It’s Never Too Early

Published: Wed, 11/22/23

Hi there friend,

Can you believe we’re less than six weeks away from the new year?

Where did time go? I feel like I was just making my 2023 plan, and now I’m planning 2024.

I find the most successful years I have are the ones where I get a head start executing my strategy to learn what’s working and optimize in order to get the most out of it.

January is typically one of the strongest months for coaches, creators, and small businesses. Let’s take coaches for example, January is when all those new year's resolutions start - people want to lose weight, find a new job, improve their business, etc.

If I asked you what’s your #1 goal for 2024 - what would you say?

If I had to venture a guess, I would say to grow your business or to make money.

And one of the best ways you can grow your business and make more money is with an engaged email list. So as you grow your email list, your earnings potential increases with it.

One of my goals in 2023 was to increase the number of people who subscribe to this newsletter. So I ran a Facebook Ad that really helped grow our subscribers.

It took me four weeks to optimize the campaign. I’d like to share my step-by-step process with you.

If you kick this campaign off in early December, then by the 1st of January you could have a fully optimized campaign that steadily grows your email list.

Step 1: Create your lead magnet

Determine what you’re going to give people for joining your email list. If you don’t have a lead magnet or don’t know what to offer, here’s an article that may help.

Step 2: Build your landing pages

You’ll need to create two landings - one to promote your lead magnet, the other to thank them.

Start with a landing page template in your account and customize it to promote your lead magnet. Here’s how to set it up in your account.

When setting up your lead magnet landing page change the submission form URL to your thank you page, this will make sure that’s the page shown when someone signs up.

Add your Facebook Pixel ID to your landing page (here’s how). This is important because it helps Facebook know who is downloading your lead magnet. This information will help Facebook show your ad to people who are more likely to take action.

Here’s the landing page we used in our campaign.

Step 3: Design your ad

I recommend creating your ad in Canva, it’s really easy to use and they have plenty of templates to help you get started. When designing your ad in Canva, start with custom size of 1080 x 1080 pixels.

Here’s one of the ads we created using Canva.

Screen shot of ad being created in Canva

Step 4: Set up your ad

Follow these steps to set up your ad.

Select the create button in your Facebook ads account.
Choose campaign objective “Leads”. This helps Facebook optimize your campaign to people more likely to sign up for your lead magnet (the pixel you set up on your landing page allows Facebook to know who signed up)
Name your campaign. Select Next.
In the conversion section, choose “website” (a few steps down you’ll link your landing page URL)
In the Pixel drop down, select your landing page pixel.
In the conversion event drop down, select “Create custom conversion”. This let’s Facebook know what to count as a conversion. In the rules section, you want to select “URL contains”, then add your thank you page URL. Then select create.
Enter a daily budget. Put whatever you are comfortable spending per day. I recommend at least $20/day.
In the “detailed targeting” section browse through demographics, interests, and behaviors and select the options that best fit the audience you want to target.
Select next
In the Ad creative section, add your media (your design), write a short headline (make it attention grabbing) and a description (what value will someone get from your lead magnet).
In the website URL, add your lead magnet landing page URL.
Select publish.

After you select publish, your ad will need to be approved by Facebook. This could take up to 24 hours.

Here’s what our ad looked like when we were done.

Step 5: Analyze

Now it’s time to sit back and watch your performance.

I like to look at my ad performance bundled per week. Here’s an example (not actual data):

Example of an Excel spreadsheet used for tracking ad performance

By breaking the data out by weeks, I’m able to identify any trends.

As Facebook optimizes your campaign, you should start to see your cost per lead (or CPL) decrease over the first couple of weeks.

If you don’t see your CPL decrease after the first few weeks, you may want to try new creative.

What did you think of this email?

❤️❤️❤️ Loved it. Can't wait to get the next one.

💔 I didn't really care for it.

Give your emails a face-lift with just a few clicks

Keeping your email styles - the font, colors, and look of things - consistent is really important to make your emails easy to read and present your brand in a persistent way to your readers.

Keep your messages looking consistently great

We've released a beta version of Message Themes, a tool that lets you set your default font, color, and other styles directly in the email without having to touch any html like you have to do in other email editors.

You can try it for yourself by clicking the "What's new" button in the message editor. It will create new blank message with message themes enabled and the feature will be on the next time you open any message.