Facebook’s email and mobile-number ad targeting: Powerful, but creepy if mishandled

According to Facebook, the global launch has been made available to Facebook-managed advertisers and will span all of Facebook’s ads. “Any company that has a customer list can benefit from this new feature,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

“This type of targeting is similar to email marketing or direct mail where, after making a sale, an advertiser reaches out to a group of customers with more information related to its offerings,” explained Facebook. “We think this new audience targeting feature will be an effective tool for advertisers to reach their customers on Facebook and will lead to more relevant ads for people who already have relationships with advertisers.”

InsideFacebook, which first broke the news based on a test Facebook ran on its ‘Power Editor’ tool, reported that “personally identifying information will be hashed before being uploaded to Facebook” so the customer information would remain private to the brand and not be accessible to Facebook itself.

Despite these reassurances, brands and Facebook will have to be careful how they communicate this function to customers to avoid appearing creepy, pointed out Ramkrishna Raja, managing director, digital, IPG Mediabrands.

“From a targeting perspective, this is a big plus for marketers,” Raja said. “But from a consumer perspective, if I have not been informed that I will be targeted, it will be very creepy and cause privacy concerns.”

Brands, he suggested, should send an ‘opt-in’ request to customers before targeting them on Facebook.

If executed “correctly and ethically”, this move from Facebook makes a lot of sense, as Facebook fans will benefit from the deal-focused nature of CRM and loyalty programmes, said Damien Cummings, regional marketing director, digital and social media, Samsung. “It’s a win-win as one of the key reasons people ‘like’ brand pages on Facebook, is to receive special treatment.”

However, if the function is abused, or if it comes from a customer email list that regularly goes straight into a ‘junk’ folder, the function can lead to “brand fatigue, resentment and lost customers,” Cummings cautioned. “Yes, I might have signed up to a Groupon daily email list, for example, but I now ignore the emails and haven’t bothered to unsubscribe. Do I really want that experience extended to my Facebook page?”

Simon Kemp, managing director for We Are Social, agrees that Facebook will have to manage this function carefully to avoid being complicit in potential spam. “Email addresses and phone numbers are still sensitive information,” he said.

From a pure marketer perspective though, the ability to connect a brand’s CRM database with the Facebook advertising ecosystem to seamlessly drive outbound messaging, would be “very effective for brands,” concluded Raja.