ description?
Facebook Submit Ad Button
No additional cost to MailChimp user bar the ads cost. Thank goodness considering the quoted ad cost is high enough.
How Good is the Mailchimp Facebook Integration?
The best use case I see is sending a ‘newsletter’ Ads to your email list.
Wait! What? Spend money on a Facebook ad so your subscribers will see it?!?!? Or maybe not see it? Hum…
Well, we can choose which segment of our list we want to send to. A few segments anyway.
However, I don’t think a list of ‘those who did not open’ is a targeting option – nope I checked.
The Mailchimp Facebook Integration Ads Assessment
I was hoping this Mailchimp Facebook integration would have more capabilities, but, the appearance is this is pitched towards beginners who want to dip their toes into paid advertising.
The interface has fewer features than the ‘Boosting’ post interface on Facebook Pages. I did not think it was possible to have fewer features than the boost a bost. But, there we go.
As was pointed out to me:
“I’m actually happy the (MailAd) capabilities aren’t advanced! One less tool I need to learn”
The natural question does MailChimp get any financial kickbacks from Facebook for each advertiser that places ads via MailChimp? (my tongue is squarely in my cheek and I believe the answer is no).
Before you spend money on any ads download this simple 7 step strategy formula to Double your Clients using Facebook Ads for your 6-Figure Business. It’s FREE!
MailAds are full circle in many respects. Think about what MailChimp, an email service provider, has done. They have integrated social advertising as a service.
Mailchimp is not the first EPS to do this and they will not be the last ones.
As I heard a rumour Infusionsoft was pushing the user to set up and use Google Ads words accounts from their toolset.
Strategically, why would MailChimp develop these Mailchimp Facebook Integration feature sets?
To attract more customers? Engage with their existing customers? Is their customer acquisition slowing and need more features? Are they losing customers to competitors? Or is this a brilliant strategic business move leading to the competition?
Whilst on the surface ‘brilliant we can make ads directly from our MailChimp account’ the features available don’t rate highly and not much to get excited about.
Maybe MailChimp is following the MVP process and will improve the interface over time.
My suggestion is don’t use MailAds. Boosting a post is better (my goodness I never thought I would say that!)
I am off my rocker? Naturally. Did I miss a rich feature? Let me know in the comments.
