How To Use Facebook & Twitter PPC To Build Your Email List

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Building your email list is a common goal of virtually all websites, whether an ecommerce store, an industry blog or a brick and mortar store. Email consistently provides one of the highest ROI channels for online marketing, contributing an average of 23% of sales, but only getting 15% of the marketing budget.

Email contributes 23% of sales but only gets 15% marketing budget

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Add in the emergence of AdWords Customer Match, Facebook Custom Audiences & Twitter Tailored Audiences (all based on email) and your email list becomes an increasingly valuable tool. However, if you’ve already using strategies like lightboxes, pop-ups and prominent CTAs to drive email signups, how can you accelerate list growth? PPC has you covered.

Twitter Lead Gen Cards

Lead gen cards aren’t new. They were announced in May of 2013, so they’re already a toddler. However, I am surprised at how underutilized they are by many advertisers I work with. In a nutshell, you attach a card to your tweet and it adds an image, an offer and a CTA button. Here’s one I caught in my feed today:

When I click on the “Enter Now” button I get a quick confirmation screen and then my name, email (the one associated with your Twitter account) and Twitter handle are all submitted directly to the advertiser. And don’t think you’ve got to go pull your leads from Twitter. You just integrate them directly with your CRM like so:

So how well do they work? Here are the results for 2 campaigns during Q4 of 2015:

As you can see, both converted right around $8.50/email which was below the target cost/email of $10 for this specific client. My recommendation? Get testing these if you haven’t already.

Facebook Lead Ads

These are quite a bit newer, having been announced in June of 2015 and rolling out to everyone in October. Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture a user’s information without the need for them to fill out a form. Here is an illustration of the process:

As you can see, the ad unit has the offer, an image and a CTA (eerily similar to Twitter, I know, almost like they emulated them) that leads to a brief confirmation dialogue (users CAN change the information being submitted if they want) and then they’re done!

Here are some results from a client we work with (keep in mind they were asking for more information that just an email) :

Regular Mobile Ads:

835 leads, 1.35% conversion rate, $57 CPA

Facebook Lead Ads:

1,082 leads, 5.29% conversion rate, $35 CPA

So how do you go about creating these awesome ad units? It’s the same flow as your regular Facebook ads and looks like this:

These are the components:

Text – you get to add a couple lines of text here. This shows on desktop and mobile newsfeed placements, but not right side ads
Headline – keep it short
News Feed Link Description – put some benefits in here, but you don’t have a lot of space
Display URL
Image or Video/Slideshow – test these options out because your audience might get distracted by a video or they might love it
Call to Action – I’ve highlighted the options you have to choose from. While there is only 6 now, I’m hopeful Facebook will add more or give advertisers the ability to control the text

They aren’t hard to set up and they work great. Users don’t have the hassle of typing out their email address, it automatically populates with the email they have associated with their Facebook account.

Summary

In summary, both Twitter Lead Gen Cards and Facebook Lead Ads give you the option of building your email list without requiring a user to leave the social network they’re on or manually type out their email address. This makes it easier for them and increases conversion rates.