6 ways to automate Facebook Lead Ads

You've captured some leads in Facebook Lead Ads, and now you need to act fast. Depending on where your prospects are in the sales funnel, you'll likely need your sales team to reach out while they're warm, send them nurture campaigns, or create custom deals in your CRM. 

By automating this process every step of the way, you can avoid manually downloading leads and uploading them to the platforms you use the most. You can even build a fully automated lead management system that lets your team respond to every new prospect with speed and agility.

Let Zapier's Facebook Lead Ads integration do it for you. Learn four ways to automate Facebook Lead Ads and increase your digital ad funnel's success.

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• Back up leads in a spreadsheet

• Track leads in your CRM 

• Get customized alerts for new leads

• Nurture leads with automatic emails

• Generate custom deals and packages

• Use webhooks to fill in the gaps

• Advanced Facebook lead automation tips

Back up leads in a spreadsheet

Spreadsheets are the unsung heroes of any business. They're not always pretty or fun to look at, but they get the job done: storing all your most essential data while letting everyone across your organization access the information they need—even if they don't use your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool.

But the more places you store lead information, the harder it is to keep those records in sync. Automation lets you keep an accurate and up-to-date backup of all your leads. From there, you can use your spreadsheet as a central source of truth for other workflows (automated or not).

And if you like to stay informed about updates to your records without keeping Google Sheets open in your browser 24/7, use this Zap to send yourself or another person an email whenever a new lead is added to your spreadsheet.

Track leads in your CRM 

The ability to automatically send lead information directly to the CRM of your choice with the right integrations is essential. This prevents you from needing to remember to check every few days to download new data, import it into your database manually, and then take action.

Instead, the data automatically syncs on a regular basis—potentially even in real-time—so your team will have a lead's information the second they complete that form.

This allows your sales team to register all new leads instantly so they can follow up as needed. They can track the lead through the sales process in your CRM, seeing when to send initial messages, when to follow up, and when to push to close.

You can even have new leads added to your project management software so nothing is ever missed.

Of course, when someone clicks on a Facebook ad, you'll often still need to do a little research to fill in the gaps in their profile. You might need their full name, occupation, or other demographic data. These Zaps let you run that new lead through Clearbit to find and enrich your lead data before adding them to your CRM. That way, you and your sales staff can hit the ground running.

Get customized alerts for new leads 

It's not enough to simply have lead information show up in your CRM; you want to notify your sales team right away, too. 

This is crucial for businesses that have sales teams on hand for high-value products. If your business is in an industry like car sales, marketing contracts, and services, for instance, you want to be able to get in touch right when users are at the peak of interest (and before they start looking for other solutions). Automatic notifications for your sales team supports that work. 

If your sales team needs to respond to time-sensitive leads on the go, you can even use these Zaps to send a WhatsApp notification or SMS for new Facebook lead activity.

For National University of Health Sciences webmaster Rachel Campbell, it was a long process to get the university's Facebook leads into the hands of their Admissions team. Every week, Rachel would download leads, upload them to Hubspot, and then send them to the Admissions team, which uses a different CRM. Now, she lets Zapier handle all that.

"It literally saves me hours of work every week," she said. "In addition to ensuring we don't lose any leads due to manual error (of download/uploading sets of leads), it also saves me time. Our Admissions team is notified instantly, and our prospective students are contacted within 24 hours."

Nurture leads with automatic emails 

Striking while the iron is hot is important, and while your sales team needs to know about new leads, having an automated email system do some of the heavy lifting can be a gamechanger, too.

As soon as leads convert off of your Facebook Ads, have an email autoresponder ready to go so it can send out a welcome series right away. If you offered a lead magnet (like an ebook, access to a webinar, or a coupon code for a free class), this kind of automated workflow promptly sends your leads exactly what they expect. 

Ideally, you'll do the following when it comes to automatic emails:

• Send the first autoresponder welcome email right away, as soon as the lead form is generated. Your new prospect might be excited about the lead magnet they converted on, so getting it to them ASAP is important. 

• Keep the first email simple. Don't start hitting them with a ton of aggressive offers right away. Welcome them, confirm their subscription, and let them know you're there if they have questions.

• Send another email in a day or so with more information. This is why it's called a welcome series; your sales team can follow up a day or so later to assess where they're at and offer help, or you can offer additional content-focused newsletters. Test what works for your brand.

This leads to a better user experience, too. If you're manually downloading leads from Facebook and manually inputting them into your CRM and a database or spreadsheet, people could be waiting hours—or days—to hear from you. 

Siera Rejcek, an Account Executive at social media management company SocialStrategy1, used Zapier to streamline this process. 

"We use Zapier to input any leads that we receive from Facebook ads into a Mailchimp list," she explained. "We have also connected our Mailchimp lists to our Google Sheets, so that when a lead is added to our Mailchimp list, they are then added to a lead spreadsheet. Because these Zaps are performed every 5 minutes, we know that as soon as an individual requests information, they are going to receive a welcome email and then be contacted by our customer service employees via our Google Sheet."

Generate custom deals and packages 

When your sales team has the ability to create custom deals and packages for leads, you can expect to see your conversion rates increase accordingly. Even if they only seem custom or exclusive, that can help, too.

You can create deals or packages that are trackable as soon as new leads are generated from Facebook Lead Ads so you can track what's driving conversions. These can be generated automatically upon lead form completion, giving your sales team plenty of leverage to start off strong.

Use webhooks to fill in the gaps

Sometimes, you may come across a scenario where an app doesn't integrate with Zapier, or you need to customize (or format) the data differently to what you can achieve with Zapier's standard integrations.

When that happens, you can use Webhooks to fill in the gaps. This Zap will make sure every time you receive a new lead via Facebook, it'll be automatically sent to the webhook URL you define—and formatted how you like. 

Advanced Facebook lead automation tips

The best way to think about automation is as a well-oiled machine that manages systems, rather than just simple two-step workflows. Here's an example of an automated lead management system—visualized in Zapier Canvas—that a hypothetical sales team might use to respond to Facebook ad activity.

In this example, new Facebook leads are sent through ClearBit to be enriched before being added to a CRM tool like HubSpot. From there, the relevant salesperson is notified of high-scoring leads for immediate follow-up, while low-scoring leads are added to a Mailchimp segment for further nurturing. Go from Facebook interest to sales outreach (updating records along the way), all automatically.

Optimize your lead ads for your digital sales funnel

In many cases, using Facebook Lead Ads mid-funnel is the best approach. 

If the first contact that a user has with your brand is a lead ad, they're more likely to fill out a form after they've watched a video ad showing a demo of your product or an ad sharing a customer testimonial, for example.

Retargeting can be incredibly valuable here, especially as you set up a Facebook funnel. You can create custom audiences who watched that first video to completion or from your customer list. You can also use the Facebook Conversions API to target users who visited your desktop site, allowing you to reach warmer audiences right off the bat. 

With automation, you not only get leads faster, but receive more lead information because you have a more well-rounded and well-built digital sales funnel.

This article was originally published in February 2017, with previous contributions from Emily Irish, Ana Gotter, and Elena Alston. It was most recently updated in February 2025 by Nicole Replogle.