Facebook Lead Ads are a great way to affordably grow your email list. Here’s a tutorial.
Facebook is an extremely powerful advertising platform thanks to its ability to target people based on a rich dataset. It also offers many types of ads, and one particularly compelling one is the Lead Ad.
Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture information about Facebook users without them ever leaving the Facebook site or app. Facebook also pre-populates information such as name and email address. This results in much higher lead conversion rates compared to ads that send users to your website that has a lead capture form. In my experience, conversions can be 10x with a commensurate drop in cost-per-lead.
One use for Lead Ads is to increase the size of your email list. Here’s how to do it.
1. Create the Ad.
In the first step of ad creation, choose “Lead Generation” under consideration.
2. Pick your audience.
If you already have fans of your Facebook page that do not subscribe to your email list, this is a good group to target first. You can also select other targeting characteristics of people and companies that might be interested in your email list.
3. Create your ad and lead form.
I’m going to assume you know how to create a Facebook ad. There are plenty tutorials for that if you haven’t done it before. The unique thing about the Lead Ad is that you need to create a lead form.
When doing this, Facebook gives you an optional Welcome Screen for the form. This is helpful if you need to explain what your email list is about and who will benefit from subscribing. If you are targeting people already familiar with your brand, you might want to skip the Welcome Screen.
The next screen in the Lead Ad is the actual lead form. You’ll select what fields you want. The fewer the better from a conversion standpoint.
Once you create the lead form, you are ready to set your add live.
4. Get your leads.
Now your ad is running. People that want to sign up for your list submit the lead form. It’s very easy since Facebook pre-populates some of their info. (Note: People rarely use their company email address on Facebook, so expect most of the email addresses you get to be personal ones on Gmail and ISPs.)
There are two ways to get your leads. You can do it manually by downloading a CSV or Excel file, or you can automatically send them to your email list service. I highly recommend the latter as you’ll save a lot of time and be able to send a welcome email quickly (rather than after you upload batches to your email marketing service).
You can use Zapier to automatically transfer your leads to programs such as MailChimp. Zapier automates lots of tasks through what it calls “zaps”. Here’s a zap for getting your new subscribers from Facebook to Mailchimp.
Zapier is free for 14 days and then paid plans start at $20 per month. I recommend using the free trial to verify that Facebook Lead Ads will work for you. You’ll get a good idea of whether Lead Ads will work for you within just a few days.
Of course, using Lead Ads to grow your email subscriber base is just one use. No matter what kind of lead you need, Facebook Lead Ads are likely to be powerful.
Michel Payette says
I tried Facebook: will never do it again! AWFULL! Simply AWFULL! My audience ended up mostly from South America and Philippines. Go Figure. And nope: the ads was not in Spanish.
Totally rigged by Facebook!
Andrew Allemann says
You can select which countries (or cities) you want people from.