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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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Loyalty-Driven Gamification: Fostering Customer Engagement and Retention

Floating credit cards of three different tiers with coins of money falling around

We’ve explained before how important customer loyalty is for any business, and a returning clientele’s support is even more important for smaller businesses. Those dedicated customers help a business thrive and grow as they recommend your products or services to their friends and family. This is why loyalty programs are a key strategy for customer retention, especially in e-commerce. However, any loyalty program needs to be well designed to effectively foster customer engagement. One of the strongest methods is gamification. We’ll explain what gamification is and how you can start to gamify your loyalty program below.

What does gamification mean?

Gamification or gamifying means applying game-design elements to non-game contexts. This can refer to systems like point scoring, rankings, leaderboards, badges, competition, and other game elements. Along with loyalty programs, gamification like this has been applied widely in multiple industries and settings. Workplaces have used gamification for increased productivity. Schools and educational software have used gamification to encourage learning. Many athletic apps even use gamification to motivate physical exercise. Furthermore, government organizations and researchers have considered gamification to improve voter turnout or reduce the occurrence of traffic violations.

Why is gamification effective?

The wide use of gamification alone should suggest its effectiveness. This is because game-design elements have been shown to create more retention and interaction with a system. Gamification plays on innate desires for being rewarded, often with visual and audio indicators that add some fanfare to mark the victory. Some other game systems, such as collective goals or leaderboards, also build on human social tendencies of cooperation and competition. Altogether gamification is extremely motivating and for businesses that means fostering healthy and active customer engagement and dedication.

Gamified Loyalty Programs for Small Businesses

Many loyalty programs already use some principles of gamification. The most widely used is point collection systems, where customers gain points for all or certain transactions. These points can then be used to redeem discounts or other bonuses. This can be immediately rewarding, but there are other ways to design a strong loyalty program and drive more engagement and retention through gamification.

Ways to Create a Strong Gamified Loyalty Program

  • Simple is Effective: Sometimes a complex game can be satisfying to learn, but the most popular games are those that are easy to pick up. It’s the same for gamifying a loyalty program. When it isn’t clear how a customer gains points, badges, titles, or other rewards, the loyalty program quickly becomes confusing, unrewarding, or even frustrating. Both potential earnings and rewards should be clear. For example, make it simple how each transaction will gain a certain number of points or contribute to earning a certain rank or title. This clear communication about what can be earned helps to further motivate customer engagement.
  • Titles, Ranks, and Other Recognition: Point systems are familiar territory for most loyalty programs. However, they can quickly lose appeal if they are the only system. An effective way to start rounding out a gamified loyalty program is other rewards and recognition, such as titles or badges featured on customer profiles that are earned for certain customer engagement. These could be tied to points. For example, earning a certain amount unlocks a VIP title that offers better discounts, things like free shipping and more point collecting opportunities. However, loyalty is created and can be gamified through other engagements, which leads us to our next point.
  • Moving Gamifying Beyond Gamifying Transactions: There’s more to customer engagement and loyalty than just repeating business. Gamification is a great way to leverage and encourage true loyalty. For example, titles or badges could be given for repeated business over years. You could also offer exclusive experiences or event attendance. You can reward those who follow your social channels, where you could also then offer opportunities to get more points or create community goals. Points, discounts, and titles can also be given for referrals or recommendations, motivating customers to help your business grow.
  • Audio and Visual Recognition: The key here is recognition. Along with clear systems, the recognition of titles, and the practical rewards of discounts, a key part of gamification is visual and audio systems that reflect progress and success. It might seem silly, but seeing a bar fill shows progress. Some fanfare with animations of spark and/or confetti and a celebratory tune for earning a title or new rank provide the audio and visual feedback that motivates further engagement.

Start Gamifying Your Loyalty

With how effective gamification is, you’ll likely want to start gamifying your business loyalty program or start building one. Thankfully, this doesn’t have to be done from the start. Many loyalty program platforms help you create a loyalty program that suits your business and customers, such as smile.io. If you’re ready to start encouraging and fostering more customer engagement and retention, contact our web experts at Rosewood Marketing. They will help you determine the right system while our marketing team helps devise the game-design elements for your business.

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AI and SEO: How Artificial Intelligence Impacts Search Rankings

Glowing AI Button on top of a slate brick background

AI is increasingly everywhere these days. Considering AI seems to be doing so many different things, the term AI has become a bit of a confusing catchall and buzzword. Nevertheless, you now find most apps and programs are now including and loudly featuring some kind of AI tool or functionality. You’ll also find AI write-ups from Google’s new search AI, Gemini, at the top of many searches. It shouldn’t be a surprise that AI is now having a significant role and impact on SEO. Since search rankings are critical for any small business to expand its discovery on these platforms, we explain some of the ways to consider how AI impacts SEO.

How AI Has Changed SEO

AI and learning algorithms have drastically changed how internet searches work over the past decade. You will want to consider these when creating web pages that are optimized for search engines.

Moving Beyond Keywords

Search engines like Google have been using learning algorithms (i.e. AI) to move beyond simple keyword searches. These algorithms help identify word associations and larger concepts to create semantic based searches. Semantic search considers phrases and the associations between specific words. More advanced semantic searches will also consider previous searches, location, and the user’s profile for a more complex meaning. These are the same kind of semantics we use to understand language and meaning. Google began using these semantic searches in 2015 with RankBrain. They grew in sophistication when they launched BERT, and last year they launched an even more advanced semantic model with the AI MUM.

Understanding Pages

Search engines like Google have also begun to use the same AI tools on the web pages they crawl. Rather than searching for certain words that indicate a topic, Google’s algorithms now try to more fully understand the information and/or content on pages. The information and meaning they gleam from the page is then used to rank the site according to the semantic meaning in a search. This is to try and provide more relevant results for searches rather than just targeting what most fits those individual keywords.

Together, this semantic shift means that small businesses need to move beyond considering individual keywords to target certain phrases and start considering more complex connections. For example, you could consider, what is the kind of information or resources people might be searching to want this page? Is there a certain question or need that the page or your website answers? What related phrases are people searching that you could connect to your business’ website?

AI’s Getting to Know Us

Another way search engines are using AI that has a direct impact on search engines is understanding users rather than individual pages and searches. Along with monitoring search semantics, Google’s AI tools monitor how and what users search to personalize their results. These AI profiles are designed to help predict and re-rank sites according to that user’s calculated interests. However, these AI profiles are also beneficial for smaller businesses as they allow them to consider target audiences and profiles for their SEO. With these in mind, businesses can start to tailor their webpage’s content and SEO to users in whose searches they would prefer to rank higher.

How Gemini is Changing Search

One of the most recent developments of AI in search engines is Google’s Gemini. MUM, and BERT before it, who were already trying to extract immediate answers or quick summaries from high-ranking search results. However, Gemini is a generative AI, which uses language model functionality to produce a written-up summary and answer. Rather than quoting from a single page, Gemini consults multiple high-ranking sites and tries to combine these for a single ultra response.

While Google does link to the source pages Gemini used, there are drawbacks for websites. Ultimately, this result is not designed to motivate users to visit the actual page. Google has given the answer and users are expected to be satisfied. However, Gemini is often wrong. Most generative AI tools still suffer for any specific topic and tend to provide inaccurate or false information. In turn, this means users may still be motivated to visit specific pages for more accurate information from a human.

The other important thing to consider is that Gemini results like these are still more tuned to general research searches like “where do salmon migrate.” Gemini cannot put together products or services. Instead, if searching for products or services with Gemini, it will direct users to local businesses. Users will still be visiting and browsing the specific pages of small businesses.

Keeping an Eye on AI and SEO

As we mentioned, Google and other search engines have already been using more advanced algorithms for nearly a decade. However, we also can’t deny that the recent surge of generative and other AI tools has led to a rapid shift in SEO with significant impacts on search rankings. Small businesses will need to keep monitoring this active landscape to ensure their websites continue to rank high. Of course, that’s also the benefit of a dedicated marketing team, like Rosewood Marketing. We continue to actively monitor how AI and SEO are actively changing. If you’re interested in revising your SEO strategy or ensuring a new website will rank high in this new AI frontier, be sure to contact us.

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