How to Build a Targeted Email List With Facebook and Quizzes

You may have heard the saying “The money’s in your email list.”

It’s true.

Email is still one of the cheapest and most effective forms of online marketing; therefore, it should be high on your list of distribution strategies.

Two questions remain though:

How do you build a list quickly if you aren’t getting much traffic to your website?
Then how do we incentivize visitors to hand over their email addresses?

Sure, we can use the good ole’ Sign up to our Newsletter pop-up or give something of value for free. But these tactics don’t always work for new visitors, who aren’t familiar with your content.

In this post, I’d like to introduce you to another list building option: quizzes.

You’ve probably seen them in your social media feed. You may have even taken a “Which Sex and the City character are you?” quiz.

These types have been made popular by the likes of Buzzfeed and Mashable, but that’s not to say humble website owners, like you and I, can’t use them to build a list too.

The case study I’m about to detail utilizes this quiz creation tactic and Facebook Ads.

Facebook ads is one of my favorite ad networks right now.

It's kind of like what Google Adwords was 10 years ago – there are still cheap clicks to be had in many niches – making it an ideal option for email acquisition campaigns.

In this post, you will learn how I quickly and affordably built an email list creating a simple quiz and promoting it via a Facebook Ad campaign.

Above is a screenshot of the results of the campaign.

The campaign ran for a total of 12 days.

According to Facebook, during those 12 days, 12,181 people saw my campaign, and I had 535 conversions. In actuality though, I only collected 508 unique email addresses, so my cost per acquisition (CPA) was a smidge more than Facebook reports. But still only a mere $0.42 per conversion.

That's a conversion rate of 4 percent, as in 4 percent of people targeted by the campaign clicked, entered an email address and completed the quiz.

Not too shabby, if I do say myself.

Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Create a Quiz

Yep, a quiz!

If you're a Facebook marketer, you might have used these before to engage followers. Buzzfeed and Mashable have used them extensively to engage readers and push up pageviews, but in this instance I'm purely focusing on using quizzes as a lead generation tool.

Create a Quiz About a Topic People are Passionate About

Get creative and write a 10 question quiz on something your audience is passionate about. Brainstorm some ideas and remember that marketing is all about testing. I've run quiz campaigns that have not generated the engagement required for a low cost per acquisition, but I've approached the same audience from a different angle and nailed it.

In the example I'm using here, I wanted to find out if quizzes could be a viable acquisition strategy for a business selling equestrian related products. And so I built the quiz: ”Should You be a Horse Owner?."

Note: We have built slightly more serious tests around web developer knowledge too.

I used Sit the Test Builder (Beta) to create my quiz. This tool gives you the option to collect email addresses up-front – before people take the test.

Step 2: Build a Facebook Ads Campaign

Once you have your test topic, creating your Facebook ads campaign should be pretty straight forward.

Use images that relate to your audience's interests and the quiz you've built. Grab something from your favorite stock photography source.

Initially, I like to test three different images as well as different post formats, as you can see above.

I also setup my target audience as part of the Ad Set preferences.

This campaign started off with two Ad Sets, AU-F-18-24 and AU-F-13-17.

These targeted women in Australia aged 18-24 and 13-17, respectively, who like horse riding, dressage etc.

I turned the 13-17 year old campaign off after a day as they may not make the best sample given they're probably unable to transact online.

As you can see I also tested a target audience in Texas – apparently they have the highest horse ownership per capita; however, cost per conversions were a little on the high side for my appetite so I only ran this ad set for two days.

Running regular reports on the AU-F-18-24 Ad Set showed me that cost per acquisition varied greatly from state to state in Australia, so after a couple of days I focused on the eastern seaboard states as they were the cheapest.

Step 3: Optimize the Campaign

If I was to take this campaign a step further I'd look to exclude the capital cities and see what effect this had on cost per acquisition.

At the end of the day; however, what we really want to know is: “Will these people buy something from me?"

Email Marketing to the List

Assuming you've used a quiz tool that lets you export your emails leads and that you've complied with the CAN-SPAM act, the next step is to import them into your email marketing software, such as Aweber, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor.

Then, you could, for example, segment people into separate lists based on whether or not they passed your quiz.

So if we'd tested people on their HTML/CSS skills, and they failed, we might send them an offer, suggesting an online course or book.

If they passed, we might suggest they sign-up to a developer job board.