Today I’ll tell you about lead magnets. If you don’t have one on your website, or rather, a good one on your website, you should keep reading this post to discover a new way to get more leads and customers.
What Is a Lead Magnet and Why Do You Need Them?
A lead magnet is an irresistible offer about certain information, service, or any other type of experience with sufficient value for prospects to give you in exchange their email address or any other information that may be useful to you to eventually turn them into clients. A lead magnet can also be used by the reader at that moment to perform an action that helps you to become known, such as sharing on social networks the post they’re reading or talk about you.
For example, when you leave any of the posts in this blog, you may see the following lead magnet:
FREE COURSE
HOW TO SUCCEED WITH YOUR BLOG
Join our Newsletter and get the course lessons straight to your inbox to take your blog to the next level
I suppose that since you want to achieve success with your blog, it didn’t take you a second to subscribe to our mailing list in order to receive the course ? Or didn’t you?
Today we are all fed up with receiving many emails with advertising or information that we have not explicitly requested. And although this is much more regulated with the new GDPR, in general, we are reluctant to sign up for mailing lists. In fact, when you discover a blog with content that you find very interesting, why should you join their mailing list if you can already visit the blog whenever you want? This is where the lead magnet can be that little push you need to give your contact details.
Beware! If your goal is to get an email from a user and then blast them with advertising, without bringing anything valuable, they will quickly unsubscribe from the list or mark your emails as spam. So your goal should be for that user to receive exactly the information he or she would like to receive. And surely, if everything you tell them is interesting, they will also be interested in the products or services you offer.
Building lead magnets
For a lead magnet to convert, that is, for visitors to do the action you want them to do, you need to define and design a set of elements that are part of the whole conversion process.
First of all, you must define and create what “star product” you are going to offer your audience. For now, don’t worry about that. Later on, I’ll tell you 7 fantastic lead magnet ideas that you should try.
Then, define how you want to present that offer to your reader: will it be an offer that will be integrated in the middle of a post, like the one shown above? Will it be a pop-up window that will appear when the reader is about to leave your blog? Will it be an ad that is always visible on one of your landing pages? Or a simple button with a very attractive call to action?
You’ll also have to decide where you will store the data of your subscribers and which mail server you will use to send the different emails of your marketing campaigns (Mailchimp, MailPoet, Marketing360, Hubspot, etc). And you must understand how to connect your website with this mail server, so that the latter can store all the contact details you collect.
You’ll need to define the form or landing page where the user will enter their contact details. If your offer is integrated in the middle of a post, the same offer will already include the form to fill in. Alternatively, the form can be a new window or landing page to which the user lands after clicking a button.
Remember also that you must include the information necessary to be compliant with the GDPR. Don’t forget this to avoid possible legal problems in the future.
You’ll have to define a thank you page for subscribing. Don’t leave your new fan in doubt as to whether he has registered correctly to your super lead magnet.
Finally, make sure that the new contact receives the information you promised. And establish what other actions you should take to keep your new subscriber loyal and become a customer.
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The Lead Magnet Ideas You Should Try
Now that you know the process to follow when you want to embed lead magnets in your website, let’s take a look at 7 ideas you should try.
#1 Mini-eBook
If you are an expert on a subject, there will be no reader who is reluctant to read the complete information you can offer. If it’s just what the reader was looking for, they won’t hesitate to subscribe and read your mini-ebook from top to bottom.
A mini-eBook may have the following index:
- Introduction
- Theoretical framework
- Practical application
- Tools
- Advice and Errors
- Conclusions
- Sources
- Glossary
As you can imagine, the creation of a mini-eBook can give you a lot of work but Anum Hussein tells you the steps you must follow to create an eBook.
#2 Complete or Definitive Guide
A complete guide on a topic can be very useful for anyone looking for information on that topic. For example, if you already have a set of articles published on your website that make up the guide in question, it costs very little to offer the reader the possibility of downloading the same information in a single PDF file. In this case, what you are offering the reader is to always have the guide in question at hand.
This example of lead magnet can be found on Brian Dean’s website with his definitive Link Building for SEO guide.
Another option is that, instead of having the complete guide published on your website, you only have part of it, and you offer the link so that your readers can download the rest of the information.
#3 Checklists
As you well know, we love lists and we love to complete them: shopping lists, orders, the list of what to take with you on your camp or trip, etc. A useful and practical list is a good lead magnet for readers. And as it’s an easy resource to create, many bloggers easily point to the creation of this kind of lead magnets.
And remember, not only do they have to be lists of actions or tasks to perform, they can also be lists of questions such as, for example, what you should do when you want to hire someone or a certain service. Anyway, as you can see, with the lists you have a lot of options. And this is a much easier resource to create than the previous ones!
#4 Templates
Surely when you have had to do or update your resume, the first thing you have looked for are examples and templates. And so did you when you had to create a business plan or a formal letter, a planning of a certain topic, a submision, etc.. Templates are very useful resources to perform certain tasks and, therefore, they’re another great technique to get more leads.
For example, a fantastic template could be a spreadsheet with pre-defined formulas that we use for more complex calculations, such as a free excel template to calculate the LTV and CAC ratio of your business:
#5 Mini courses (off-line or on-line)
When you want to learn about a specific topic, you easily sign up for any free course on it. This type of lead-magnet is again a pretty safe bet to get leads. The courses also allow you to get to know and talk about your products and services in a much more colloquial way than with other alternatives, thus generating a closer relationship and trust with your audience.
If you don’t know where to start in order to create your course, in leanWorls you have an ultimate guide on how to do it.
#6 Free Trials
If you offer products or services, users who have already tried it are more likely to become your customers. Don’t hesitate and let people try your product, and you’ll see how well it works. A lead that is already willing to test your product for free is much more likely to become a real customer than one to whom you have offered information only.
#7 Discounts
Another alternative to get the contact details or, better yet, have your reader become your customer directly from the beginning, is to create a discount on your product and offer it to the reader exclusively.
For example, a reader interested in subscribing to Nelio Content has probably visited our pricing page. If, instead of subscribing, they leave the page, a new pop-up window will appear with which we offer them a discount code so that they can subscribe.
Conclusion
Increasing traffic to your website is not enough to get more customers and it’s critical to look for mechanisms to increase the conversion rate. How? Optimize your website with A/B tests and create the lead-magnets that we have proposed here. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments section below.
Good luck with your project!
Featured image by chuttersnap on Unsplash.
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