Who said you can’t get clients while being lazy?
Inspiration
This is my first time on a platform like Medium, but hey, we all have to start from somewhere don’t we? I hope you guys enjoy the content 😃.
I was actually scrolling through YouTube yesterday and a 3 hour course popped up in my feed, precisely, 3 hours and 30 seconds or for the techy guys 3:00:30. Don’t plan to offend anyone…yet… 😄. So me being me, I decided to check the course out and I can’t lie, freeCodeCamp.org does a really good job at enticing their viewers and their explanations are on point, not that they are my affiliates of course — though would love to have them onboard. Well, that’s a different story, so where were we?
Oh yes, I’ll be honest with you guys, no-strings attached, I’ve watched the course from the beginning to the end (I know, well done me👏) so that you guys don’t have to, sit back, get comfy and let me drop those gems. However, I have a confession to make, I may have stolen their content — don’t look at me like that Susan! Here’s the fun bit, I’m going to challenge myself to make these flows and develop them and then provide them to you guys for FREE. I think we have a deal🤝? Let’s get automating…
Setting Up With Facebook
Click on create a new campaign with a + symbol in the top left-hand corner.
Name your campaign. Of course it goes without saying, we never forget to name our pets — awww come on here Lulu.
Now that we have named our campaign, we need to know why we’re creating this ad. In our case, we’re doing it for lead generation. Okie doke let’s continue.
So leads have come through, now what? Well, we want to have some sort of tangible metric to convert the leads and that’s were Instant Forms come in…
…OK, ladies and gents, this is the most important step for heavens sake please make sure you get it right 😮💨.
Look, I don’t want you becoming bankrupt so please choose the budget sensibly. The higher the budget, the higher the number of leads. No rocket science 🚀.
Confirm your identity — you know what I mean. NEXT.
The next thing you would want to do is to have an ad that has a link to take you to the Instant Form. I’m no master of marketing, but a punchy headline and some descriptive words really do the trick.
Finally, the moment we all have been waiting for. This is quite self-explanatory so go ahead and fill in the details below. Just read the question carefully OK. Can I trust you to 👀?
Select the form you’ve created. Well done you for making it this far 👏.
Finally, click publish and wait for the leads to come in 😎.
Now that the boring but foundational stuff has been done, we can look to create a flow in make.com. Let’s see how we build that.
Facebook lead generation in make.com
Overview
Essentially, this is what the scenario should look like. The terminology is quite technical but don’t worry I’m going to be holding your hand throughout the entire process. The course goes to explain how Facebook: New Lead and the Google Sheets: Add a Row module work together to store the leads to a spreadsheet already created. However, what’s the point of all the hard work when you can’t even have a method in place to reach those leads. You’ve guessed it! That’s where we come in and we’ll look to use the Email: Send an Email module to make sure that those leads are contacted using their email collected in the Instant Forms.
Terminology
The scenario or the automation flow is made out of modules these are the round bubbles in the blueprint above. These are triggered when information is passed to it and an action is taken as a result. Sometimes it’s really difficult to retrieve information from pages of a website but webhooks make this so much easier and it allows the apps to communicate seamlessly. Simple so far? Good.
Course vs Curiosity
The course has a lot to offer especially to those who want to automate and streamline their business day-to-day activities. Here, I’ll show you how to go one step ahead and send email to those leads, helping you get clients for FREE using make.com.
First, using the webhook sign into to your Facebook account. Essentially, you’re allowing make.com to access your account in order for it to grab those leads and follow the instructions below. Come on buddy!
Secondly, sign into your Google account and find the spreadsheet where you will be storing the leads in. Choose the columns that make sense to you.
Well, I don’t know how excited you are but what I’m about to show you will probably blow your mind- don’t worry I’m not for real, come on bud!
Thirdly, using the data captured in the Facebook: New Lead module, select the data that resonates with the columns of the spreadsheet. For example, if we have the leads full name (from the Facebook: New Lead module) then this goes under the Full Name column.
Fourthly, sign into your email account, in my case, I’m using gmail so folks choose what suits you, no pressure…
…then select the email data captured from Facebook: New Lead module to fill in the Email Address 1. Obviously, nobody is going to read an email without a subject so remember to include one!
Finally, draft an email but before that we need to know the following functions:
- First function: returns the first element in an array
- Split function: returns with a bunch of sub-strings after separating the string with a given separator
I know it may seem confusing and it did to me at the start too but hold your horses and listen.
We know the lead’s full name and that contains two sub-strings in one big string then we apply the split function to give us two separate sub-strings. Happy up to here? Good. Now, we apply the first function to find the first name of the lead. See that wasn’t so hard, with a bit of logic anything is possible. This should be the quote of the year, someone make note😁.
To include spaces between paragraphs use
<br><br>
since it’s HTML after all, duh.
The process is the same, select the data which resonates to the email from the Facebook: New Lead module. That’s it, as easy as abc!
P.S. I’ve also found a way to draft an email without doing the work but won’t be sharing that until later. Stay tuned.
Results
So I ran the scenario by clicking on the run once button and voilà got my first result!
Findings
To be honest, its good to have a spreadsheet that tracks the leads as you can modify and track which leads need to be contacted or not. However, wouldn’t it be cool if we can save the time in having to write that lengthy email, well, I’m telling you my fingers can’t tolerate to type non-stop. That my friend, you shall find out very soon 🤫. Stay tuned. Peace!
