
03: Everything You Need to Build Your Email List Faster With Facebook Ads
10 December 2019 | By Salome Schillack
This is episode number three of The Shine Show. And in today's show we're going to look at the list builders complete checklist for setting up Facebook and Instagram ads faster, which is a checklist I created to help list builders get started with their Facebook and Instagram ads by knowing what all the parts or the pieces or the components are that goes into building a successful campaign.
It's kind of like having a list of ingredients before you start baking a cake or having a list of all the pieces that are included in your Lego project before you start building your Lego thing. It's much easier, faster, and more time efficient if you know exactly what all the parts are that you need to get ready before you go into the ads manager and get started.
And if you're a seasoned entrepreneur and you have an agency who runs your ads, today's episode is for you too, because you're going to learn how you can better support that agency or ads manager to give them the parts they need to help you succeed. So if that sounds like something you want to do, then stay tuned.
You took a huge leap forward in your journey to create a successful online business when you decided to get serious with your list building efforts and now it's time to put those efforts on autopilot and get started with Facebook and Instagram ads to help you build your email list faster so that when it comes time for you to launch your online course, you have a bigger warm crowd who are ready to buy from you because you've been priming them and you've been sending them weekly content and there's just a bigger pool you're in front of.
More people, but getting started with Facebook and Instagram ads can be daunting. I hear so many people say all that money and I just don't know how I'm going to get a return on that money. And I want to say if you haven't yet sold your course, that is a normal feeling to have because you are pouring money into something that hasn't been proven yet so, so if that's how you feel, just know that it is normal.
But if you get started with list building from the get go, you're going to build momentum so much faster in your business. It's going to keep you motivated to keep building that course, creating that course and getting it out into the market quicker. And if you are a seasoned entrepreneur who may be, have launched many, many online courses and you are not building your email is 12 months of the year [inaudible] I know who you are, then you should listen up too because this episode is for you and it's going to help you better understand what all the pieces are that goes into building a successful list building campaign so that you can support your ads manager or the agency that runs your ads for you and ensure that you know whether or not they're doing a good job in you building your email list and to help you get started with this, I created a guide for today's show called the list builders complete checklist for setting up Facebook and Instagram ads and we are going to talk through that guy to die on the episode and you can download that guide by going to the shine show.com forward slash zero zero three if you go there and you download the guide and you come back and you listen, you'll be able to go through it with me.
But if you don't have the guide in front of you right now and you just want to keep listening, maybe you're jogging on the treadmill or maybe you're driving in the car, then that's okay because you can come back and downloaded lighter and go through it again. The checklist will provide you with the necessary pieces that you need to start building your email list.
Okay, so let's get started. The very first thing that you're going to need before you start building your ads, our landing pages, you're going to need a standalone page that explains to people in very simple language what they're opting in for and most importantly, why they're opting in for it. You want to make sure that your landing page has a massive Bayner for driven headline. This is one of the mistakes I see most often is we want to describe what's in the lead magnet we're giving away, but people don't care about what's in it.
They care about what's in it for them. So make sure that you have an attention grabbing headline that's going to get them to go, Oh, I have to have that, and you can create landing pages using tools like lead pages. You can create your landing pages in WordPress. You can create landing pages in Kajabi or in click funnels. There are so many different ways, even the email service providers like MailChimp, ConvertKit and active campaign or moving more and more now towards giving you the capability of creating pages. I like using lead pages. I've just recently switched from lead pages to only using WordPress and I'm still getting used to that a little bit, but you are going to need some kind of a landing page builder, so look around, see which one works best for you and find the one that works for your budget.
Your landing page is going to link to what we call a lead box or a form. It is just the little pop up that comes up where people get to enter their email address and their name and then once they hit submit on that it goes to a thank you page and that thank you page is in Facebook ads terms. The thing that triggers for Facebook, it triggers for Facebook that there has been a conversion, so as soon as somebody hits the thank you page, then Facebook will know that there's been a conversion.
If you have the pixel set up and we're going to talk about the pixels, they will know that there has been a conversion. So first things you need, you need landing page software and that landing page software needs to link to some form of a email service provider that is going to capture those email addresses, be able to tag them and be able to send out automations.
I use active campaign in my business. Infusion soft is one that is more robust, but also the learning curve is huge to get to know how to use it. Another one that's quite robust is Ontraport, but these days the most popular ones I would say is ConvertKit. For people who are just starting out, you can even use, I think Kajabi now does that click funnels does that.
There are so many different emails, service providers. I encourage you to look around and find one that works for you. When I started my business, I started with MailChimp and I started with the free version of MailChimp and I think MailChimp is just perfect for people who are just starting out. But right now we are absolutely loving active campaign.
The second big piece of Facebook ads, once you have your pages in place is your pixels. So to explain pixels to you in the simplest terms, you should think of pixels as the, it's a little, it's, it's a little bit like fairy dust.
So just stay with me here. My kids love glitter and wherever my kids have gone in the house after they've played with the glitter, it's like a little path that they leave with glitter all over the house. And I can see they've sat on the couch cause there's glitter on the couch. I can see they've made a sandwich cause there's glitter in the kitchen and I can see they went to the swimming pool because all the way out to the swimming pool I see glitter. And sometimes I even see glitter in this swimming pool. So think of the pixels as that glitter, that fairy dust. And it is just a little piece of like fairy dust that gets sprinkled on your customer's head or on the person who waned into your lead magnet or clicked on your page, his head. And now it kind of follows them around a little bit and it gets an understanding.
It learns what they're doing and where they're doing it and what the actions are that they're taking it. And if you think this is creepy, maybe it is a little bit, but there's two sides to this coin is the one side is as consumers we love being presented with content that we love and so by having pixels track us around on the interwebs, the algorithms on Facebook and Google and everywhere else is able to give us more of the things that we're already interested in and that we really like.
The other side of it is it's creepy that something can follow you around and there are lots of things that you can do to make sure things don't follow you around too much, but that's not what this episode is about. The important thing with the pixels is you need to have your base pixel installed in your landing pages.
Facebook has extensive training on how to do that. You can Google how to do that. You can find videos on YouTube. There's so many resources for you to learn how to add your base pixel to your landing pages, and then what we like to do is to also add a lead tracking pixel to the thank you page. It's just a tiny little snippet of code that you just copy and paste into the thank you page and that's just going to help you track your conversions in a little bit more better way in a slightly more advanced way than just relying on creating custom conversions with your using your URLs.
That which leads me to custom conversions, which is the third thing you're going to need, so a custom conversion. The best way to describe what a custom conversion is is a custom conversion is the use of the pixels and the corresponding URLs of the pages that indicate the conversion, so I know that was a mouthful.
What I mean is you have a thank you page that thank you page has a URL, a unique URL and it has a Facebook pixel on it. When I want to create a custom conversion, what I'm going to do is I'm going to say to Facebook, Facebook, any time somebody lands on the page that is called shine and succeed.com forward slash list builders checklist. Thank you.
That is an indication that they have converted to a lead and because I have the pixel on there, they can be tracked. So just, I just want to repeat this again because I understand that this is quite can be quite an abstract concept. You're using the pixel that are on the pages and you're using the URL of the page that they land on. Once they've taken the action you want them to take, so they have converted to a lead, they've given you their email address.
Now they've landed on the thank you page and now you are calling them a conversion, but Facebook doesn't know that unless you tell Facebook that. So you set up a custom conversion using the URL of the thank you page and that is going to indicate to Facebook that there has been a conversion. There's a lot of training on how to set up custom conversions.
I'm not going to go into how to do this, but this is definitely one of the most important pieces you want to get right before you start setting up your ads, a setup, your custom conversion. Now, the one thing I get asked about so often is audiences. And that is the next thing we're going to look at. I want you to spend some time here and really think through who your target audience is and what the things are that they are interested in.
And in the past, I would say in the past we used to say get as specific as you can with your targeting. And that's not true today anymore to die. The algorithm is so good at finding people. For us, we actually want to try to not be very specific because if we are too specific, we narrow the audience down so much that the algorithm kind of struggles to find the right people and it struggles to give us that conversion, the repeated conversion that we're looking for.
Sometimes it's better to just keep it kind of big, keep it kind of broad but still make sure that you're matching interests to things that your audience will actually be interested in. So the first things you need to think about or things like their age, their gender and their location. And I recently saw somebody like literally take in the U S they just took the major cities and ended up narrowing down their audience so much that they couldn't find them.
And I've just said to them, why don't you just make it open as the U S the entire us? Huge. Use their age to narrow them down and then use some interests that they will be interested in and see if that helps. And it did help. It made a huge difference.
So I want you to think about wide open, big open interests. So a couple of ones that we've seen really good success with lately in the online marketing spice in the coaching space, in the business coaching space, anybody who sells personal development is targeting Oprah. That's been so successful because as soon as you put Oprah and the Oprah show and O magazine and those sorts of things in, you've got an audience of millions of people and because they're broadly interested in personal development, which is something most people who are into online marketing and into online promoting or into or if they're selling personal development courses or even the other one is Tony Robbins.
That works really well too. There's so big and so broad and actually so vague, but because they are so big and the chances of somebody being interested in that and also being interested it thing is if someone's interested in online marketing, the chance that they're interested in personal development is pretty good and they would kind of fall into either the Oprah category or the Tony Robbins category.
You know, if it's more of a female audience, they might more go into the Oprah category. If it's more of a male audience, then it might be more in the Tony Robbins category. So play around with these sorts of things. But also use your common sense. Like if you are a health coach and you work mainly with women who are interested in yoga, then you know the yoga journal might be an option. Or Lulu lemon might be an option as think about your, the values of your clients.
Think about the things that they are interested in and almost more importantly the things that they're not interested in so that you can really narrow them down. And then as far as audiences go, you definitely want to make sure that you're setting up your Facebook engagement audiences for at least 180 days. Instagram engagement audiences for at least 180 days and website visitors for at least 180 days. Those are your golden gooses. Those are your people who have shown interest in your social media. They've shown interest in your content, they're interested in your blogs, they're interested in your, in your podcasts, they're interested in everything you want to do and definitely also set up a custom audience of your current email list. That is a very important one too. So those are the audiences that you're going to want to go in and set up and think about and do this work before you open the, the, the ads manager so that you've got some good traction going with your audiences by the time you set up your ads.
The next thing you need to look at is the copy for your ads. So you are going to need a few different options for your copy. And when you sit down to write your copy, of course you're going to think about your ideal customer. You're going to keep her or him front and center of your mind and you are going to write for them in a way that is going to get their attention with the hook of the copy and then expand maybe on some pain points, maybe on some desires that they have. And just remember to keep your copy happy. Facebook likes happy copy.
You can imagine Facebook does not want us to remind people about their pine or their sadness or their overwhelm or their, whatever their negative feelings are. Because if we remind people about their negative feelings, what they do is they click away from Facebook and they go and search the web somewhere else and we do not want to lose our Facebook or Instagram viewers or the audience because we want to keep them there because then we can market to them.
So always keep your copy uplifting, focusing on the benefits they're going to get when they have taken your course or when they have downloaded your freebie or when they have read your blog post and then play around with both long copy and short copy. As some people like to read a lot. Other people don't like to read a lot. And this is kind of something that I find you learn what your audience wants and then after a while, if you've been doing long copy and short copy for a year and the only ads that convert are the short copy, then you know your audience isn't, they're not long readers, they just want it in a nutshell. So give it to them that way. But if you've been running ads for a year and all they want is to read your beautiful long paragraphs that you're writing because you're such an amazing writer and I just can't get enough of your writing, then that is the way to go.
But understand that you are going to need to taste both so that you get an understanding of what your clients need. So one tip that I wanted to give you that we learned the hard way is if you are writing a long copy, remember that on Instagram you're limited to 2,200 characters in your text. So you could end up writing this beautiful, beautiful long copy and have it more than 2,200 characters and then be completely stumped because you cannot put it on Instagram and it won't place there and they knew can't taste Instagram.
And specifically, if you are someone who's Instagram heavy, whose audiences Instagram heavy, that can be a problem for you. I have an example here of short copy. I've just been scrolling through my newsfeed to look at a short copy and long copy. So I can give you an example. An ad came up for Pinterest, which is interesting to me.
It's always, I find it fascinating when other social media platforms advertise their advertising on Facebook. Isn't that funny? Linkedin's done it. And now Pinterest is doing it too though. Pinterest ad says 300 million people use Pinterest to find what to try next. And the headline says, share your ads with the world. Little bit tongue in the cheek. I would say a 300 million people use Pinterest to find what to use next.
Share your ads with the world. In other words, they're shy saying, if you advertise on Pinterest, you are sharing your ads with more people. I love it. It's great. It's creative. It's too bad that Pinterest ads don't work very well for conversions. It works for traffic, but it doesn't work for conversions. And then I looked for some long copy and this ad came up in my news feed. It is by somebody called Allie Bjerk.
I don't know who she is. As she looked lovely and her ad was fantastic and I thought I would share this with you. And I'm going to read you this and I consider this long copy, but some people would consider it short copy, but I'm going to read you this and then you can decide for yourself the copy. SES. I love a deal, especially one with black Friday in the title. Yet as a coach, I generally recommend against discounting because competing on price is a race to the bottom where no one wins. But I digress.
Back in April, I launched live stream three 65 a content planning calendar with three 65 live stream ideas for just $27 and over 7,430 entrepreneurs and counting bought it, but from now until Saturday, November the 30th I want to sweeten the pot. I'm bundling my best selling live stream calendar, my 21 day visibility challenge and a brand new Instagram story system we've been building over at AB HQ.
This has been monumental here for not only my business but for all of the business owners who have purchased and taken action on my programs. They've all made huge strides too and I want to celebrate with you. You can get access to all three of these programs today for just $27 and solve all of your content and visibility needs in 2020. There you have it. That was Allie Bjerk's long copy. In my view, this is long copy. Some people would show this as short copied. What I like is she got their attention with, I love a deal, especially one with black Friday in the title and it kind of ran this ad ran today as I'm recording it, it's Friday the 29th of November. This ad ran about a week ago, so kind of before the whole black Friday rush started. So I liked that she got in early with this.
She got people's attention with the black Friday and I love a deal. She's telling, she's saying there's a deal coming up. And then I love the last line that she says you can get access to all three of these programs today for just $27 and here's the beauty, the benefit. This is the catch phrase, the beauty, the black finale, and solve all of your content and visibility needs in 2020. Now who doesn't want that for just $27. So she's done a great job here. And the other example that I wanted to use that is super long copy that I'm not going to read out here in the podcast today is basically any ad by the guys from traffic and funnels. So if you just look up the guys from traffic and funnels, you will get retargeted as soon as you click on anything of theirs.
They are crazy retargeters. And you will see their ads everywhere once you're done. And you will see how good they are at writing ridiculously long copy in some of their ads that just goes on and on and on. But they're fabulous copywriters and it's a delight to read their copy. So that is what I have for you on copy. You need to get your copy ready and have it written. Think about the body copy. Think about the opening hook for your copy. Think about the headline you're going to use. Think about using benefits as opposed to features and think about your customer journey and what is the state that they want to be in after they have downloaded your freebie and speak to that. The next thing you need to get ready before you start setting up your ad or your images, you want to create at least two options for your ads.
And maybe not more than that. We are starting to see more and more in the agency that lace is more in terms of options for creative. So we might have two images and two videos and just taste those and use those. But remember the purpose of your image is to stop people from scrolling in the newsfeed, stop their fingers from scrolling through. So your image needs to grab their attention. It needs to make them feel that they associate with whatever is in the image. And what we're seeing more and more is the more native you can make it look and feel, the better the ad performs.
The overly produced, overly beautified, very professional photos with lots of text in it is a working lace and lace and the more casual, more informal ad images are working better and better. So for your conversion ads, I want you to have at least two square image options and use those square images on Facebook and Instagram.
If you think about the old Facebook images used to be a vertical landscape format and that doesn't take up a lot of space in the newsfeed. If you're scrolling on your phone, if you're scrolling on your phone, you want to think about the portrait orientation cause that will end up taking up more space in your newsfeed. So to solve that challenge, we just use square images for most of our ads because we like using the auto-placement option and if we have a square image it just goes straight onto Facebook. It goes straight on to Instagram, takes up enough space in the newsfeed on mobile so that you can stop that scroll and really get their attention. And then you may also want to think of some image options for Instagram stories. Facebook has a really handy aspect ratio tool that you can download and I have hooked it up to a easy link for you to remember.
It's called the shine show.com forward slash image tool and you can just go to that URL and you will find Facebook's aspect ratio tool which tells you exactly how big images should be in the different placement options that you have on Facebook. Then you should also be thinking about video. You want to be thinking about long video and short video and you want to be thinking about what the different placement restrictions are in terms of your video. Now again with video, this is something that is kind of like lace is more the more casual you can go. The lace produced the lace, overly formatted and overly edited. You can go, you can get with your videos the better, but try different angles. Try to, I have, I had a client that did a workshop on movement and one of the videos that I had her record was her lying down on the floor and standing up during the 15 seconds that her Instagram story video was on that video performed like gangbusters cause it's a weird angle and then it gets into like a comfortable speaking position for the viewer.
And so it gets their attention cause it's a bit different but then you become comfortable because she's talking to you from a stent standing up position. So think about ways that you can get started with something that's going to grab their attention really quickly. A different angle, a different bright color, a movement with your hands or a movement with your body or something.
I saw Stu McLaren did an Instagram story video where he did a backflip into the swimming pool that I thought was just genius. It was just, it's funny, it's cheerful, it's happy, and if you only have 15 seconds and five seconds of that is taken up by, by doing a backflip, you know the rest of those 10 seconds you are going to listen to what he says because he got your attention. It's just beautiful.
Facebook has a video tool where it gives you all the information, all the techie stuff that you need for the length of videos you need to create and the aspect ratios and all those things that are quite complicated, but they don't need to be.
If you just grab your phone, hold it in portrait position, hit record and speak to your ideal customer, you should be okay. Make sure that you keep your videos that goes on the Instagram newsfeed under two minutes. You can now also upload up to two minutes of videos into Instagram stories ads, but on Facebook stories it's still only going to be 15 seconds and your videos on Facebook newsfeed can be super mega long so don't don't worry about the limitation there but try to keep it short, especially if you're going to run the video to a cold audience that my friend is everything you need to get started. This is your ingredients lists, so just to go over it again, you need landing pages, landing page software and an E and a CRM or an email service provider. Something that's going to deliver your lead magnet into their inbox and that's going to allow you to collect email addresses.
You need pixels set up on your Facebook account and placed correctly on those landing pages. You need your custom conversions set up and in place. You need to know which audiences you are going to target. Make sure you target a large audiences, millions of people.
For cold ads, you need to have copy written copy that are going to convert copy and a few different options. You need short copy and long copy and you need images, you need a couple of different options of images that's going to stop the scroll. You need video and you need some video. That is also going to make them double tag. Do a double take, look. Again, pay attention and listen for a few seconds to you. So there you have it. Now you have all the building blocks you need to get started with Facebook ads and put your list building on autopilot.
So I want you to imagine it's a year from now and you took what you learned here today and implemented it at only $20 a day. That's $600 a month you can get there. You can definitely get there and imagine for that $20 a day you got five people to opt into your email list every single day they need one year you will add 1,825 people to your email list and because you're sending out regular content to your list, those almost 2000 people will be primed and ready to buy when you launch your first or next online course.
So make sure you download the list builders complete checklist for setting up Facebook and Instagram ads where you can go back through everything and there's even more information in there than I've shared with you on the podcast today and go through it, set up your ads and let me know how you go getting started with your list building efforts.
Join me next week on episode four of the shine show when we're going to talk about why goal setting is not working for you and how you can change that.
Thank you so much for listening. If you had to fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.