How to effectively grow your email list with Facebook

But don’t be blinded by the rumors.

With 3.07 billion monthly active users and 2.11 billion people visiting the social media platform daily (Facebook, 2024), Facebook is still by far the most popular social network globally.

With the power of Facebook, you can grow your email list faster than you can say "cat video." Just follow these simple steps and watch your Facebook email list (and ego) balloon in size. 🚀

An email list is a list of people who have opted in and consented to receive email marketing from you. A high-quality email list is a super valuable asset because it gives you a direct line of communication with your customers and other people who are interested in your brand or products. And according to Statista, the number of people using email is expected to reach 4.89 billion by 2027.

Though Facebook’s targeting capabilities are overwhelmingly impressive, almost every marketer struggles to maximize their visibility due to the ever-changing algorithm. Not so with email marketing. Your email list empowers you to communicate with your audience on your terms.

So, as a business owner, you’ll want to combine email marketing with Facebook marketing. In fact, you want to make email and social media work together for good.

The idea is to leverage Facebook to find new leads and then use email to establish relationships and turn leads into long-term customers. With email marketing, the chances of your message being seen are significantly higher. Plus, your efforts are easy to measure and optimize by analyzing your reports.

What’s more, should you ever lose access to your Facebook page or account (and as a result, your followers), with email, you’ll still have a way to communicate with a large chunk of your audience. Trust us, we know a bit about this after we lost our own Facebook page. 😱

Before we get into all of our Facebook email address list growth ideas, let's first make sure your pages are set up properly.

Step 1: Optimize your Facebook Page for growing your list

When was the last time you updated your Facebook business page? As the digital business card of your company, you have to make sure everything looks picture-perfect.

Quickly check whether your Facebook page elements could use a refresh.

• Profile picture

• Cover image

• About section (are the opening times, phone number, etc. all up to date?)

• Photo album

You can also add an action button to your page to include a CTA (Call-To-Action) for people to sign up to your email list.

To do this, log in to Facebook and switch to your page. Click the Page settings button (3 dots) and then select Add Action Button. Choose the Sign up option and enter the URL for your signup form landing page then click Save.

Step 2: Create a signup landing page

You need a place to direct people to so that they can subscribe to your mailing list—this is where your landing page comes in. This is the last stop before subscribers enter their email, so you need to get the messaging and design right to convince people of your newsletter's value and encourage the maximum number of conversions! Here are some tips:

1. Grab attention and communicate the main benefit or action with a clear headline.

2. Use high-quality, compelling visuals to support your offer, message, and brand personality.

3. Keep the messaging minimal, straightforward, and focused on your value proposition.

4. Use a strong CTA button that stands out and drives action.

5. Include some reviews or feedback from fans of your content.

6. Optimize for mobile! If people are clicking through from Facebook, there is a good chance they’ll be on a mobile device.

Step 3. Link the call-to-action button to your form

As a last step, don’t forget to link the call-to -action (CTA) button to your signup landing page URL. This button will appear directly underneath your cover picture on the bottom-right corner.

Now let’s talk about the thing that you came here for: Email list building with Facebook.

There are paid and organic strategies to grow your Facebook email address list, and we’ll cover tactics for both of them, starting out with the best organic methods.

Facebook’s algorithm might prevent every single one of your followers from seeing your posts in their feed, but even if 10% of your audience does, that’s 10% you can convert into newsletter subscribers. Plus, with 70% of Facebook users visiting local business pages at least once a week, there’s lots of opportunity to direct followers toward your signup page. You can do this by:

Encouraging signups through Facebook posts

Regularly remind your followers that the best way to stay up to date with all of your news, offers and content is by subscribing to your newsletter, and include a URL of your sign-up landing page. 

Give people a reason to sign up by describing the benefit of receiving your newsletter. This could be early access to sales or promotions; the latest news about your products, company, or events; or useful tips and tricks. You can especially make use of this tactic around launches, promotions, and events, just like My Bloody Valentine did in this post:

Share newsletter previews

With increasingly crowded inboxes, people are becoming more selective about where they hand over their email addresses. They want to be sure it’s going to be worth it before jumping in! A great way to convince people that subscribing to your newsletter can blossom into a beautiful (brand) relationship, is by showing them a preview of the goods. 

Give your audience an insight into what’s in store for them by posting a newsletter preview URL or redirecting them to a landing page. You can also use this Facebook strategy as a teaser for upcoming newsletters. Below you can see how International Space Station National Laboratory does this with a captivating description and eye-catching image.

Promote your newsletter in Stories

Having your newsletter visible in more places will result in more people being aware of it and thus, more signups! The consumption of Facebook Stories has grown by 842% since 2016, and 62% of American users plan to watch more Facebook Stories in the future. This means Stories shouldn’t be overlooked when it comes to reaching your audience and highlighting your newsletter. 

Stories can also be more natural and less polished than posts, giving you an opportunity to connect with your audience on a more personal level. You can create a quick video of yourself sharing why you’d love people to signup and what they’d get out of being part of your email list, or tell them why you’re excited about an upcoming edition.

Share user-generated content

Have you been tagged in a post or reel by a subscriber who loves your content? Ask them if you can share the post on your own feed as a form of social proof to encourage potential subscribers to sign up. You could also reach out to your most loyal subscribers and ask if they would like to submit a review about your newsletter, either written or as a video.

People love instant gratification which makes giving something in return for a signup a super-effective tactic—an effective lead magnet can bring in a minimum of 1,000 subscribers per month. Here are some ideas:

Offer free resources, discounts, or exclusive content

Think about who your audience is made up of, why do they follow you, and what they want or need that you could provide them. Some lead magnets you could consider are:

• Ebooks or guides on specific topics in your industry or field

• Spreadsheets or other tools that can help optimize a project or task

• Templates for planning, design, or social media

• Mini courses

• A free consultation

• Access to invite-only webinars or exclusive video tutorials

• Discount codes or gift vouchers

• Free shipping

Here’s an example of a free ebook for signing up from vegan cookbook author, Dreena Burton, where she uses video to share a little about what the ebook includes.

Use contests and giveaways

Who doesn’t love a good giveaway? It’s the oldest trick in the book, but it still works—as long as the prize is enticing enough for people. If you’re using a Facebook giveaway to collect email addresses, make sure that people have to sign up (and not, let’s say, only share or like the message to win).

This post from Samsung is a great example. It’s short and straight to the point where a lot of giveaway posts can become quite long. Samsung has avoided this by linking to their terms and conditions and keeping instructions minimal but clear.

Learn more about growing your email list with giveaways in the article below:

Facebook isn’t only successful in connecting friends and acquaintances—it has become one of the largest networks of online communities for people all over the world who share the same interests. In fact, over 1.8 billion people use Facebook groups every month! So how can you take advantage of this to build your email list?

Create a Facebook group to connect with your followers

A dedicated group for your business is a surefire way to bring in people who are solely interested in your brand, products, or services. It will allow you to communicate more directly, engage with your audience, build relationships, and of course, promote your newsletter! Plus, being able to respond to people’s posts and show a bit of the human behind the brand will lead people to develop a deeper connection with your business, making them more likely to subscribe to your newsletter.

Join other groups where your audience hangs out

When you find a group filled with people that match your ideal audience, this can be a great place to promote your newsletter or offer. Depending on how targeted the group is, you might just see all your potential customers gathered in one place. But, don’t get too excited. This approach needs effort and patience. You can’t barge into a group and shamelessly promote your landing page.

To find Facebook groups, enter fitting keywords in the search bar. Then check for the number of members and activity rate (how many posts are published per day). It’s also worthwhile to check comments, both for engagement and to get a feel for the group’s vibe.

Make sure to engage with people, build meaningful connections, and then promote (only when it’s relevant to the discussion). When in doubt, state this in your message (“I’m not sure if this is allowed, so please feel free to remove this message”) or contact the admin beforehand for approval.

Host online events to attract new leads

Facebook is a great tool for people to find events relevant to their interests, and for you to promote your event and get in those search results. If you create an event on Facebook, make sure to require a signup via URL, not merely a Facebook RSVP. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on email signups.

Additionally, you can promote the event in a Facebook post and add the link in the description. Keep the link short and sweet.

Below, you’ll see an example from our own Facebook page, where we created a free webinar in collaboration with email marketing specialist Marta Lumera. The webinar gained over 200 responses and 108 people attended.

Partner with another brand or creator

This strategy isn’t necessarily Facebook-only—it works well in general. By partnering with a brand that has a different or bigger audience than yourself, you can successfully gather new leads. Partnerships can be anything from a mention in a post to a joint webinar, event, or giveaway. Here’s another MailerLite example, where we partnered with Cloudways for a free online event. Tagging the brand in the event increases visibility among Cloudways’ audience.

Digital marketers love Facebook because of the advanced ad targeting possibilities in the Meta Ads Manager. Facebook's massive database makes it possible to find potential new customers no matter how niche they might be.

Plus, Facebook is actually one of the most flexible social ad platforms for your ad creatives. You can:

• Add images in 3 key formats: square, horizontal, and wide

• Add up to 5 descriptions, headlines, and primary texts

• Choose from many different objective-based CTA texts

And then there are Advantage+ creative enhancements which combines customer insights with AI to tailor your ads, making them resonate more with each person. 

Once you’ve found a strategy that works, you can take advantage of these advertising features to take your paid ads to the next level.

Lead ads allow you to find people who may be interested in your products or services and collect information from them. When people click on your ad, they'll be prompted to fill in your form. 

Lead ads are optimized to make it super easy for people to connect with your business. Using a feature called “Instant forms”, you can reduce your bounce rate on mobile devices by pre-populating form fields with visitor data (i.e name, email, mobile, etc). The goal of this feature is to overcome your lead’s apprehension to complete the form. Being more efficient and cost-effective, it is often the preferred option for conversions, resulting in a lower cost per lead. 

Another great benefit is that Meta ads integrates with MailerLite. Simply use Zapier or another integration to send your new leads directly to your MailerLite subscriber list. That way, when the leads start flooding in, you can be there ready to nurture them.

Facebook video ads allow you to promote your products or services using video content. These ads are shown in the Facebook news feed and are designed to grab the attention of users and encourage them to take a specific action, such as making a purchase or visiting a website. 

And according to Biteable, video comes out on top when it comes to lead generation, clicks, and ROI! In their test, a video ad generated 3x as many leads and 25% more views than an image ad, showing that the video’s reach was greater and more people paid attention to it.

Video ads can be created using a variety of formats, including short videos, live videos, and 360-degree videos. But remember that you need to hook the viewer in the first couple of seconds. Videos have the ability to hold the viewer’s attention for longer, but only if you grab their attention right away. Let them know immediately what you intend to share and use teasers to keep them engaged.

There are other benefits to using Facebook video ads as well, including:

• Increased engagement: Facebook videos are more likely to be watched and shared than other types of content, which can help to increase engagement with your ads

• Better placement options: Facebook's placement options allow you to show your video ads to the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services, which can help to improve their effectiveness

Although video ads tend to work well in many cases, that doesn’t mean you should skip image ads entirely! We recommend testing out a mix of video and image ads to get a better overview of the types of ads that perform better with your audience. You never know, image ads could come out on top!

To learn how to use video ads to grow your list of emails, check out the article below.

A Custom Audience on Facebook is an ad targeting option that lets you find your existing audiences across Meta apps. This includes existing customers and people who have previously visited your website or clicked your ads.

By syncing your email list with Facebook Custom Audiences, you can include your subscribers in your ad campaigns. Now, I know what you’re thinking… Displaying ads to existing subscribers isn’t going to grow your email list—but I haven’t gotten to the best part yet.

After you’ve synced your email subscribers with Custom Audiences, you can create a Lookalike Audience: A list of people who match certain data points with, or “look like”, your email list. This gives you the power to reach people you know have a high chance of being interested in your offer because they’re similar to those in your existing audience.

Learn how to sync your MailerLite email list with Facebook Custom Audiences in the video below.

As Claude Bernard once said, observation is a passive science, experimentation is an active science. And if you want to grow your email list, active you must be! Minor tweaks to your ad strategy can make a big impact on your conversions, so you’ll want to test various approaches to see which results in the most signups. Here are a few key elements you can start with.

Audience targeting

Take advantage of Facebook’s super in-depth targeting capabilities by experimenting with lookalike audiences, custom audiences, and interest audiences. For example:

• Lookalike audience: Test different audience sizes (1%, 3%, or 5%) to see if a more narrow or broad audience results in more conversions and better CPC (Cost per conversion)

• Custom audience: Try out retargeting ads to target people who have visited your website or engaged with your page but haven’t subscribed to your newsletter

• Interest audience: Create an audience based on specific interests, demographics, or behaviors that align with your ideal subscriber persona

Ad creatives

Test multiple ads and regularly switch things up based on the best performing creatives. Test out:

• Images vs. videos: The stats say that videos outperform images, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with both. You could experiment with different imagery, image text, video length, animations, and more

• Ad copy: Experiment with tone of voice and language while remaining true to your brand personality. Does a friendly, casual approach work or does your audience prefer more formal, straightforward language? You can also test short copy against longer, more descriptive copy, as well as highlighting different benefits

CTAs (Calls-to-action)

Try different CTAs within your copy, ad image text, and CTA button.

Lead magnets

Freebies can be great for organically growing your list, but you can also use them in Facebook ads. Test out whether including a freebie increases conversions, and then try different kinds of lead magnets to see if one is more attractive to your audience than the rest.

Once you start testing the various elements, you can start to optimize your strategy by creating new ads with the best-performing audiences, creatives, and CTAs, hopefully resulting in more signups!

Lead ads are optimized for conversions, making them super effective for growing your list! But you need an efficient way to keep your email list up to date without the need to manually upload new subscribers. The best way to do this is to use an automation so that every time a lead is collected or updated, it’s automatically added to your subscriber list in your email marketing platform, meaning there’s one less thing for you to worry about. 

With MailerLite, you can do exactly that thanks to this nifty Zapier workflow. Even better, you can keep your subscribers organized by using this Zap to add new Facebook Lead Ad subscribers to a specified group. 

And, if you want to promote your newsletter whenever you send a new campaign, there’s a Zap for that too! You can bring more awareness to your newsletter and encourage your Facebook fans to sign up without lifting a finger. This Zap for creating Facebook Page posts when new MailerLite campaigns are sent will get the job done.

Once you’ve bumped up your email list by a few thousand and have a steady stream of subscribers coming in, what next? Should you sit back, relax, and congratulate yourself on a job well done? Well, yes and no. You did a great job and definitely deserve a break, but it’s not over!

It’s important to regularly review your Facebook and Instagram email marketing efforts to look for new opportunities and areas for improvement. A well-planned strategy that includes a mix of organic tactics, valuable content, and paid ads will help you keep your email list promotion fresh and keep growing your list. 

If you’re wondering how you can apply these tactics to growing your email list with Instagram, we’ve got a guide for that too!

Performance metrics are your best friend

Facebook can give you tons of data about the performance of your organic posts and your paid ads, so there’s no need for any guesswork. You can make data-driven decisions about which audiences to target and which creatives to use, always optimizing and testing for maximum conversions.

Now you know how to build your email list with Facebook, here are the tools and resources that will help you reach new heights with your email list!

• Email marketing platform: A modern, user-friendly platform that easily integrates with Facebook and other tools to simplify automating list growth and creating Custom Audiences. We recommend MailerLite, of course!

• Automation platform: We used Zapier as an example in this article but Make, SureTriggers, LeadsBridge, Integrately, Apiway, and Pabbly Connect are all great options

• Analytics tools: If you’re directing people towards a landing page, you’ll want to connect with with an analytics tool like Google Analytics to get metrics about the number of clicks from Facebook to your landing page and the number of conversions it results in. Facebook’s native analytics tools are also essential for gaining insights into ad and post performance 

• Facebook Pixel: You can create custom audiences from your website visitors and then use them for retargeting ads, encouraging people to sign up. But to do this, you’ll need to install Meta’s Pixel on your website.

There are many strategies you can use to grow your small business and increase your reach with Facebook. Social media is great for discovering and reaching new customers, whether that’s organically or via paid advertising. 

By redirecting these potential customers to your email contact list and asking them to sign up, you can start building real relationships—without needing to worry if Facebook’s algorithm will deliver your content or not.

For more tips on growing your email customer list in general, check out our ultimate guide.

What’s your go-to tactic to grow your list using Facebook? We’d love to know in the comments below.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in December 2022, and it has now been updated with new insights and examples.