How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Email List

If you’ve been in the blogging/business world for awhile, then I know you’ve heard about the importance of building your email list. And if not, you’ve definitely been living under a rock. But I’ll fill you in.

An email list is an incredibly powerful tool to have as a business owner. These are people who are so interested in you, your information, and your products/services, that they have willingly given you their email address as well as permission to use it to contact them about your business. Do not underestimate the power that your email list gives you.

Obviously, I am all about using social media marketing to attract customers to your business, but email marketing is 40 times better at gaining customers than social media AND has an ROI of 4,300%. That is how you know it’s a powerful tool.

If you really need a few more reasons why email marketing is important for your business, you can read these posts here and here, but I think we’ve covered the bases.

If you’re about to go start your email list right after this post, have been struggling to really build yours up for the last couple of months, or just want more people because you can never have too large of a list, you might want to try list building with social media. Facebook and Twitter both have awesome lead generation ads and, although this gets more into social media advertising (paid) versus social media marketing (free and organic), they are really great tools to know how to use.

So we’re going to go through a step-by-step of how to create a lead generation ad using both Facebook and Twitter ads.

Facebook

You can access your Facebook Ads Manager by going to your Facebook Page and clicking Promote in the upper righthand corner and then clicking Go to Ads Manager. If you’re lazy, you can also get there by going to facebook.com/ads/manage/home.

You’ll then come to your ads dashboard. To create a new ad, click the green Create Ad button in the upper righthand corner.

Facebook has a ton of different ad options, but the one we’re going to use today is the Increase conversions on your website objective.

Now you have to create a conversion pixel. Click Create a Pixel, give it a name, then click Create Pixel. You have the option to have Facebook email you your pixel code or install it immediately. You only get one pixel per ad account, so name it after your business (i.e., I named mine Chloe Social Pixel) and install it on the page that you want to track. If you have WordPress, you can install it on the page by scrolling down on the page/post editor and pasting the code in the Scripts box. Facebook will let you know if your conversion pixel was installed correctly and is running.

Paste the URL that you want your ad to link to (ideally the landing page for your email sign-up freebie) where it says Enter URL to promote and then you’re ready to click Continue!

Now you get to set up your ad! (Follow along with the extra long image of the ad set-up page below.)

Number one is to create your audience. I have a targeted audience that I use each time (with a few tweaks depending on the type of ad/post) called SMM. Create your targeted audience by selected the age, gender, and location/language of your target demographic, as well as their interests (i.e., social media marketing, business) and behaviors (i.e., Facebook Page admins, small business owners). You can also select different connections, like friends of people who like your Page, or target only people who already like your Page.

Then you choose how much you want to spend. You can spend as little as $5 a day on your ad and choose for it to last as long or as little as you’d like…even just one 24 hour period, so that you’re spending only $5 to get your ad shown to thousands of Facebook users.

For this type of ad, keep the optimization on Website Conversions. (When I promote a blog post, I prefer to change this to Clicks…there are a few different options.)

(Read the rest of the how-to below this image.)

Step three is to create your ad and perfect your visuals. Write your ad copy, select an image/video, and a call-to-action button. One of my favorite features of Facebook advertising is that you have complete access to Shutterstock’s library for your ad images. Can I get a hell yeah?!

If you’re using your freebie’s landing page as your ad URL, you’re going to want to use the call-to-action Download. Also, you have the option to use one image or create a carousel of multiple images. There are a few things that the carousel works really well for…this really just needs the one image though.

Your Headline is automatically going to cut it to 25 characters because those 25 are guaranteed to show on all platforms. You can increase the length if you want, but it will give you a warning.

The ad Text is like the “status” part of the post. It guarantees that 90 characters will be shown, but you can increase the length like a normal Facebook post. People just may have to click “Read More” in order to see the rest. Short and sweet is good, but I’ve seen great ads where people give a good bit more detail about what they’re promoting.

Once you’ve previewed your ad in the righthand column and it looks perfect, click Place Order. Your ad will go into review and will notify you if/when it has been approved.

For an example of what your ad will look like, here was the Facebook ad for my lead generation
test:

Twitter

To get started with Twitter ads, you first need to go to ads.twitter.com and sign up for an ad account. You’ll be taken to your Twitter ads dashboard. To start your new lead generation campaign, click Create new campaign and then select Leads on Twitter.

The cool thing about the Leads on Twitter campaign is that people can give you their email address without leaving Twitter. The sign-up box to input their email is a part of your card. You can use Website clicks or conversions to track conversions on your actual website, but using the leads card makes it incredibly easy for Twitter users to sign up for your email list and download your freebie.

Now you get to set up your campaign. Follow along with the super long image below.

First, give your campaign a name and choose to have your ad run continuously or give your ad a start and end date. (Ranging from a 24 hour ad to whatever length you want.)

Step two is selecting your target demographic again. Similar to your Facebook ad, you can choose who can see your Twitter ad based on location, gender, language, and more.

The first thing you can target for is keywords. Choose keywords that pertain to your ad (i.e., social media, small business). When choosing keywords, you can decide whether you want your keyword to be a broad match or phrase match. This means that if you have a broad match on the keyword small business, that your ad will also show up for searches that also have the terms out of order or with other words in between. For some keywords, this might be just fine, but for the most specific targeting, I prefer to use phrase match.

Twitter also allows you to choose negative match keywords. This means that searches with those keywords are ineligible for matching and your ad will not show up. This could be useful for a business that is similar to another industry but not quite the same. For example, if your company does barge towing, you want to make sure that your ads do not show up for car towing searches.

The followers option is seriously genius. This allows you to target the followers of certain accounts. If your ad pertains to social media, you might want to target the followers of @buffer or @SMexaminer.

The interests targeting is similar to Facebook. You can browse available categories or type in your own.

Tailored audiences allows you to input your own data for targeting, i.e., your email list or visitors to your website.

TV targeting allows you to target viewers of certain TV shows–great for if you’re promoting a new show that is similar to another one already out there. For example, if you’re promoting a new crime show, you may want to target viewers of shows like Bones, NCIS, and Criminal Minds.

Behaviors is another targeting options also available on Facebook ads. (Can you see how Twitter targeting seriously trumps Facebook targeting right now?) For example, this is where you can target companies that are just a few years old or have been around for awhile or users with a particular political affiliation. There are a ton of different options to help you target only your most specific audience.

Event targeting allows you to target users that are attending or talking about certain events, large or small.

Choose which locations on Twitter that users can view your ads and also choose whether you want to limit your targeting by excluding certain audiences and behaviors.

(Read the rest of the how-to below this image.)

Step three is to set up your budget. This budgeting is slightly different than Facebook. Where Facebook will use your daily ad budget for any 24 hour period (whether it’s 11AM to 11AM or 3:30PM to 3:30PM), Twitter’s ad budget resets at midnight. This means that if you have an ad running for only 24 hours but from 2PM to 2PM, Twitter counts it as two days. Keep this in mind when setting your daily budget.

Click Show advanced options to change your bidding strategy (i.e., automatic bid, target bid, or maximum bid).

In step four, you finally get to create your ad! Type out your text, add an image (800x200px), then click Add call to action. This is where you get to set up your Twitter card.

Use the short description to explain exactly why people need your freebie and should download it. Similar to Facebook, you want to have Download as your call-to-action, but Twitter actually lets you type out your CTA rather than choose from a dropdown menu. This means you get to throw in a bit of your personality and type in “Download this shiz” or something fun like that.

Paste in the link to your privacy policy and landing page then click Save.

Give your Twitter card a name, preview your ad, and once it’s perfect, click Tweet (promoted-only), then Save campaign. It’ll take you to your campaign overview and you’ll click Launch campaign when you’re ready to go!

For an example of what a lead generation Twitter card looks like, here’s my own:

(This is the preview–the actual card includes a sign-up box for users to enter their email address and sign up directly from the card.)

There are many ways to grow your email list, but investing in some social media advertising is a great way to do it. Although many of us may prefer organic growth, a strong email list equals a strong ROI.

And if ya want to, you can sign up for my own email list and get a free copy of my ebook How to Create a Social Media Strategy below:

P.S. Everything You Need to Know About Facebook Analytics

P.P.S. Everything You Need to Know About Twitter Analytics