Expanding your email subscriber base is crucial for eCommerce success. Meta Ads, encompassing platforms like Facebook and Instagram, offer a powerful avenue to achieve this.

Here’s a streamlined approach to leveraging Meta Ads for effective email list growth.

1. Create an Irresistible Offer & Landing Page

Begin by offering a valuable incentive that resonates with your target audience. This could be a discount, free shipping, an insightful eBook, or exclusive access to early product drops. When creating your lead magnet or offer, please ensure that it addresses a specific need or interest of your potential subscribers.

Pro Tip: If you average order value is above £100, consider offering a set amount as an offer, e.g: Sign up to get £5 off your next order rather than using a discount.

This psychology of promotions was first introduced Marketing Professor, Dr. Jonah Berger and offers an easy way to remember to consider psychological perceptions in what he calls The Rule of 100.  This rule states that for products or services over £100, a pound (£) discount will be more effective.  For those under £100, things reverse and a percentage discount will likely be more effective. 

Once you have decided on your offer, you will then need to create a specifically designed landing page to capture your new subscribers / leads. Ideally, this page will have a small amount of text detailing the offer and a sign up box – that’s it. We don’t want people getting distracted by anything other than signing up!

Pro Tip: Please ensure that you are tracking your subscribe button, or as a gold standard, the ‘Thank-you’ page they see after they have signed up. You can do this in your Events Manager. If you do not do this, you won’t be able to see any data inside of your ads manager.

2. Design a Compelling Lead Generation Ad

When new consumers sign up to your email list, you need to have an automation in place to deliver the offer immediately. Once the consumer has this, you then need to nurture them through a series of emails.

We recommend an email welcome series that:

Email 1: Provides to offer immediately

Email 2: Introduces your brand and story – your why

Email 3: Introduces best sellers

Email 4: Share customer testimonials

Your welcome series should build trust, and nudge your new subscribers toward making a purchase.

REMEMBER: There is no point in spending money on Meta ads to build your email list if you do not have an email nurture sequence in place. Please do this first before running your Meta ads.

3. Creating Your Lead Generation Ads

Once you have built your landing page and created your email automation, you are now ready to create your Meta’s Lead Ads. Focus on engaging visuals and concise copy that highlights the benefits of your offer. Remember, the goal is to entice users to share their email addresses willingly.

Here’s how to build your Lead ad in Meta:

1. At the Campaign Level:

Select your daily budget and ensure that the objective is clicked on ‘Leads’.

We would recommend setting a minimum daily budget of £5 a day for this style of campaign.

2. At the Ad Set Level:

This is where you set the targeting for your lead generation ads. For most brands, we advise going broad here and only targeting on demographics (age, gender and location). This is because the Meta platform is using more and more machine learning to find the right people for our goal, so we must give the platform the opportunity to do that for us. In 2025 and beyond, our targeting to find the right people for our ads, is done at the ad level with our creative and copy.

When you get to the audience controls, you will need to find the blue writing that says ‘Switch to original audience options’ and click that and then on the pop up, please select ‘Use original audience’ (grey box)

3. At the Ad Level:

Link your Facebook and Instagram account from the drop downs and then head to the next section.

Select manual upload, single image or video (depending on what you want to use as your creative) and click off ‘Multi-advertiser ads’. This will mean that your ad is not shown alongside competitors which we think is much better for results. Upload your image / video.

Add your ad copy to the ‘Primary Text’ box: This can be short and sweet and to the point. Lead with your offer. E.g ‘Join our emails today to get 10% off your first order. You can also enjoy exclusive subscriber only offers and secret product drops!’

Add your headline (this is the small bit of text that sits below the ad): This needs to be your offer / or key unique selling points (e.g sustainable handmade scarfs’). Please remember that your headline is character limited – so it will need to be very short and sweet to fit in the space

Add in your landing page URL: This needs to be your sign up page URL not your homepage or any other page on your website

*Your ads should look like the below, with different sized creatives for feed and story / reel places.

We recommend having at least 2-3 different ad creatives within your lead generation campaign, to ensure they appeal to a wide range of consumers. Either use the duplicate function or repeat the above steps do this.

If you want a faster setup, you can also use Meta’s built-in lead forms for a seamless user experience. We share step-by-step video tutorials on setting up lead forms inside of our membership portal. You can learn more about Ad Answers for eCom here.

Finally…

By implementing the steps outlined above, you open up your business to a huge potential customer base. And if you have a lovely nurture sequence in place, it is only a matter of time before new subscribers become new customers 🙂

If you need help setting this up or with anything Meta ads related for your eCom business, this is exactly how we are helping our membership members. Come and join us 🙂