Course Creators and Coaches: How to usse Facebook Ads to rapidly grow your email list

When I started this blog, I primarily grew my audience and email list through organic strategies like SEO and Pinterest.

After I learned about Facebook Ads and how course creators and coaches could benefit from them, I decided to give FB/IG ads a try.

Facebook is extremely good at lead generation because of its unparalleled audience network. You can very easily tap into a new audience that shares similar interests to your business and capture new leads at a low cost.

To generate leads with Facebook Ads, I ran conversion campaigns and targeted interest-based audiences.

The power of interest targeting lies in its ability to reach a large pool of new traffic that you can nurture into sales. This is how you can scale your audience size and your business.

My experience with lead generation campaigns has been profitable so far, and I thought to share what I did to help anyone who may be considering FB ads.

Results:

• No. of conversions (leads): 617
• Cost per lead: $1.26
• Total ad spend: $776.90
• Website purchases: 47
• Purchase value: $3,548.02
• ROAS: 457%

Real talk.

Initially, I was hesitant about running FB ads. There was a chance I would spend money and not make any returns.

But I’m glad I took a chance and experimented with it! In a month, I grew my email list by 617 new subscribers and some have ended up purchasing my digital courses.

My lead generation campaigns in November 2020 were remarkably profitable as leads from Facebook converted into sales. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

For every dollar I spent on Facebook, I made $4.50 in revenue.

Before we dive into campaign strategy, I do want to point out that I already had a proven list-building and sales strategy in place before investing in ads.

With Google Organic and Pinterest, I grew my email list to about 3,000 subscribers and knew which were my best-performing lead magnets and offers. Then, I used Facebook ads to amplify them.

The last thing you want is to experiment with building your email list, creating profitable offers, AND how to run successful Facebook ads at the same time.

Media Plan

• Objective: Conversions
• Daily budget: $20
• Audience targeting: cold audiences in marketing interests
• Target cost per lead: $1.50

I set my target cost per lead (CPL) at $1.50. This was how much I was willing to pay for a lead.

Though, I suppose this depends on how much a lead is worth to your business. If you’re running ads to drive leads to a high-ticket funnel, then your CPL could be much higher.

Now, let’s get into campaign setup and optimization strategies.

1. Set up a conversion campaign

I had 4 campaigns running at the same time for this lead generation campaign. Each campaign targeted different audience interests.

2. Campaign analysis

The biggest lesson I learned here was to let campaigns run their course before turning them off prematurely.

There were a few campaigns that I stopped prematurely, which I regretted in hindsight. Because they ended up converting into purchases later.

The 1st campaign converted much slower and had a very high CPL ($2.44). Again, I turned this off within a day and realized that was a bad decision. Leads that came from this campaign converted into my biggest course sales later. 

The 2nd campaign was converting at the lowest CPL but it was not driving much purchase conversions. The moment it started to make a loss, I switched it off. This turned out to be a good decision.

3. Audience targeting: Interests

There were plenty of options to select in the marketing interests space so I tested out 4 different audience interests. I created one campaign per audience.

This way, I could test out the performance of each interest and see which one resonated most with my lead magnet.

4. Opt-in form to capture leads

Lead generation is all about the lead capture process. So you need a compelling opt-in form, a reliable email marketing service to deliver your freebie, a welcome email series, and a sales sequence email.

The last step for a sales sequence email was key to the high ROAS from the campaign.

If you want to make a good profit from lead generation, you would need to nurture them down the path to purchase. As we were running a campaign for lead completions, Facebook will show our ad to people most likely to sign up.

So having a strong monetization strategy after you capture a new lead was key to getting ROAS.

So the first three steps: opt-in form, freebie delivery, and welcome email series were mandatory for a lead generation campaign. 

Don’t run ads until you have a solid email system in place. I use Convertkit to grow my email from zero to my first 1,000 subscribers and they continue to support and accelerate my blog’s growth.

You can set up everything from creating an opt-in form to embed on your website or an opt-in form landing page hosted by Convertkit, to freebie delivery and email sequences in Convertkit.

Facebook ads will help you amplify lead generation. Make sure your email marketing system does not fail you in your sales process.

5. Sales funnel that converts

Before using Facebook Ads, I recommend growing your email list with organic strategies first. SEO and Pinterest are great at generating a sizeable amount of traffic and leads for free.

Organic traffic will help you build an email system to capture leads and nurture them into purchases.

SEO

Work on SEO from the beginning because Google traffic takes time. Always get the fundamentals right such as Keyword Research and writing SEO-optimized content.

Optimize for SEO and drive leads from organic search. By ranking for the right keywords, you can drive a consistent stream of leads organically.

Pinterest

Pinterest is much easier than Google SEO. The key here is to create eye-catching pins for your opt-in landing pages to drive traffic and leads from Pinterest.

You can get traffic and leads from Pinterest faster by publishing new pins regularly.

6. Campaign optimization strategies and profitability

Lead generation campaigns can be quite scalable. You can try out different interest audiences to find the best-performing audience group.

For audiences that don’t convert or convert at a high CPA, stop the campaign.

For audiences that perform well, you can replicate the same campaign every month and increase the ad spend. 

Questions to guide campaign optimization:

• Which audience targeting groups drive the highest conversions (leads)?
• Which ones drive the lowest cost per lead?
• Which campaigns drive the most purchase conversions (sales)?
• Which campaigns drive the highest ROAS?

The mission here is to find the best-performing interest audiences and continue running ads to them. Identify poor-performing interest audiences and stop the campaign.

Let your campaigns run for at least a week

The biggest lesson I’ve learned during this campaign is to let my ads run for at least 1 week before making any changes.

Fear and anxiety have gotten the best of me during this launch. I turned off campaigns too quickly when I saw a high cost per conversion in the beginning.

I can’t help but wonder what could have been had the campaigns I turned off prematurely continued running.

Lower ROAS due to high ad spend?

Higher ROAS, higher ad spend?

How to make money from lead generation campaigns

One drawback of a lead generation campaign is its monetization potential. Since we were not optimizing for sales, don’t expect a high ROAS.

To break even from lead generation campaigns, I had a low-cost tripwire to make a quick ROAS.

Then, to make a profit from the campaign, a sales funnel and email nurturing sequences were necessary.