Did you know collecting emails improves your ROAS too?

Obviously, collecting email addresses help your email marketing performance. But few realize this is actually key to your Meta ads performance as well.

Why capturing email addresses improve your EMQ!

Awhile ago, I explained what your Meta Ad’s EMQ score does and the drivers behind this critical score.

Meta prioritizes different data types. Some give Meta better targeting signal, some are less important.

Source: Meta Ads Event Match Quality

Let’s break this down.

The two most important data types Meta looks for are email addresses and Click ID.

Click ID 

What is it? This ID number is generated by Meta and automatically associated with your customer’s events. For example, if they click on your Meta ad and gets directed to your site, there is a Click ID associated with that event. This Click ID is used for Meta’s attribution calculations.

How to get more of this? This is automatically generated depending on how many ads you run on Meta. So the more events you can create within the Meta Ads ecosystem, the more Click IDs it generates for you.

Email Addresses

Why we like this? Because Meta Ads’ algorithm loves email addresses — and it’s something we can control.

Why Meta loves this? Because across all of Meta’s products (like Facebook, Instagram, etc), email addresses are what Meta uses to identify all their users. Every user logs in with an email addresses, so Meta has this information across all their users. The more email addresses you can send to Meta, the easier it is for Meta to match your site visitors to a Facebook or Instagram user.

How do you get more email addresses?

Email address collection is a gray area. Not everyone does it in a compliant way. Considering I’m a founder of a first party data app, compliance is basically my middle name.

So here are two compliant ways to collect more email addresses:

1. Get email address opt-in via popups or lead magnets

2. Get email addresses when customers check out

Obviously, optimizing for #1 👆️ is better — because not every customer makes it to checkout. If and when they do, you’re definitely guaranteed to get their email address.

There are many ways to optimize your popup or lead magnet.

The most popular way in ecommerce is to give out a ~10% discount, free shipping code, or exclusive content.

Ideally, you should design this popup to be as minimal as possible. For example, don’t ask for anything more than their email address.

Deciding which popup solution to use

Most brands use native popups that are built into existing platforms like Klaviyo’s or Omnisend’s. Using an option from an established platform is a very good idea.

Their popup solution is already well integrated into your major marketing platforms like Meta Ads, Shopify, etc. This means that they already go the extra mile for you in terms of associating the captured emails with your customer’s behavioral events, and so on.

Pay extra attention when using custom developed popups

If you do choose to use an unpopular popup solution or build your own, please be aware of its risks. There is a good chance the emails captured in these popups are not automatically associated with the critical behavioral events, like View Product, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, etc.

This means that the email addresses you send to Meta Ads does not come with the critical information these platforms need to know how to categorize the data.

For example, if [email protected] opt-in email and then added to cart. There is a chance that [email protected] is not associated with Add to Cart event properly. As a result, Meta doesn’t know that they should target [email protected] or similar accounts a particular ad campaign to retarget the prospect.

I have a real story for you

I have a customer (an ecommerce brand) who used a pretty random/outdated/unpopular popup solution. As I was looking at his data, I realized all the email addresses he collected were not associated with his customers events correctly.

So I wrote him some custom code to read the captured email addresses correctly, and associate the email addresses with each prospect or customer’s respective behavioral events.

Take a look at the before and after!

As you can see, right after I implemented this update for him — all his Meta campaigns started spending 5x more. While his ROAS remained stable at 2.5x. He was already profitable with that ROAS, but now he 5x’ed his business, in 2 weeks.

He used to be stuck at a few hundred bucks per day on Meta’s spend. Now he can scale!

How did they achieve this growth?!

Let’s start from the top and analyze everything I talked about with his story as a real world example.

1. Target ads based on customer information (like email) — Meta’s algorithm uses all data types they can get on a single customer to target the Facebook user. For example: their email address, phone number, address, IP address, first name, etc.

2. Target ads based on your prospect’s funnel stage — Meta’s algorithm then uses the associated behavioral data to learn more about the different types of customers interacting with your business. For example: Meta knows this specific Facebook user is added something to cart, or another just initiated checkout. The algorithm uses this information to target your ads to similar user profiles.

3. Generate more Click IDs — As it sends more ads to your customers, it generates Click IDs to learn more about how each ad is performing with different user types.

4. Grow better — He now can scale his campaigns and 5x his business.

Let's take a step back and think about this whole email situation a little bit more. Marketing fundamentally is all about getting to know your customers better. Collecting emails is just a digital way of knowing who are your customers. The better you know about your customers, the more efficient the marketing campaigns will be.

Remember, whenever you get stuck, always go back to the basics.

✌️Here to help you win,

Yiqi