The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your List With Dope Lead Magnets
So You Want to Grow Your Email List?
You already know that content marketing can be a great source of traffic when you do it right.
But traffic by itself doesn’t make you money.
Turning a first time visitor into a customer involves building a relationship with them. Making that transition is a process that’s definitely longer than 1 visit to your website.
How can you keep in touch with someone long enough to earn the sale?
Enter: The Lead Magnet.
What’s a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is a carrot that you dangle in front of your site’s visitors. They can have the goodie if you can have their email address.
Lead magnets are important because they incentivize people to join your email list and when they do you have the opportunity to turn first time visitors into repeat visitors.
This should matter to you because it takes between 6 to 8 interactions on average with a lead to make a sale. (Sometimes it can take as many as 13 interactions to make your sale!)
Understanding how to create lead magnets and incorporate them into your marketing strategy will help you set up an automated process that helps visitors become customers.
What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?
What separates the low-perming lead magnets from the golden ones?
When you’re creating your lead magnet, you’ll want to be sure that it’s:
Problem Focused
Think about the products and services that you sell. Why do you offer those?
Because you know that your customers are trying to get something, and you know that your products are a vehicle to help them get there.
It doesn’t matter what your specific market is.
Whether you’re helping people grow their business, lose weight, be entertained, give a great gift, hit the golf ball farther, or have a great cup of coffee — all you’re doing is filling needs, and helping your customers get what they want!
Something that can help you brainstorm ideas for your lead magnet is to critically look at the products or services that you offer and think to yourself:
Think of your lead magnet as a “warm up” for your actual products and services.
For example, maybe you’re selling a yoga course. It’s for intermediate practitioners, and it’s about Bikram Yoga (aka Hot Yoga).
I’m sure people come to your courses all the time with questions, without the right equipment, and maybe even with some misconceptions — right?
Those are the kinds of topics you can address in your lead magnet.
For example, maybe this yoga instructor will have a 3-part series about Bikram yoga as a lead magnet.
Part 1 could be an introduction to the style of yoga, and overview of what to expect from your first class.
Part 2 could cover the equipment.
Part 3 could answer some Frequently Asked Questions! All you have to do is reference your email (or social media) and write down what people are asking you, and you can easily create a short PDF guide or a 5–10 minute video on that topic!
Specific
“Everyone wants a ‘magic pill’ or ‘silver bullet,’ so it’s always better to make and deliver one big promise as opposed to a lot of little ones.” — Ryan Deiss
Ideally, our yoga instructor wouldn’t call her lead generation magnet “The Beginner’s Guide to Bikram Yoga”.
That’s a pretty broad topic, and just from that angle alone it wouldn’t be very clear what to expect from that.
Case in point: Will there be instruction in Bikram yoga in the guide?
The answer is no from the sample flow we set out above, but that’s not clear just from the title.
A better specific promise might be “A Super Simple Guide to Preparing for Your First Bikram Yoga Class”.
I don’t mean for these to be headlines necessarily, but just to demonstrate the difference between the broader “beginner’s guide to Bikram yoga” topic and the “preparing for your first Bikram yoga class” topic.
Actionable
People don’t like fluff.
Whatever your lead magnet is, people should be able to take that information and directly turn around and apply it somewhere.
When you’re making your lead magnet ask yourself:
“How can someone use this? What can someone do with this information?”
So in our previous flow, someone who’s never been to a Bikram yoga class will now know: what equipment they need, where to get it, and perhaps they’d have some techniques to practice like knowing how yoga breathing will be different in a hot room (because coordinating the breath and the movement is the whole point in yoga) or maybe how they can practice for their classes before hand. They may even learn about some beginner’s mistakes they can avoid.
Valuable
“Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it should LOOK free.” — Ryan Deiss
If this yoga course was a video course, I’d advise this yoga instructor to use the same quality equipment when making her lead magnet (if her lead magnet was a video) that she used to film her course.
How Do I Pick a Topic for My Lead Magnet?
Questions to Ask Your Customers
If you want to have a lead magnet that converts well for you, then it’s a good idea to make it very customer focused.
The best way to do that is to create a survey with a tool like a Google Form or a Typeform and email your list.
You’ll want to ask your previous a few questions to get the downlow on what they’re thinking like:
- What’s your #1 challenge with (your niche)?
- What personal goals do you have about (your topic)?
- Why did you decide to buy X from me?
- What do you think I’m the best at in this industry?
- What other products or services have you bought to reach your goals in (your niche)?
- What’s really annoying you about (topic you teach on) right now?
- Is there a topic that I haven’t covered that you REALLY wish I would?
- What else do you read or listen to when you’re looking for information about (your niche)?
- What other questions do you have about (your niche)?
With these questions you’ll be able to find out more about your customer’s problems and goals related to your space.
Plus, with some of the questions you’ll be able to find out who they trust, what they’ve tried, how they think you stand out, and where they want you to go next.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Your previous customers and existing list will be a wealth of information, but there is some due diligence you can do on your part as well to help you select a kickass topic for your lead magnet.
- Review your social media and email for questions that you have been asked, keep track of them in a document.
- What misconceptions do you commonly find people have about your industry?
- Looking at each of the products or services that you offer: What does someone need to understand, feel, and believe to pick my solution for their problem?
- Which of my products or services are the most popular? (You will want to look to those topics for lead magnet ideas)
- Can I create a lead magnet for each of my specific products or services?
- What isn’t being talked about in my industry that should be?
- What is being talked about in my industry that is false, or a myth?
Lead Magnet Categories and Examples
Audio
I think that audio lead magnets are sometimes overlooked, but being in someone’s earbuds can really help you build a powerful connection with them!
You can have an audio lesson, and audio coaching session, if you have a podcast you could try bundling a few episodes together as a download, or you can do some special expert interviews and only allow those through download.
Check out this example of Marie Forleo’s audio lead magnet:
(It must be working for her because she’s been using the same lead magnet through several different website re-designs!)
Video
The good ole’ 3-part video series makes a great lead magnet, especially if you don’t know where to start!
A multi-part video series is meaty enough that the reader feels like they’re getting a lot of value, and it gives you the opportunity to pop up in their inbox several times.
Here’s an example of a 3-part video series by Amy Porterfield:
We already talked through one example of what a 3-part video series could look like for a yoga niche, so let’s look at another example.
This example will be based off of my friend Tomesha Campbell, she’s in the diet and wellness niche:
I definitely recommend you check out her website because she shares a TON of great recipes, and has a huge backlog of videos answering probably any question you have.
What could a 3-part video series look like for this 5 day challenge product that she has?
Part 1 could be “Grocery store essentials” where she talks about all of the food staples she tries to have in her home to put together meals.
Part 2 could be a “Kitchen walkthrough” where she talks about all of the gadgets she has to help make cooking easier, perhaps she could give some recipes.
Part 3 could be “How to plan a healthy day” where Tomesha could give a few guidelines on how you can plan your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She could also talk about her “fall back” meals, what she cooks for dinner when nobody knows what they want for dinner.
Remember, you want your lead magnet to be actionable and warm people up with the information they need to know before buying your product.
The trusty PDF download is another great option. You’ve got your:
- Ebooks
- Cheatsheet
- Guides
- Pack of several blogposts
James Schramko offers a PDF download of transcript of his podcast.
Some general conversion guidelines for lead magnets:
A 1% conversion rate is pretty bad, so 2–7% is a good target to shoot for. You can see conversions higher than that by having offers that are very specific to your blog post though.
For example, Neville Medhora sees a ~10% opt-in rate across his entire website by offering a PDF download of the actual blog post as the lead magnet at the end. Of the people who click to start the form, about 60–77% of them complete it and join his list!
Giveaway/Sweepstakes/Coupons
Finally, a classic in the ecommerce niche is to offer product discount codes or the chance to win a free product with the email subscription:
What Should I Charge For, and What Should Be Free?
A few people have asked me about this recently.
Sometimes you might feel a little icky about giving away a lead magnet, or just confused because maybe you sell something (an e-book, a video series) as a paid offering that you feel like other people give away for free.
Here are some good rules of thumb:
For ebooks, if your book is less than 50 pages it’s a great contender for a free lead magnet! What if your book is 80 pages, or even a full-length book of a few hundred pages?
You should definitely charge for longer ebooks, but a great lead magnet strategy is to give away a chapter (or sometimes the intro, a chapter 1, and then a later chapter) for free!
For audio, if it’s a standalone interview you probably shouldn’t charge for it. You can either use it as content marketing, or use it as a lead magnet.
If you have a bundle of audio files (maybe 3 or 4 interviews) and you’ve made materials like worksheets to go along with the interviews, that’s a great option for a paid product.
And if it’s a very lengthy audio course, like there are more than 10 tracks or files then that would be fine to charge for.
For videos, if it’s a single video that’s less than 30 minutes then use it for content marketing or as a lead magnet. If it’s one of our 3-part series lead magnets, then obviously use it as a lead magnet.
If the skill taught in the video requires an investment of time of a few hours (even if the content isn’t a few hours long, if it would take the person a few hours to master the skill) then consider charging for it.
Obviously a more complicated sequence of videos that are a course you can charge for.
Tools You’ll Need
So that’s the theory of creating your lead magnet, now let’s talk about what tools you can use to make and deliver them!
Tools for Creating Your Lead Magnets
A nice mic like the Blue Snowball or Blue Yeti (which I think is worth the upgrade, it sounds a thousand times better) is a must for audio or video content.
For video content, you’ll want to borrow a friend with a nice camera if you don’t want to pay for one yourself. If you’re looking to make an investment in your business’s video strategy, then the Sony a6300 can help you create TV-quality video.
Audacity is the only software you need for recording audio! Best of all, it’s free.
Open Broadcast Software is a free tool that will let you capture your desktop. It will also allow you to record from your webcam (and it takes audio from external microphones like the Blue mics for audio quality) if you want!
Canva is probably a tool you’ve heard of before, but they specifically have a TON of ebook templates if you’re trying to make a professional looking ebook.
Creating Optin Popups
This guide is all about creating the actual lead magnet itself, but the optin popup is obviously a very important part of distributing that lead magnet to your list so I didn’t want to leave you hanging without tools for this.
Skip SumoMe, the best paid option in the world for email optins is Thrive Leads because it’s a one time purchase of $67! So it’s even cheaper than using 1 year of SumoMe with the automated list import features (because that’s only on their paid plans).
A free option is Icegram for WordPress.
Quick and Easy Guidelines for Great Optin Popups:
Headline — Don’t bury the lede, say WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM right from the get go. Try to make your headline as specific as possible, remember our conversation on the difference between “beginner’s guide to Bikram yoga” and “preparing for your first Bikram yoga class”!
Have a brief description — Set the expectations for what the material will help them do, when they should expect it, and how long they should expect to spend on it.
Keep It Simple Stupid — Don’t ask for too much information, stick to the simple name and email.
Rock Your CTA — Don’t just GIVE UP by the time you get to the bottom! A “Submit” button is lame, and it actually HURTS your conversions. Your call to action should be just as specific and relevant as the rest of your copy. Experiment with phrases like “YES, I want my guide” and “Get my (your title of lead magnet) guide now”. Look at how other big marketers use their call to action buttons to get more ideas on how you can use yours most effectively.
If you need more guidance, here’s a helpful 63 point checklist to help you create the perfect optin form.
Delivering Your Lead Magnets
Phew, we’re almost done!
You’ve done all that great work on your lead magnet, now let’s talk about how you give it to your list.
Your files will need somewhere to live, so there are 2 easy options.
First, your email marketing provider may already allow for you to attach PDFs, audio, and videos in your autoresponders. Mailchimp does allow this for example.
If it doesn’t, or if you’d just like to keep track of your lead magnets another way you can host your files on Google Drive. You’ll want to upload your ebook or lead magnet to Google Drive, and then follow these directions to get a link where others can view the content. This method will work for videos, audio, and PDFs
You can also consider using YouTube for video or audio, you can use Canva to make a nice slide image to display in the background for audio files.
Many email service providers don’t allow something called “transactional emails”, or one-to-one emails. Some services like Convertkit were designed with lead magents in mind and have a builtin solution for delivering them. Some email services like Mailgun allow “transactional” (one-to-one) emails and do have free plans.
But if you don’t want to switch email services, or incorporate Mailgun then an easy way to get around this limitation is with email automation.
Directions for specific services:
- AWeber
- Mailchimp
- Convertkit
- Active Campaign (Form tag and automations with tags)
- Campaign Monitor
(If you use Constant Contact you just need to give up and switch to something else, they don’t even have support for multiple sign up forms as far as I can tell!)
When you build out the 1st email in this automation series you’ll want to have some copy thanking them for downloading (THE TITLE OF YOUR LEAD MAGNET) and that they can “click here to download it: (LINK TO YOUR GOOGLE DOC).com”
Putting it All Together
It can be A LOT of work digging up the market information, planning your lead magnet, actually putting it together, and setting up the systems to support delivering it but YOU WILL BE REWARDED with glorious, glorious email subscribers for doing so!