• by Jess Nelson , October 16, 2015

Email marketing claims to have the highest ROI when combined with social sharing, psychographic data and targeted outreach, but many SMBs don’t have the resources to create personalized campaigns.

A new partnership announced Thursday hopes to make multichannel marketing easier for small business owners.

Facebook has joined forces with Constant Contact and AdRoll for their new Small Business Solutions partner program. SMBs can now combine AdRoll’s retargeting solution and/or Constant Contact’s email marketing platform with Facebook’s social ads. 

Any email sent through Constant Contact can now be automatically repurposed into a Facebook ad and optimized for mobile. The new SMB tool is also a programmatic solution that incorporates Facebook’s API to find a local “lookalike” audience that should be most interested in the business being advertised.

Joel Hughes, vice president of emerging business at Constant Contact, says this is an automated marketing option made possible by Facebook allowing the company to integrate their email marketing platform directly into Facebook’s advertising product.

“It was simple,” says Hughes. “The perfect marriage.”

Hughes says this is beneficial for SMBs because it tackles two traditional barriers of advertising: a lack of familiarity and high price points.

“As consumers they’re experiencing multichannel marketing all the time, and they want to take advantage of that as small business owners,” says Hughes. “But it’s a really complex landscape, and the myriad of opportunities can be quite confusing.”

“SMBs need multichannel marketing tools that are easy-to-use and provide strong, measurable results,” says Scott Gifis, vice president of platform sales and operations at AdRoll. He says email is a useful low-cost solution for SMBs, but that cross-device marketing helps SMBs be competitive in a landscape where consumers are always on the go.