Want to grow your email program with targeted opt-in emails but you don’t want to overspend? This is how we do it!
Facebook’s email opt-in forms are an underused advertising feature that has performed with astonishing results for us lately. For one client in particular we have made a massive shift of ad budget away from Google Ads and towards Facebook.
What you need to do: Create a lookalike audience on Facebook from your customer list and create an email opt-in form on Facebook. Advertise the opt-in form to this lookalike audience and then allow Facebook’s machine learning to do it’s work.
The results?
We began Facebook email acquisition on Facebook for this client 1 year ago and the cost per email was between $3.38 and $4.02 per email for the first series of campaigns.
We experimented with different combinations of ads and audiences for this client and now can report the following:
- Most recently, our ongoing campaign has averaged as low as $.49/email over a 7 day period and is reliably below $.60-$.70/email right now.
- The average for the last 30 days is exactly $.55!
How can you replicate this?
1) Isolate a Customer List
You will want at least a few hundred people in the list. We have used lists of 450 or more people with great success. You should balance size with quality. If you can increase quality by reducing the size wisely, do this, as long as the size is still sufficient.
2) Upload to Facebook and Create a Lookalike Audience
How to upload and create the lookalike audience:
- Navigate to the audience manager in your Facebook business portal.
- Select Create Audience -> Lookalike Audience.
- When the next window opens to create the lookalike audience, select Create New Source -> Custom Audience -> Customer List.
- Next, you will be able to see what the proper spreadsheet formatting for uploads looks like if needed.
- Click Next, and you will be able to enter customer values here if needed (not required).
- On the next screen you will have the option to upload your list.
3) Create Facebook Email Opt-In Form
Try to keep it simple for users and make it clear what they are signing up for and why. This form will not be the first thing that users see. You will later create an ad that promotes this form and this is wise to keep in mind.
How to create the email opt-in form? While managing your page, use the left menu to find the publishing tools. Get yourself into the publishing tools interface and from here you can find the forms section in the lower left of the publishing tools menu. Visit the forms library and create a new form.
4) Create a Campaign with a Dynamic Ad to Promote Your Form
This is where you will create the initial ad that promotes the Facebook form and this is where you tell Facebook to target your lookalike audience.
Be sure to use a dynamic ad so that Facebook can optimize on a higher level using different images.
You don’t need to fill the dynamic ad to the maximum capacity with image options and we believe it is likely best NOT to do this. Just use 5-6 images to begin with.
Once your campaign has gone through the initial machine learning phase you can add in more images for the campaign to test. We like this strategy because it can help combat ad fatigue in addition to other possible implications regarding the optimization process.
5) Let the Artificial Intelligence Work and Don’t Touch Anything
The first 1-2 days might show you some results that are far less than optimal. The costs will usually get reduced greatly in the first few days if this is the case. Allow the AI to learn, experiment, and gather data.
Anytime that you make changes to a campaign, the AI will need to learn something new and this can be disruptive. You need to set it and forget it!
6) Trim Budget Down
Once your costs have settled down and Facebook has gathered enough data (roughly 1 week and/or 50 conversion events) try turning your daily budget down by 10% to 20%. We have seen unproportional large increases in email acquired per dollar and we have found that in at least one case, this resulted in lower ad spend and a higher total number of emails acquired. This is what we call finding the sweet spot.
Why does this work? Facebook has to show your ad to X amount of people per day in order to use your daily budget. The machine learning figures out how to do this most efficiently and who to show the ad to. When the budget is trimmed, it can now target an even smaller group of people which can often mean that they will be even more likely to convert for you.
Once you have given Facebook a sufficient budget to learn about your audience, you can exploit this in order to lower costs even further.
DO NOT: Run multiple campaigns at the same time targeting the same audience or similar. Our understanding is that nothing good can come from these campaigns stepping on each other and we have seen good results when eliminating similar campaigns in the past.
CALL US: Facebook is changing, the ad world is changing, and we are pushing the limits of what we can achieve for our clients everywhere including on Facebook. We welcome you to take this information, start your own campaigns, and get your own email program running in high gear. For some business owners it makes more sense to have our agency set up your campaigns and get everything running optimally so please call us if that’s the case!
