Email marketing and social media are both powerful channels we can use in our marketing strategy. Until now, email campaigns could be sent with platforms such as MailChimp, Drip and others. Most of these tools usually have a free plan, but with certain limitations.
Very soon these platforms will face a big new competitor, and small businesses will get a great new opportunity to send email campaigns for free.
The new competitor is none other than the giant Facebook, which is still testing its tool and will allow business pages to send email campaigns.
Facebook has confirmed that it is working on the tool to support small and medium-sized businesses that want to announce changes to how they operate following the COVID-19 crisis.
There is not much information about the new option yet, but so far we know that:
- We will be able to send up to 1 email per day and a maximum of 2 email campaigns per week, and each campaign can go to a maximum of 3,000 contacts
- The feature is free, but it is not clear whether there will be a paid plan once the COVID-19 crisis is officially over
- The email layout options are modest: we will be able to add 1 or 2 columns with an image or text. But Facebook is unlikely to leave things like this, and in the future we can expect to be able to attach videos to our emails too.
- In text fields we will be able to change the font and background colour, use bold, italics and underline, and add hyperlinks. There is no option to choose a different font.
- There will also be call-to-action buttons, but for now there are only two options: “Send Message” and “See Facebook Page”. One button sends people to Messenger and the other to the Facebook page. There will certainly be more options in the future, but for now, if we want to send people to our website, we can do it with a hyperlink in the text.
- Not all pages have access to the feature yet. Of the nearly 30 pages we manage, so far we can create campaigns in only one. To check your access, go to your Facebook page, and in the messages section you should see a Marketing Emails option.
- People who like the Facebook page are not automatically added to our email list.
- New email contacts are added manually or through csv, xls or xlsx spreadsheets.
- There will be statistics on the results, possibly including the number of opened emails, the number of recipients, link clicks, bounce rate and more
- While you create the campaign, you can check at any time how the email will look on mobile and desktop devices
We are definitely excited about this new feature from Facebook and will certainly try it out in our work. The fact is, however, that the option is still in testing, some things need improving and others need adding, but we are confident that the social network will keep improving the system and that it may even overshadow the best paid email marketing platforms.
Share this article if you liked it and found it useful! We would also love to hear your answer: would you use Facebook for your email marketing?
