That One thing Bitesized: Building your email list with Meta Ads

Want more email subscribers? Have you considered paying Meta to help grow your list? In this bitesized episode of That One Thing I will talk you through exactly what you will need in place to successfully grow your email subscribers with Meta Ads.

I talk you through: How to create your Lead magnet, the importance of prepping your website, how to create an success page and email nurture sequence. To setting up your Facebook pixel, which campaign options to choose from in Facebook Ads Manager and how to track your success.

Learn more pro tips in my Facebook + Instagram Ads Toolkit: https://thesocialally.co.uk/ads-toolkit

Ask me any questions on this episode in My Instagram DM's https://www.instagram.com/thesocialally_/

Drop me a line: vanessa@thesocialally.co.uk 

Transcript

[00:26] Speaker A: Now, before we start today's episode, I wanted to just quickly talk to you about my free ads toolkit that is live on my website right now. My toolkit has everything you need to create a really super successful Facebook ad campaign from top to bottom. Okay? So you've got creative in there. You've got copy in there, you've got all the jargon busting terms in there. You've got a free checklist that will tell you exactly what you should be doing from start to finish in your campaign. It's all in there. Go to my website, click on the link, pop your email in there. I will send it to you free of charge with my love to all my lovely subscribers. They will also get £20 off their first empowerment session when they sign up. So it's a total no brainer. It's on there. Click the link or have it in the podcast notes. And without further ado, let's get on with the show, shall we? Hello, everybody. Everybody welcome back to that one thing. I am speaking to you from my little podcasting cupboard on a very foggy and cold November day in the west country of England. And today I'm going to be talking to you about one of the biggest things you need to be focusing on for 2023 when you're running ads, especially at the beginning of the year. So, without further ado, let's get cracking on talking about how to run Facebook ads to grow your email list. So first up, let me just briefly talk about why you should have an email list. I've spoken about this in depth in other podcasts, so I'm going to touch on this very briefly. Let me give you an example. Say your audience and the people that buy from you are all on Twitter. You will probably be feeling a little jittery right now, but if you have an email list, you can relax because that doesn't matter. You know that you can take your people somewhere else if Twitter implodes, right? But it isn't just Twitter, is it? I can count on my fingers how many times friends of mine have said they've had their Instagram accounts hacked in the last couple of weeks. And also, Meta could just switch off your account whenever it wants to. Willynilly. At the moment, it seems. So having an email list and keeping them updated and nurtured is probably the most cost effective and easiest way for you to grow your business right now. So let's start at the top of the funnel, shall we? Let's talk about creating your lead magnet or your offer. Now, when I'm talking about lead magnet, this is mainly for service based businesses here that I'm speaking to, okay? So all you product based peeps, I will talk about something specific to you later. So your lead magnet is a free offer that you will give your potential person in exchange for an email address. Okay? The lead magnet is content that your subscriber wants or needs and will be willing to exchange their email address for. This could be a PDF checklist or guide, a video series, a quiz. Works really, really well. Whatever form it takes, your lead magnet should provide incredible value. Why should you have this incredible value product free? Because this is going to be your subscribers first contact with your business. So you need to make that really, really gorgeous first impression and give them exactly what you promise. So where possible, you've got to strive to really, really over deliver here because subscribers may base their future decisions on actually parting with their cash with you on the value that they take from that first interaction with your business. Now, for my lovely ecommerce businesses, offering a discount in exchange for an email address is the way forward for you. Okay? So for example, 10% off your first free order or free shipping is brilliant for a hook in, a lead magnet and an ad. Make sure this offer is something that your customers will really, really want though, okay? Free shipping isn't going to tempt them to part with an email address if they would only be spending a couple of pounds or dollars on shipping anyway. Okay, quick pro tip offers are always worth testing. Some people place more value on free shipping than a 20% discount, even if the discount would save them more in total. So test, test. Now I'm going to talk about prepping a website. Now, okay? When you collect your subscribers organically, either through Instagram or stuff like that, lots of online businesses will use a pop up or a banner on their website. However, when you're using Facebook ads, you need a full opt in page that will ensure that there's only one option for that visitor to take from ads to subscribe to your email list. So this is when a standalone landing page comes into play because page visitors won't be able to simply close the pop up and they won't have any other distractions because obviously there's so many distractions with this kind of transaction and they could just navigate away completely from the page. So that means they won't have a menu bar, there won't be any other links to different pages or any other alternative offers that could really confuse them. Okay? It should also include one clear call to action that will persuade them to subscribe. Make it as easy as possible for the transaction to take place on that landing page and you'll get those leads and you'll get those email subscribers. A quick talk as well about your landing page being mobile optimized. Okay, the amount of times I have picked through to a landing page on my phone and it's completely in landscape mode and I can't see half of the actual landing page and all the stuff that's in it immediately makes me kick off. Okay, everybody. Well, most people I would say, when they are looking on social media are looking on their phone. So you should have it loading quickly and you should have it mobile optimized. Okay, you can build a landing page on your existing website, or you can use a landing page builder. Some email service people also offer integrated landing page builders. I can put some links in the description of the podcast of websites. I think that do this. Now, once you've created your landing page, you should also create a Success Page. Now, a Success Page is something that will show up either after the person has subscribed or it's kind of redirected them automatically to a separate page. When using your Facebook Ads to grow your list, it's best to use a separate Success Page, also known as a thank you page, so then you can track the number of leads more accurately using your Facebook Pixel. The Success Page should show the user that they have successfully subscribed. It should explain the next steps so they know what to expect, such as how they can access their lead magnet, claim the offer, or any other relevant instructions. Another pro tip for you adding another Call to Action or Upsell on your Success Page will give your subscribers the next step towards buying from you. So the sooner you can get a new subscriber to spend money with you, the better. The Success Page is a good place to try and get that first sale. I would usually put in a really, really tiny offer under $10 or £10 that will entice them to make a sale from you straight away. Now, so you can really accurately track your Facebook ad campaign, you're going to need to install the Pixel on both the sign up and the Success pages with the same Pixel ID on both pages and the View Content event code to the sign up page. I will speak about that a little more in another session. Then you need to add your lead event code to the Success page. I recommend adding it to the Success Page rather than the Call to Action button. This is going to ensure that it doesn't track if someone clicks the button without submitting their details. Okay, all of this is going to ensure that your data is more accurate within Facebook Ads Manager. Now, the first email that you're going to send your new subscriber is going to be the lead magnet, isn't it? Depending on the system you're using, you may wish to automatically resend the lead magnet or offer if the first email isn't opened. If you have several lead magnets or offers, you could elect to include very little other information in this first email. But by doing so, you can put all of your new subscribers into the same nurture sequence rather than a separate one. For each lead magnet, a nurture campaign usually has another three to four emails, and this will all have the aim of building that relationship with your new subscribers and readers. Again, each email needs to be opened in a loop, so the next email will also bring that person closer to the next step in their buyers journey. Right now you've got your email set up, it's now time to with Trepidation, I'm sure step into Facebook Ads Manager. You are going to create that Facebook ad campaign that's going to bring people in to your signup page. Right now, when it comes to generating leads, Facebook has two campaign options a conversions campaign or a lead generation campaign. If you don't have a website and you don't want to invest in a landing page builder, you can choose the lead generation objective. It's also probably the easiest and most cost effective way of creating leads directly into Facebook because it offers its own built in form builder. However, if you prefer, you can use a conversion campaign. This is going to be a little more expensive, in fact, sometimes quite a lot more expensive depending on the time of year. But then you can build in your purpose built landing page and your success page with the Facebook Pixel installed on both that I spoke to you about before. Now I'm going to quickly touch on audiences. When you're an ad manager, you can instruct Facebook to display your ads to different sorts of people by creating an audience. So if you're aiming for brand new subscribers from a cold audience, you can use a lookalike audience of the people that already follow you on Instagram or Facebook, for instance. Or you can create a brand new audience using interests or demographics. It's totally up to you. You could in fact send the ads out to a warm audience. So a warm audience would be people that have already engaged with you on Facebook or Instagram. And you can do that by creating a custom audience. And there'll be various options that you can choose from, including people that have engaged with your Instagram shop, for instance. Here's another pro tip for you. When you're asking for people's email addresses, also ask for their Instagram handle. It's a really, really nice way of going in and giving them a little private message in DMs to say, thank you so much for signing up. If there's anything that I need to help you with, please let me know. It's just a nice little touch, isn't it? Now, once you've created your ad and you've set up your campaign, when you're tracking your campaign data, one of the most important things to look at is the click through rate. This will show up as CTR in Facebook Ads manager. A tip on this a well performing ad will show a CTR of 1% for a cold audience and 2% for a warm audience. A low click through rate can signal that your ads aren't stopping people from scrolling, or your copy isn't compelling enough to cause the action of a click. So if your stats are lower, than you expected. You should maybe test something stronger with like, a really, really strong call to action. So should we round this up? Yeah, I think that meta ads can be a really effective way to grow your email list, provided you offer something of value to your target audience. Make sure your meta ads and your landing page have a really, really strong call to action to persuade the visitor to exchange their email address for your lead magnet or offer email addresses are golden going into 2023. And if you can nurture those lovely people in your email list, you are sure to make a cracking start on the profits in your biz next year. I really, really hope this helped. If you have any questions, please feel free to come into my DMs. I've really only touched on Facebook Ad Manager because it's super, super difficult to talk about it in a podcast without showing you any interest at all that you have in running ads. Or if you need any advice at all, please feel free to either email me or pop into DMs and I'd be really happy to help you. Here's to a super, super successful 2023. Next week I'm back in interview mode and I'm going to be interviewing the wonderful Jillian But. Michael, she is a Master certified transformational coach, an energy management practitioner, and a Shopper Center certified meditation teacher. It's a wonderful discussion. We talk about her new book, Coming Home. And yes, I really, really hope to see you next week for another episode of that One Thing. See you again soon, my darlings. Bye now.

[18:55] Speaker B: Thank you so much for listening to that one thing. And please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps to get my little podcast into the universe and I'll be forever grateful.