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Meta Ads for Lead Generation: Building a High-Quality Email List

A woman working on her laptop doing lead generation

Social media, and particularly the omnipresence of Meta and its platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – are still some of the best places for small businesses to get the attention of potential clients and customers. This makes the platforms excellent for lead generation, especially for email newsletters. We’ll explain the why and how of leveraging Meta ads to start communicating directly with your audience through email.

Why Email?

Social media including Meta’s platforms are excellent ways to update and interact with your audience. Yet, email has stood fast as one of the best ways for businesses to communicate directly with their audience. It’s the channel where a business has the most control in their messaging and content, and they’re able to send it directly to the inbox of their subscribers. This can be a key difference where social media content might be missed in a follower’s feed. With this stable communication, email is effective at helping to retain and maintain returning customers or clients. This is why it’s important to grow your email following with a high-quality list.

Benefits of Meta Ads for Lead Generation

There are numerous reasons why Meta is effective for lead generation when building a high-quality email following. One is simply the scale of reach, over 3.3 billion people use Meta daily and over half the population of Canada actively uses Facebook and Instagram. Meta simply provides a staggering advertising network for lead generation. Furthermore, Meta also has built in advertising specifications for lead generation. Their tools and templates help you design ads specifically honed to growing a dedicated following on your website and email newsletters.

Using Meta Ads to Build a Quality Audience

When it comes to building an email audience, quality always beats quantity. A quality audience is engaged with your emails, regularly opening them and clicking on the contents in genuine interest. A disengaged audience doesn’t open emails and may even begin to negatively impact your sender reputation. This is another benefit of Meta ads for lead generation. Meta possesses a rich swath of data about its users such as location, age, and interests. Meta uses these to create profiles which your business can then target in its lead generation ads. This helps to attract the right potential audience to your email content, helping to create an email audience that is great in both quantity and quality.

How Lead Generation Works in Meta Ads

For brevity, we’ll need to assume you have some familiarity with Meta and Facebook ads. When creating Meta ads for email lead generation, you have two main methods for this: collecting the emails directly through the ad or redirecting users to a landing page on your website.

Collecting Emails through Meta

With its built-in lead generation functionality, Meta can have users directly subscribe to your emails with a simple “Subscribe” button on the ad. When users click this, it will verify they want to share their email and any other personal information the ad requests, such as their name. If they approve, they will then be added to your business’ email audience. For this functionality, you will need to set up the Meta integration on your email marketing platform.

This is extremely convenient and fast for users looking for a one-step sign-up. However, users are not necessarily willing to provide their information through such a quick email sign-up. The easy process may raise concerns of legitimacy or safety. On the other side, the simple sign-up could also make it easier for bots to subscribe to your newsletter, bloating and reducing the quality of your audience.

Directing Users to a Landing Page

This is where the strengths of directing users to a landing page start to shine. First, users are instead taken to your website to subscribe. Here they can provide the information they want rather than what is specified in the Meta ad. Second, the landing page will help establish your business’ credibility and legitimacy. The landing page can provide more information about your business, establish a value proposition, and will allow prospective subscribers to browse the website and learn more. Overall, while the landing page might not be as simple, it can be much more effective at conversion.

Motivating Subscriptions

Whether you choose to grow your email audience through Meta lead generation ads or converting users through a landing page (or a mixture of both), there will still need to be some incentive to generate these leads. As we mentioned, a landing page will help establish the value proposition of your business and email list. However, users will still need to be enticed to click the ad. Creating effective lead generation ads will mean following good advertising practices such as captivating images and intriguing copy.

However, there are some other methods for motivating email subscriptions:

  • One-time discount: A tried-and-true tactic. Entice new subscribers with a one-time discount on their next purchase.
  • A Loyalty Program: Loyalty programs are great for customer retention and repeat business. They can also further the value proposition of your email newsletters to help motivate subscriptions.
  • Sneak peeks and Exclusive Benefits: As a direct method of communication, your email newsletter can provide subscribers with product or service updates before you publish updates on other channels. It can also provide practical benefits such as early pre-orders or access to exclusive subscriber discounts.

Beyond Meta with Lead Generation

You should have a much better idea of how Meta’s ads are great for lead generation on Facebook and Instagram to help build a high-quality email audience list. Social media like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are incredibly potent tools for communication, but you should be leveraging that communication for conversion, directing users to other channels that you control. This can also work the other way. If you already have a substantial, high-quality email list, you can leverage your email to generate leads towards your social media channels.

If you’re looking to set up new Meta lead generation ads on Facebook or Instagram, be sure to contact Rosewood’s ads team. Our email marketing experts can also help you onboard this new audience and create captivating newsletters that keep your audience dedicated.

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The Dos and Don’ts of Email Marketing for Small Businesses in 2024

Woman creating email marketing for a small business while following our 2024 Dos and Don'ts

Email marketing is one of the most consistent and stable forms of digital marketing of the last 30 years. It’s especially effective for small businesses to reach and communicate with their customers and community. There can be plenty to consider and strategize for effective email marketing. Therefore, to start your 2024 off right, we’ve created a list of some essential DOs and DON’Ts of email marketing for small businesses.

DOs

  • Set Up DMARC Authentication: The Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is a protocol that authenticates those sending on a domain. This allows you to track and monitor everything sent on your domain, preventing the possibility of someone spoofing your domain and sending false emails on your business’s behalf. It’s best practice to set this up, but in 2024 it is also becoming a requirement from Google and Yahoo.
  • Verify Your Sending Domain: Effective email marketing requires using a third-party platform for creating campaigns, designing automations, managing audiences, and more. However, to send on your domain’s behalf, these services require you to authenticate your domain. Be sure to do this, so your emails come from your domain rather than the service’s proxy. Along with DMARC, this is also becoming a requirement of Google in 2024.
  • Link Everything: It might sound simple but don’t forget to link every image and button in your email. Along with opens, you want people to click on your email marketing to access your small business’ services and products. Users also now expect images and buttons to be linked and may become confused when a relevant image doesn’t go somewhere.
  • Keep Branding Consistent: Your email marketing, like any marketing, should be consistent with your brand. This ensures its messaging and appearance properly reflect your business. That consistency with your business, its other marketing, as well as keeping it consistent throughout all your email marketing will increase your audience’s trust in your emails.
  • Avoid Spam Complaints: A healthy sender reputation is critical for the success of your email marketing. It allows your emails to reach users’ inboxes where they will open and click them. This is why you need to avoid spam complaints, which will harm that sender reputation. Be sure you are only sending emails to subscribed recipients and follow Canadian regulations to avoid spam complaints.

DON’Ts

  • Forget About the Alt Text: Emails usually include at least a few images that are part of your messaging. It’s essential for your email marketing’s accessibility that you define the alt text for each of these images. This allows anyone who may have difficulty seeing these images can still comprehend your content.
  • Have Too Many Calls to Action: Don’t overburden your email with too many messages. Stay focused and limit the call to actions you want your recipients to perform, or else they may become overwhelmed. Research has shown that keeping an email down to at most two calls to action seriously improves click rates.
  • Write Wordy Subject Lines: Just like you shouldn’t overburden the contents of your email marketing, you also should keep your subject lines short and sweet. Remember, brevity is the soul of wit. The recommended maximum is 9 words, but an effective email marketing subject can be even shorter. Try to create something that is quickly captivating and piques a recipient’s interest. Let the email itself do the job of delivering the full message.
  • Forget the Unsubscribe Button: It’s legally required in Canada to include an option for your audience members to withdraw their consent to receive messages. The new requirements by Google in 2024 will also require this unsubscribe to be only one step and easy to see within your email itself. Plus, making this easy will reduce receiving spam complaints that will harm your small business’ sender reputation.
  • Send Without Testing Your Email: After you have diligently designed and written out that perfect email campaign, don’t just schedule and send it out to the world without first testing it yourself. Every email platform provides testing tools to send the email to a single account. This allows you to make sure everything is linked, is linked correctly and displays properly. Be sure to test it with a few different email service providers. Even certain versions of some providers are infamous for not displaying emails correctly. Also, make sure to test the device on desktop and mobile devices since assets may appear differently on each kind of device.

Mastering the Power of Email Marketing

Email marketing continues to be a powerful tool for any small business’ digital marketing. It’s a powerful channel for effectively and directly communicating with your audience. These email marketing dos and don’ts will help you start to master its techniques. If you’re looking for more advice to improve your email marketing for 2024, or are hoping to start email marketing, contact our marketing services team at Rosewood.

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