Marketing

How to Grow Your Email List Using Facebook

June 12, 2018

Facebook is one of the most undervalued platforms for B2B marketing. It gets overlooked because when many people think about Facebook marketing, they tend to think about consumer products.

And although it’s true that Facebook is perfect for selling directly to consumers, it can also be used in more nuanced ways to target businesses and generate leads. At the end of the day, even when you’re selling to businesses, you’re still selling to individual people in that business. Within Facebook’s 2.2 billion monthly active users, chances are that many of those people are business owners or managers.

The difference is that unlike consumer products, B2B purchases don’t tend to happen after seeing one interesting video ad or promo code online in the evening. They happen during business hours after in-depth evaluation and multiple conversations. That’s why many companies still rely heavily on email marketing and more sophisticated sales pipelines.

But if you’re leaving Facebook completely out of the equation, you’re probably leaving a lot of money on the table. At my digital marketing agency, Single Grain, we use Facebook ads for lots of lead generation.

Here’s an example of a Facebook ad we ran to redirect target decision makers to our blog:

How to Grow Your Email List Using Facebook1

From there, we convert them to email subscribers or chatbot subscribers as we move them through a more comprehensive pipeline.

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Let’s talk about some of the ways that your business can also leverage Facebook.

How to Capture Emails on Facebook

Before we dive into the strategies, you should know the different ways that you can drive traffic to your email list.

The first is by adding opt-in CTAs right on your company’s Facebook page. You can add a squeeze page and present the user with a standard opt-in form. Tools like MailChimp make this easy.

How to Grow Your Email List Using Facebook3

Even simpler, you can create a custom CTA button on your Facebook page that directs visitors to a landing page that you already have on your website. That’s how OpenView does it:

How to Grow Your Email List Using Facebook4

Click on the “Sign Up” button and it’ll take you right to a sign-up page on the OpenView website:

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If you don’t have a large Facebook following, you can reach more prospects with paid Facebook lead ads. These let your prospects enter their information directly from the CTA on a Facebook ad. No redirects. Just a low-friction popup within Facebook:

How to Grow Your Email List Using Facebook6

If you don’t want to ask prospects to opt in after three lines of copy, you can also create ads that send them to your site. It could be a blog post, case study, testimonial video, or just a nicer landing page—anything you think would provide enough value to entice someone to seek more information.

Facebook Lead Capture Strategies

The quickest way to start seeing results from Facebook marketing is to combine it with other existing digital marketing efforts.

Content Marketing

Facebook marketing pairs excellently with content marketing. You can use Facebook ads and promoted posts to distribute the blog posts and media that your company produces. And you can join niche Facebook communities to share it in. Doing these things will drive traffic to your site where you can convert the visitor into a lead; it also helps increase your following on social media where you can include the more direct CTAs discussed before.

Webinars

Webinars are another strong partner for Facebook. You can promote these online seminars to your followers and market them with advertisements. In fact, you should create a Facebook event to help establish social proof so that people can see all the others attending the event.

You could host the webinar live on Facebook. In some cases, Facebook will notify your active followers of live events with push notifications in order to increase attendance. But keep in mind that this won’t collect email registration, so you might want to host it off-site.

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Video Content

Video is another important way to generate leads on Facebook, either organically (if you have a following) or with paid ads (to attract a new audience).

Over 500 million people are watching videos on Facebook every day and the growth of sponsored or branded content has been massive: from Q2 of 2016 to Q2 of 2017, views of sponsored video content increased by 258%!

You should start by having your top-performing blog posts, SlideShare decks, and other marketing material converted into video format. If you have no one in-house to take on the project, there are tons of freelancers who can take existing content and turn it into video.

Direct Value Ads

You can also try direct value ads. The key here is to solve a problem that your audience has, so think about the pain points that individuals face. Don’t just think about increasing the bottom line, but also how you can make a manager’s life easier or more effective.

If you’re a consulting company, for example, record one of your consultants giving a solution to a common question you get from clients. Or walk a sales manager through organizing a pipeline that helps their team be more effective. And then encourage viewers to subscribe to your email list for more resources and free videos.

Targeting

 The other thing that makes Facebook such a great tool for B2B professionals is the targeting features. Even with the recent efforts to tighten up the amount of personal information you can target, Facebook still offers the best targeting data in the industry.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your site has a Facebook pixel installed on every page. This will allow you to send retargeting ads to anyone who visits your site in order to reengage them and build more brand rapport.

If your top priority is to get more email subscribers, you can even create an exclusion list for existing subscribers. You just need to upload their email addresses as a custom audience and exclude that audience from any lead generation ad campaigns.

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This means that you won’t waste any ad spend on people who have already converted to email leads.

Once you have that email list uploaded, you can also use it to create a lookalike audience. Facebook will automatically look at all the data for your existing subscribers and start showing your ad to users with a similar profile. Targeting on autopilot!

If you don’t have a huge list or you want to reach a new audience, you still have all the other targeting information on Facebook. You can target them based on job, geography and tons of other criteria. If you employ account-based marketing strategies, this can be huge for getting buy-in from multiple people inside the same large organization.

Conclusion

It’s easy to understand why B2B companies overlook Facebook. As a standalone channel, it’s not the most effective for longer sales pipelines. But as a lead generation tool, it can really shine.

Just to recap, here are my top tips for using Facebook to grow your email list.

Capture leads using:

  1. Squeeze Pages
  2. Custom CTAs pointing at your on-site landing page
  3. Facebook Lead Ads

Use these strategies:

  1. Drive traffic to your existing content marketing
  2. Host webinars and free training sessions
  3. Do Facebook live videos
  4. Add video content to your ad campaigns

Use these advanced targeting tools:

  1. Install a Facebook pixel for retargeting ads
  2. Use an exclusion list to target only non-subscribers
  3. Use lookalike audiences to expand your audience efficiently
  4. Target people using standard Facebook data, including employment, industry, job title, and location

With these strategies, you’ll be able to generate more leads from the largest social network out there and feed them into your email funnel. If you need help turning those leads into customers, check out my previous post about converting B2B email leads!

CEO

Eric Siu is the CEO of digital marketing agency <a href="https://www.singlegrain.com/">Single Grain</a>, which has helped venture-backed startups and Fortune 500 companies grow their revenues. He's also the founder of two marketing podcasts, Growth Everywhere and Marketing School.