Social media marketing has come into its own and Facebook has been the leader in new and effective developments. One of Facebook’s newer advertising products is the Lead Ads objective, and it’s a great way for restaurant marketers looking to build a loyalty program or e-club subscriber base.
Driving new subscribers to your email list or loyalty program can be a challenge, but Facebook Lead Ads for restaurants can be a big help.
What Exactly are Facebook Lead Ads?
Facebook Lead Ads are mobile ads that present a form, directly in Facebook, making it quick and easy for potential customers to give you their details. Traditionally, Facebook ads would take a user to another landing page with a form from a third party.
While Lead Ads don’t necessarily devalue a great landing page with strong calls to action, they may circumvent the need in some scenarios and even offer higher conversion rates resulting in lower cost per subscriber acquisition.
This easy-to-use marketing tool has been described by Facebook as “tap, tap, done”. In some cases, Facebook will even auto-fill parts of the form for your potential customers.
How do Lead Ads look to Facebook Users?
Facebook Lead Ads look very similar to your typical sponsored post with a CTA button. When users click on a Lead Ad, a form pops up with a few fields. The form will be mainly pre-filled from information already held by Facebook.
The user can review the info, makes any necessary changes and submit the form. No fuss and no additional website. The user can then happily go back to reading their Facebook feed and you can add their data to your contact lists.
Facebook also gives advertisers the option to add an explanation page of your offer before users are shown the form. Although in our experience, the less clicks to making a conversion, the better.
Praise from Early Adopters
Facebook Lead Ads became available to most businesses in October of 2016, and the initial feedback has been impressive. Conversion rates are much higher than traditional mobile ads, making Lead Ads something at least worth testing out.
Early adopters of Lead Ads include:
- Land Rover, who said their early data show Lead Ads clearly outperform its other click to website ads.
- Stuart Weitzman, a fashion site that calculated an increase in ad cost efficiency of 52%.
- Properati, a Brazilian property firm who said “ad costs are down and leads have risen since using Lead Ads”.
That’s impressive feedback from such a short time-period, and results are consistently positive across different industries.
Results around Lead ads for restaurants are encouraging as well. We’ve seen e-club sign-ups for our clients in the $0.50 range, more than half the cost of previous averages of new subscriber acquisition.
Facebook Lead Ads for Restaurants
If you’re interested in growing your e-club or restaurant loyalty program, it’d be worthwhile to test a campaign. For those comfortable with Facebook’s Power Editor, Lead Ads are almost as quick to create as they are to fill in!
A few short steps and a strong lead magnet are all you need to create and test Facebook Lead Ads. Make the request for your pop-up as brief or detailed as you need.
Even if you go for more than just the name and email address options, Facebook’s system fills in a lot of the additional information for the user, so additional entries shouldn’t decrease your conversion rates as an off-Facebook landing page asking for the same information.
Of course, Facebook Lead Ads aren’t perfect. Currently, you’ll need a third-party integration like Zapier to automate adding new subscribers to your email list. (The alternative is manually downloading a CSV file within Facebook.) And, Facebook currently offers Lead Ads on their mobile platform only, (sorry desktops).
However, neither should prevent you from testing out Facebook’s Lead Ads objective.
If you already have an automated welcome message in your email platform, Lead Ads and Zapier could be a 1-2 punch that cuts your subscriber acquisition cost to a fraction of what it is now.
Blue Bear Creative is a Denver social media agency focused on helping food and beverage brands market to millennials and Gen Z.
