I think we found our way with Facebook Ads

So, Me and my GF launched a SaaS business in Brazil 2 months ago. It's hard to explain what it is as it only makes sense for Brazilians, but basically, we help students(B2C) with their ENEM(SAT-like) exam with content, human correction for their essays, and a platform to measure their growth.

Around 8 million people do this exam every year, and the SERPs have a huge monthly volume, It's a huge market.

We've been trying Facebook Ads since day one without much success converting people. I even spent a week learning After Effects and made a Video Ad that had 4% CTR, still, people didn't signup or buy for some reason.

Spending money on Ads without getting anything sucks. So we made another plan. My GF spent a week crafting a free course and we made like 20 Ads variations advertising the course. The thing is, to get the course you had to sign up and we sent an email welcome showing our value.

This time the results were different, we had a good amount of signups, like 200/day spending only $20/day. No conversions yet, but now we had people using our platform, we made sure that people could get some value from it even if they didn't pay.

The thing is, now we had an e-mail list of around 2k users that we could communicate with. Not much, but something. Also, we gained around 200 followers on our Instagram(not much but growing slowly).

Then this Sunday we sent our first e-mail marketing, it had no offers or anything, just tips and pointing content that we wrote on our blog and showing how a perfect essay for the exam looked like on our platform.

Then the conversions finally came and we made around $500 from this. Not much, but at least now we have an idea of a marketing strategy that can work for us.

TLDR: Advertise free content using FB Ads -> Capture E-mail or SignUps -> E-mail Marketing showing value -> Convert