How to generate more email opt-ins from Facebook

What is your number one pain with email marketing? If you’re like most marketers – it’s lead generation.

Getting good leads to nurture – and convert – is one of the biggest problems facing online marketers. Fortunately, social sites like Facebook give you the chance to begin the sales cycle through nurturing relationships, amplifying your brand, and ultimately getting the sale.

Here’s seven tactics to generate email opt-ins and warm leads from Facebook.

1. Free Webinars

Do you market for a business that hosts webinars? Free webinars are particularly successful for B2B lead generation, and they can deepen the relationship between your business and prospects.

To make the best webinars, provide useful information, and solve customer problems by addressing concerns in live videos. Include a portion of the webinar for live Q&A too. When your content is genuinely of interest to your demographic, you’ll attract genuine leads.

Promote the meeting on Facebook through updates. Link the posts to email-gated registration forms to collect your warm leads. Send out a triggered automated message to each sign up, with information about how to log in to the webinar. Follow up with emailed reminders, and of course, send out a thank you email to follow-up after the webinar is over. Invite your prospects to connect with you further by inviting them to future webinars or by giving away more free content.

Use Facebook ads with well-optimized landing pages for Facebook Ads to generate more sign-ups to your RSVP landing page.

2. Facebook Chatbots

Chatbots are always available to engage with your fans and potential leads. You can handle more requests and scale up without hiring more support staff. It saves a lot of budget and if you have a good chat bot intelligence, it can help you to serve multiple chatbot use cases on Facebook. Chatbots can be programmed to automatically serve and deal with customer questions, but also increase sign ups, and promote your signup incentives and ask people to join your newsletter.

A Facebook chatbot is like a PA, or your allways on Butler. Assisting in customer support, marketing, service and sales. Setting up a chatbot is mostly a one time effort, after which it is just managing. 0

And there are a lot of interesting developments going on in AI Chatbots and conversational commerce, that make this an area to look into with great attention.

3. Discounts and Coupons

Coupons have long been a successful marketing tactic. Studies have shown that people who get discounts from you are 60% more likely to share your brand with their friends. They’re also an amazing way to generate interested leads.

You can host coupons directly on your Facebook Page. You can also very easily email-gate them, to beef up and grow your email lists.

By hosting your coupon directly on the number one social networking site, you make it easy to share too.

Use a good third party app to generate your Facebook coupon campaign, and most apps will automatically share a Facebook update to your participant’s Wall. The auto-post feature means you get your email gated coupon seen by participant friends, who are generally like-minded people. It also makes it easy to spread the word about your email-gated coupon.

4. Sweepstakes

Like discounts, sweepstakes are some of the most shared content on Facebook. Run them right, and you’ll generate lots of enthusiasm – and rich email leads – from devoted Fans.

Here are a few tips to generate successful leads from sweepstakes:
● Make sweepstakes a regular, frequent component in your marketing strategies
● Email-gate all of your sweepstakes, to build up your leads
● Email your past participants to keep engaging them with a chance to win
● Giveaway prizes like gift cards, exclusive opportunities, or a new product to ensure your entrants are people who really want to connect with your brand

Here’s a Facebook sweepstakes example from an online fashion publication, The Style Spy:

5. Interactive Contests

A developing trend in lead generation with Facebook marketing is interactive games and contests. As an email marketer, you know that consumers are becoming more savvy in who they give out their emails to. To get the leads, you need to provide better and better motivation. Some larger companies are providing ample motivation. Small businesses can too.

Big brands like Red Bull, Nissan and Amazon are among the leaders in providing fun, engaging interactive content to generate email leads (and market their products).

Amazon recently hosted a sophisticated photo contest where entrants competed for a 10-day trip to Italy to run in the Rome Marathon. Participants entered by giving their email, and uploading a themed image of themselves.

Each day for 16 days, 2 people were selected. Then voting took place to choose the final winner. They had over 100,000 entrants. Which means they received over 100,000 email leads.

Smaller businesses are using the opportunity to engage, and generate excited new leads too.

6. Exclusive Free Shipping

Shipping costs are one of the biggest causes of shopping cart drop offs. Take advantage of this by offering free shipping, exclusively for your Facebook Fans.

Post the deal to your Facebook page. You could even email-gate the offer – so you get the lucrative email even before they start the sales funnel process.

Limit the offer for scarcity, and entice a quick CTA.

Here’s an example from American Eagle Outfitters:

The shortened link directs prospects to their ‘free shipping’ campaign online store.

When you are posting links to your store on Facebook, upload full sized images. The current image size is 403 pixels x 504 pixels – for optimal image results upload a file size up to 1200 pixels x1200 pixels.

Also, shorten your links, and keep your text to a minimum.

Use the free shipping tactic to generate leads at an optimal time in your shopping cart – use it to immediately follow up with drop offs.

7. Facebook Ads

Facebook ads gives you extremely targeted options. Did you know you can choose who sees your ads based on your current email lists?

You can even target your ads:
● to be viewed by people who are like your current Facebook Fans (called Facebook Ad lookalikes)
● by interests and likes
● by geographic location
● even to people who’ve visited your website (with Website Custom Audience).

Use the highly targeted Facebook Ad features to get your email-gated content seen, clicked on and converted by exactly the demographic who are interested in your brand.

To learn more about Facebook Ads, and how to generate leads, check out How to Build a Great Facebook Ad

Conclusion: How to generate email opt-ins from Facebook

Facebook provides incredible opportunities for you gain targeted leads. Use these seven tactics to grow your database, and increase your conversion numbers.