How to get Facebook leads from Lead Ads to actually convert

For years businesses have relied on Google, either in the form of Adwords or SEO to generate them the bulk of their leads. Search related leads (Google, Bing , Yahoo) still are probably the best place to acquire low hanging fruit when it comes to online sales for most businesses. The problem that a business faces when relying only on Google (or any other search engine) for sales is:

• Adwords becomes more and more competitive as the years go by which drives the price per click up and hence the cost to acquire customers goes up year on year. Almost no industry is immune to the increasing cost per click effect.
• The second problem with search based leads is that they require the search volume to be there. This prohibits companies with new novel products and services from acquiring leads this way (if no one is searching for your fancy new gizmo then search based leads are unfortunately not going to work)

Facebook on the other hand presents an amazing opportunity to many businesses when it comes to lead generation as it enables businesses to reach an audience that was never looking for their product/service in the first place and because Facebook marketing is relatively new when compared with Google, the landscape is far less crowded which typically results in a far cheaper lead than one would get from Google.

The problem however is that the following pattern seems to describe all new Facebook advertisers:

Week 1 – Ecstatically happy to be flooded in leads. Can’t believe how cheap Facebook leads from Lead Ads are and how many leads have been generated in such a short space of time. Kicking oneself for not trying it sooner.

Week 2 – Can’t understand why none of the leads answer their phones and the ones that do answer their phone seem to all suffer from the same short-term memory loss syndrome which makes them not remember even clicking on your ad.

Week 3 – Become despondent and stop their Facebook Lead ads campaign.

We see this pattern happen over and over again. But the good news is there is light at the end of the tunnel. After running tons of Facebook campaigns we’ve developed 4 tips to ensure your Facebook leads don’t go to waste! Here they are:

How to improve your Facebook Lead ads closing percentage tenfold : 4 Great Hacks

1) Facebook Lead Ads response time:

Like in all forms of digital marketing, time of response is king! The stats are striking!

• 73% of leads close with the company that contacts them in the first 5 minutes
• 87% of leads close with the company that contacts them in the first 10 seconds.

You can read more about the importance of response time in this B2C article: 3 Response Time Studies: Lead Generation & Wasted Sales Leads

The above stats are across a number of industries and illustrate the power of getting in touch early. This applies even more so when it comes to Facebook leads from Lead Ads as Facebook leads for the most part aren’t nearly as engaged as Google leads purely due to the dynamics of both mediums. Google leads are people who were actively searching for your product. Facebook leads are people who were on Facebook looking what their friends were up to when your ad caught their eye.

2) Forcing Cognition

Lead page screen/welcome screen and purposeful questions

One of the biggest reasons that Facebook leads are so hard to convert is due to Facebook’s streamlined process which allows a lead to convert into a lead without doing anything other than clicking the mouse button twice. This is great if lead volume is the goal but not so great if lead quality is the primary objective.

Overview of lead process in Facebook: The user simply clicks the apply now button, which presents them with a pre-populated lead form and then they click submit. Nothing could be easier!

Step 1 in becoming a lead: The user sees the Ad below and clicks “Apply Now”

Step 2 in becoming a lead: The user sees all their details already prepopulated and clicks submit

Because this process is so easy and doesn’t require the user to think much we want to actually make the lead conversion process “harder” to force cognition to filter out the people that are not really interested from the good leads worth pursuing.

There are two ways to do this:

1) Welcome Screen

When we setup our lead form we are asked whether or not we want to use a welcome screen or intro option to highlight some of the features of the product/service. Often we are tempted to not use the welcome screen as it is one more step for potential leads to fall off at before they convert, but this is a big mistake. In almost all the tests we have done, adding a welcome screen does decrease the number of leads but also increases the quality of each lead which more than makes up for the lower volume. This works because Facebook’s system is so smooth to convert leads which results in many leads converting without even knowing they have converted which is what we call a lead with low cognition.

2) Don’t only use default questions 

When an interested party clicks passed the welcome screen, most companies ask three questions of the lead: name, telephone number and email address. These are the minimum requirements typically for most leads but also Facebook prepopulates this data without the user needing to fill in anything!

In order to ensure the lead has a certain level of cognition we always use at least one extra field which requires the lead to type in an answer. This helps solidify and qualify the lead tremendously and makes the sales follow up that much easier! It’s better to use questions which ask the user to type something in rather than just selected from a list of drop down options.

3) Following up on leads from Facebook Lead Ads

Even when doing the above two steps there are still some leads who are either:

• Uncontactable
• Never answer their phone
• Never respond to the first email

We have found the best way to engage with Facebook leads is either through an immediate phone call (i.e. a phone call within the first 10 seconds) or if that fails then to put the leads into an email sequence (we use Hubspot Sales for this). An email sequence is essentially a canned set of emails which fire off in set intervals but stop as soon as the lead responds.

We typically use 3 emails in our sequence with a 1 delay between each. Each of them usually say more less the same thing and stop immediately after the lead responds at any stage of the sequence. This usually results in a response rate of a little under 90% at one of the stages of the sequence.

4) Facebook Messenger Ads vs Facebook Lead Ads

The latest Ad option to come out of Facebook is messenger Ads. Messenger Ads works almost exactly the same as lead ads with the difference being that when a lead responds the conversation goes straight into Messenger. This has a number of advantages compared to leads Ads:

Facebook Messenger Ads Advantages:

• Messenger has a built in CRM-type interface which allows anyone working on the leads to tag each lead and put them into different categories. You also have the basic functionality of putting the leads into follow up or completed status
• Leads in messenger have all the prospect’s details as well as a clickable link which allows you to visit the leads profile to see more about them allowing for the sale to be even more targeted.
• There can never be a confusion on the leads end of when and where they made contact with you as they can see the chat history in their feed
• If you are dealing with a lot of leads, Facebook’s canned responses or Messenger bots make this a great option compared to Facebook Lead ads
• Lastly, almost all our campaigns result in a lower cost per message compared to our lead generated through Lead Ads. This is probably because the whole interface is just that more native throughout. The whole process starts and finished within messenger.

Closing Thoughts:

Facebook Lead Ads and Facebook Messenger ads provide one of the best and cheapest forms of lead generation available to all B2B and B2C businesses. If you’ve tried them in the passed and gotten stuck and the conversion process don’t despair you are not alone. Please be in touch below if you have any questions regarding anything to do with your Facebook Marketing funnel and we’ll be glad to help!
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