Facebook + Email Funnels: The Perfect One-Two Combo For Growth Hacking

Launching an online product or service involves months of sweat, toil, and hustle, right?

Wrong.

In 2018, there’s no need to spend months endlessly bashing away at a keyboard crafting blog posts and promotional emails.

You now have the tools to completely automate this process and generate some high passive income while sipping cocktails on the beach.

Many tools are available to automate your marketing – and most of the most effective ones are likely to be familiar to you.

Below is a walkthrough guide on launching a product or service from scratch using Facebook ads and email funnels – and gaining $5,000 worth of sales in 30 days.

The best thing about this method is that once the initial hard work has been put in, you can automate it and effortlessly make another $5,000 the next month – or ramp up your lead-building activity and earn even more.

Sound good?

Let’s begin.

Step 1: Creating a freebie

This walkthrough assumes you already have a product or service created, plus a solid idea of who your target audience is. If you haven’t, read this and come back once you’ve got your life-changing idea.

The Facebook/email funnel combo will work for any online business. For this article, we’ll assume you’re coaching stay-at-home moms on how to make a passive income by creating an e-commerce website from scratch.

The first step is to create a helpful guide this audience would be interested in – and give it away for FREE.

This can be an e-book, video course, or even something as small as a PDF checklist. It needs to be helpful and filled with expertise, but it doesn’t need to be HUGE. It’ll serve you better if it’s something bite-sized. Most people being offered your freebie will have little to no idea who you are, so they’re unlikely to commit to reading your 100-page book, especially while scrolling through Facebook.

They’d be just as reluctant to consume this as you would be to give it away for free, so don’t spend more than a couple of hours putting your freebie together. The most important aspect is that it’s highly relevant to your target audience’s needs and desires.

Our stay-at-home mom (above) could create a “10-step guide to making your first 0 online” or a “checklist for launching your online business smoothly.”

If you have no idea how to write or design a compelling e-book, consider outsourcing it to a reliable digital marketing agency.

Step 2: Create a remarkable landing page

Let’s address the readers of your freebie as ‘leads’ from now on.

After all, you’ll ask them to give you an email address to send the freebie. When they do, it’ll add to your email marketing list.

It’s recommended to create a landing page that will automate this process. To do so, you should be a fantastic programmer or use Clickfunnels or Leadpages. MailChimp and other email marketing software providers offer free landing page services, but they’re bare. Facebook ads can also collect emails without the user having to leave the page, but a landing page allows you to gain leads from all sources.

Your landing page should contain some copy explaining what readers can expect from your freebie. It’ll also have a prominent sign-up box where your leads can enter their email address.

What is the best tip for landing page copy? Explain what’ll happen to your leads when they read your freebie rather than what it’s about.

“Make your first $100 online today.”

is a better headline than: 

“Download my free guide to making your first $100 online” or, even worse, “Sign up to access your free e-book.” 

Why email marketing?

You have heard the rumors that” email is dead” and that you should only be using social media to market your business nowadays.

Here are some pointers to consider:

• Email is universal. Pretty much everyone with web access has an email address. You need one to open a social media account.
• Email is a more private and personal medium. Your email subscribers are actively opt-in to receiving messages from you and should therefore be warmer leads.
• Your email open rate (average 20.8% for marketing emails) is mainly based on the quality of your writing. Your social media reach (average 6.5% for Facebook Pages) is primarily based on the platform’s algorithm.
• Email is where people go to make business transactions. Social media is where people go to connect with friends. (This is why you should offer freebies on Facebook and sell products through email).
• You write the rules with email marketing. With social media, you’re subject to algorithm changes, a third party’s terms and conditions, and the fact that the website might close down or ban you with no warning. What use are your MySpace or Vine followers these days?

If you’re still not convinced, here are 11 reasons your business needs to build an email list now.

Step 3: Create your email funnel  

Some experts in this field suggest emailing your list once a week. Others recommend doing it every day.

This might seem like a bit much, but if you’re writing genuinely helpful emails and solving people’s problems, most of your leads will want to hear from you daily.

The people who stay subscribed to daily emails will love getting all this free information. You might trigger more unsubscribers when delivering daily emails, but these were unlikely to be the ones to spend big money on your products anyway. You’re better off without them, as most email marketing services charge you more as your list grows.

Of course, you should also include a subtle call to action at the end of your super-useful and helpful email, stating how your paid-for products and services can help your leads solve their problems with greater ease or depth.

Having received so much free information in their inbox, a healthy percentage of your leads will feel confident in your ability to solve their problems. Many will investigate your paid-for service without you having to sell anything aggressively. This strategy is often dubbed ‘Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook‘ or ‘The Thank You Economy,’ both books by digital marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk.

The good news is that you don’t necessarily need to write an email daily for the rest of your career. That would interfere with your beach and cocktail time. Using an Autoresponder, you could send all new subscribers the duplicate 30 emails your initial subscribers initially received. Getresponse and ActiveCampaign have brilliant autoresponder tools, while Mailchimp has a decent free one.

Step 4: Send Traffic To Your Landing Page

There are many ways to send traffic to a landing page, but there are two key reasons why Facebook ads are one of the best for this strategy.

You can target your perfect customer.

The targeting with Facebook ads is incredibly detailed. You can target people based on their age, gender, location, relationship status, and what Pages they like, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If our stay-at-home mom wanted only to target Toronto’s single women in their 30s, who, like both ParentsCanada and Entrepreneur, she could.

You can automate Facebook ads.

Once you’ve created a winning Facebook ad with a profitable cost-per-click, you can let it run and run and generate leads without lifting a finger.

If you need more leads and customers, up your daily ad spend. If you don’t need anymore (perhaps because your service involves personal coaching), turn the ads off.

You may need to tweak your promotions now and again to combat ad fatigue, but once you’ve found a winning formula, it’s simple enough to repeat this while changing your ads.

The downsides of Facebook ads

The most obvious downside is that you have to spend money to make money. The amount of money it’ll take to get 1,000 email subscribers will vary tremendously depending on your target audience. We’d recommend spending whatever it takes to get 30-35 new email subscribers per day (or 1,000 per month). With a winning formula, this shouldn’t overeat into your monthly profits.

 However, the downside that stops most entrepreneurs is that you have to learn how Facebook ads work. Most entrepreneurs won’t take the time to learn this skill. They’ll either outsource this to a specialist (even though the specialist’s fee makes it tough to create a profitable campaign), or they’ll try one of the alternatives to Facebook ads listed below (even though this probably takes longer than learning how to work Facebook ads).

The alternatives to Facebook ads

You can drive people to your landing page via blog posts, organic social media marketing, podcasts, webinars, press releases, forum marketing, or other methods. It’ll take a lot more hard work (and a lot less time on the beach) to build an audience of 1,000 subscribers a month, but it is possible.

Step 5: Rake in the money

Let’s quickly recap what you’ve done so far:

• You’ve built an email list of 1,000 highly targeted leads by offering them a fantastic freebie.
• You’ve demonstrated your expertise and built their trust by emailing them daily with practical, relevant content.
• You’ve informed them about your products and services in a non-aggressive way via a platform proven to be among the best for converting leads to customers.

Is it that far-fetched for 0.5% of your email subscribers to buy your $999 product? Or that 5% of them buy your $99 product? Or that 10% of them buy your $49 product? Consider creating three product tiers to convert leads with all budget sizes for maximum profits.

Of course, it depends partly on the product’s strength and the power of your writing, but these low conversion rates are all that’s needed for revenue of very close to ,000 a month.

Plus, this all becomes hassle-free once the initial hard work has been put in. You can always outsource your Facebook ad management and email writing services if you’re lazy and don’t mind this eating into your profits.

Best of all, this strategy is highly scalable. All you need to do to double your revenue to $10,000 a month is to up your ad spend to attract 60-70 new subscribers per day.

The only question remains: how will you spend all your newfound free time? Will it all be spent sipping cocktails on the beach, or will you use some to devise your following $999 product? The choice is yours – perhaps the most rewarding aspect of this entire strategy.

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Elijah Masek-Kelly is the Managing Director of Powerful Outreach and is obsessed with words and their meaning. He is a writer in many forms, but he is currently focused on helping small businesses, and startups grow by any means possible.

As Managing Director of Powerful Outreach, he helps clients get exposure through innovative and strategic outreach. With a long history as a writer and content marketer, Elijah is focused on helping small businesses develop their brand, increase their influence, and generate leads by leveraging his skills and knowledge to tap into new audiences.