Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing tools today. Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, social proof, or conversions, email marketing can help you meet your targets faster.
What is the ‘catch’? What do you need to make email marketing work? You need to have a big list of subscribers, not just any subscribers but people who are or might be interested in your products or services.
The question is, ‘How do you grow your email list fast?’ There are several ways to do this, and one of the fastest is to utilize Facebook's 3 billion active daily users.
Before getting into the details on how to set up Facebook Leads ads to capture emails directly from Facebook and add those automatically to your email list, let’s look at other ways that are also great for building up your email list.
Blogging: Websites that maintain a blog and publish high-quality content regularly can grow an email list faster than websites that don’t publish regular updates.
Of course, blogging alone will not make people subscribe to your list, you need to give them incentives (like a free eBook), test different positions for your sign-up box and message before they will be willing to share their email address with you.
The problem is that to get a decent number of email subscribers per day from blogging, you need a lot of website traffic. Without targeted traffic, any efforts you put into optimizing your email subscription process will not be fully utilized (until you grow your traffic).
On the other hand, once you have enough traffic, you can grow your email list day by day for free, and with the right email marketing strategy, you will be able to take advantage of all the benefits ‘list building’ can offer.
Content Upgrades: This is related to giving users some sort of incentive to sign up for your list. Why would someone give you their email address if there is no benefit for them?
With content upgrades, people can give you their email addresses in return for more content or to receive your content in different forms, e.g., PDF.
Google Ads: Last but not least, you can use Google Ads to target people on Google, searching for keywords related to your business and having them land on an optimized landing page designed for capturing email signups.
The disadvantage of this method is that it costs money (in some cases, a lot), and if you don’t have a clear strategy for monetizing your email list, it is not worth it.
Increase email subscribers using Facebook Lead Ads
Now that you have a better idea of the most popular methods of growing an email list let’s see how Facebook Lead Ads can help you get more subscribers at the lowest possible cost (at least compared to AdWords).
Facebook Ads
There are 2 ways to use Facebook Ads to grow your email list fast.
The first way is to run targeted campaigns on Facebook with the marketing objective of ‘Send people to your website’, and the second – most effective way is to utilize Facebook Lead Ads.
The idea behind the first method is to create campaigns targeting the audience most likely to be interested in signing up for your newsletter or email list. People see your ad on Facebook, and when they click to visit your website, they land on a page optimized for collecting email subscribers.
While this is a good way to attract new subscribers, it involves many steps, and the actual conversion happens outside of Facebook.
This means you are losing several potential email subscribers uncomfortable leaving Facebook.
A better solution is to use Facebook Leads Ads.
What are Facebook Lead Ads?
Facebook lead ads are a special type of campaign that allows you to show your ads to a targeted Facebook audience alongside a lead form that users can fill in (without leaving Facebook).
You can then use some automation tools (as we will see below) to pass the information to your email marketing software and automatically add these people to your email list.
Advantages of Facebook Lead Ads
- Conversion happens within Facebook.
- Facebook allows you to export real-time information to add people directly to your email list.
- Reporting and statistics provided by Campaign Reports: You know how many people saw the ad and how many clicked and submitted a form.
Disadvantages of Facebook Leads Ads
The only disadvantage is that lead ads are currently available on mobile (not desktop) and only on Facebook (not Instagram).
How to Setup Facebook Leads Ads
The process is similar to setting up a normal Facebook campaign. The only difference is that besides the Ads, you must also set up your lead form and integrate Facebook with your email marketing software.
What you will learn below is how to:
- Setup Facebook Lead Ads
- Setup Facebook Lead Forms
- Connect Facebook Leads Ads with MailChimp so that any users who fill out your Facebook Lead Form will be automatically added to your MailChimp List.
Setup Facebook Lead Ads
Login to your Facebook Business Manager and go to ADS MANAGER.
Click the CREATE CAMPAIGN button and select COLLECT LEADS FOR YOUR BUSINESS from the options.
Enter a name for your new campaign and click CONTINUE.
Note: If this is your first time creating Lead Ads, you need to View and Accept Facebook’s Lead Ads Terms.
Next, you must define your Audience, choose your Ad placements, set your budget and schedule, and select your optimization strategy.
To demonstrate the process, I will use the following scenario:
- The objective of my Lead campaigns is to grow Reliablesoft’s email list.
- The campaign will target people in the United States. We are interested in SEO, Digital Marketing, PPC, and Social Media related topics.
- To encourage people to subscribe to my list, I will offer them a $10 discount for my digital marketing full course.
- Once they fill out a lead form on Facebook, I will automatically add them to my MailChimp list. They will then receive an email with the coupon code and details on how to claim the discount.
Based on the above scenario, this is how my Ad set settings look like:
Audience: Targeting people in the United States interested in the following topics.
Placements: Set to Automatic. Facebook will show the ads in the places they perform best.
Budget & Schedule: I have set a daily budget of $20 and selected LEADS as the optimization strategy.
So far, we have defined who will see our ad, where the ads will appear, and how much to spend promoting our lead campaign.
The next step is to create the Ad creative(s) and the Lead Form.
Creating your Facebook Ad
The Ad Creative can be a single image, carousel, video, or slideshow. You have the same ad formats as with other types of Facebook campaigns.
For this campaign, I selected a single image. This is what my ad looks like:
A last setting before creating the lead form on Facebook is to define how you want to track conversions.
To enable conversion tracking you first need to install the FB Pixel on ALL your website pages and also create Facebook Conversions.
Creating your Lead Form
A lead form is shown to users once they click the SIGN-UP button. Facebook has a nice step-by-step wizard that guides you through the process.
Click the CREATE LEAD FORM button.
Select NEW FORM and click NEXT
Enter a NAME for your form and click NEXT
Click ADD A CONTEXT CARD
This is the place to describe your offer and explain to users why they should sign up for your email list.
This is what my context card looks like:
Once you are done, click NEXT.
By default, Facebook includes the name and email fields in the LEAD FORM. You can click SHOW MORE OPTIONS to add more fields or +ADD A QUESTION to add more questions.
If your goal is to increase your email subscribers, you should keep this process as simple as possible. The name and email combination is what you need.
The last step is to add a link to your privacy policy and optionally add a custom disclaimer.
Don’t omit this step. It’s always recommended to have a Privacy Policy and disclaimer.
Add the link text and your privacy policy URL, and check the ADD CUSTOM DISCLAIMER option.
Once you click next, the final step is to add a URL so that people can visit your website after completing the form.
That’s all! You can now Preview and Finish your lead form.
Your campaign is ready to run. You can click PLACE ORDER, and after Facebook approves your ads and lead form, it will start showing them to the target audience.
How to Integrate Facebook Lead Ads with MailChimp
So far, we created the FB campaign, ads, and lead form on Facebook. The next step in completing the process is integrating Facebook with your email marketing software so that anyone who fills out the lead form will automatically be registered to your email list.
The steps below are specific to MailChimp, but the process and concepts are the same for all email marketing or CRM programs.
To integrate Facebook with an external system, you need to use a third-party service. There are many options available; in this example, I am using Zapier.
Here is an overview of the process:
Create an account with Zapier (to connect with Facebook Lead Ads and Mailchimp, you will need to register for a PREMIUM plan that costs $20 per month).
Log in to Zapier and search for ‘Facebook Lead Ads’ and ‘MailChimp.’
Select the “Subscribe new Facebook Lead Ad Leads to a MailChimp List’ Zap by clicking ‘Use this Zap.’
Next, click ‘Create Zap’.
Zapier has a very nice and easy-to-use step-by-step wizard for completing the process.
You will be asked to connect Zapier to Facebook, choose your Facebook page and Lead Form, then connect to MailChimp, and choose the list to add the new leads.
After you finish the process, your screen should look similar to this:
Once you activate this Zap, any users who fill out the Lead Form from Facebook will be automatically added to your Mailchimp list. It’s a good idea to set up a Mailchimp automation to send new users a welcome email with details on how to claim their offer.
Conclusion
Although you have to pay Facebook to get people to fill in your lead form, Facebook lead ads can help you add targeted people to your email list quickly. The cost is less compared to AdWords (I have tried both Facebook Lead Ads and AdWords for customers in different niches), and their setup and management are not difficult.
In addition, with lead ads, you can use Facebook’s powerful audience segmentation features to target the right people at the right time.
Should you use Facebook Leads Ads?
It depends on your budget and the products/services you offer. The best way to find out is to run a pilot campaign on Facebook and find out the average cost per lead and then the average cost of conversion (for your mailing list). If the numbers add up, you can spend more money on Lead Ads as long as they remain profitable.
