I have been loving the lead ad format from Facebook for a little while now. Ever since Lookalike Audiences and Customer Match, emails have quickly gone from gold to platinum in my digital marketing book.

The vast majority of marketers I work with are severely underutilizing email, even as technological enhancements make it super simple to nurture leads. I’ll take a moment to step off my marketing automation soapbox for a second to talk about acquiring those emails, namely through the lead ad via Facebook.

I think Lead Ads are pretty slick; it’s a conversion when you’re not really ready to convert-convert. Like pull out your credit card convert. All you have to do as the advertiser is give me something slightly more valuable than my email address, and boom, you have my email. If you bother me, I’ll unsubscribe. But if you’re promising me something good. or if I’m just interested enough to keep you sometimes top-of-mind, you can talk to me and you can sell me.

A few months ago I ran a pretty successful email acquisition campaign for a client that really seems to understand the value of an email. We had some hoops to jump through, but the campaign overall felt pretty successful based on our CPA. We created a Lead Ad showcasing some very TOFU content, a How-To Guide, and promised more of this valuable content if you subscribed. The Lead Ad’s beauty is its simplicity. If you were interested, you clicked on my CTA–Subscribe Now. Because Facebook already has all of your personal info from your profile, your name and email address were pre-populated on the form fill. All you had to do was press ‘Subscribe’ and Bob’s-Your-Uncle you are in my email funnel! A win for you: lots of great free content, a win for me: I have your permission to sell you on my client’s products. Hoop-wise, we had no API between our email provider and Facebook, so we had to download leads weekly and import. So you got your promised content a few days later… not the best experience ever, but with a 50%+ Open Rate and 30%+ Engagement Rate, it wasn’t terrible either. In terms of targeting, we were money because we score emails on engagement already. We took the top engagers, imported them into Facebook, and matched enough to target a Lookalike Audience for our Lead Ads.

We are getting ready to run another test, this time with a valuable coupon. I’m psyched with the value of the offer and I’m jazzed that we’re going to do it a little differently this time. For this test, we’ll run a video ad unit first, using some of our standard targeting. Then, we’ll create an audience out of the video viewers and target this group with our Lead Ads. So build the brand awareness and follow up with an opportunity to get you into our funnel. If redemption rates hold up, we should get some good incremental lift out of this round. And bonus: we get the chance to continue to talk to and nurture this new audience!

I’ll follow up on the success when we wrap.