Lead magnets are one of the most effective strategies for getting leads to a business—it’s in the name, after all. When done well, they can help you build a highly targeted email list.
The best part: lead magnets are, by and large, a passive way of generating leads. Depending on their complexity, of course, you’ll have to spend some time and effort upfront developing it. However, the payoff is more than worthwhile.
Below, we’ll explain what lead magnets are, how they benefit your marketing strategy, and how to create one in just five steps.
What is a lead magnet?
Lead magnets come in a wide variety of forms, but at their core, they’re valuable pieces of content offered to your target users in exchange for their email address.
Chances are you’ve come across them as an everyday consumer. For instance, retail and ecommerce brands often entice shoppers with a special coupon or offer; users need only share their email address to claim it.
The lead magnet in the example from Hydro Flask above is free shipping. However, coupons and discounts aren’t the only things you can offer as lead magnets. They can be any useful resource—ideally, something that relates to your business and that your target customer will find valuable.
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Common lead magnet types
Lead magnets are valuable resources offered to potential customers in exchange for their contact information. They are essential tools for building email lists and nurturing leads. Here are some common lead magnet types:
- Ebooks: In-depth guides or reports on specific topics that provide valuable information and insights to the reader.
- White Papers: Detailed, authoritative documents that address complex issues, often backed by research and expert analysis.
- Calculators: Interactive tools that allow users to input data and receive personalized results, such as cost estimators or savings calculators.
- Checklists: Step-by-step lists that help users complete tasks efficiently by ensuring they don’t miss any important steps.
- Cheat Sheets: Quick-reference guides that summarize key information, tips, or formulas on a particular subject.
- Webinars: Live or pre-recorded online seminars where experts share knowledge and engage with the audience through Q&A sessions.
- Printables: Downloadable documents that users can print and use, like planners, worksheets, or coloring pages.
- Templates: Pre-formatted files or documents that save users time by providing a starting point for creating their own content.
- Toolkits: Bundled resources that offer comprehensive assistance on a topic, often combining guides, templates, and checklists.
These lead magnets are effective because they provide immediate value to the user while allowing businesses to grow their contact lists for future marketing efforts.
Why should your marketing strategy include lead magnets?
Offering a lead magnet is a quick and passive way of collecting the contact information of users that may be interested in your product and message. If you can develop a quality lead magnet, the email list that results is more likely to lead to conversions than almost any other marketing resource.
Creating an effective lead magnet takes effort, though. After all, it must be genuinely useful and valuable in order for someone to willingly give up their personal information. Your lead magnet should also be relevant to your business’s niche or industry—otherwise, you’re offering a great resource in exchange for mediocre leads.
For these reasons, creating a strong lead magnet requires careful planning and execution.
How to create a lead Magnet in 5 Steps
A poorly designed lead magnet can fail in plenty of ways. Ineffective lead magnets may be too broad, collecting emails of people who don’t care about your niche in particular. They can also give people a bad impression of your business if they look unprofessional.
When done right, a good lead magnet should positively reflect and represent your business as a trustworthy and authoritative company. How exactly can you do that? Follow these five steps to create an enticing and effective lead magnet.
1. Describe Your Ideal Customer
Before you even begin to plan your strategy for a lead magnet, take a step back. The goal of a lead magnet is to develop a high-quality email list—that is, leads that would realistically consider using your product or service.
Your first step should thus be to describe your target audience. When you know exactly who you want to reach, marketing becomes much simpler. That includes ideating and creating your lead magnet.
The more specific your ideal customer is, the better. Ask yourself questions like:
- What are their demographics? Think age, gender, location, income, education level, and even family size.
- What is their day-to-day life like? How do they spend their time, both in and out of work?
- What are their pain points? What’s causing them problems every day?
- How can your product or service solve one or more of their problems?
A great “ideal customer” might be a 50-year-old woman who works in marketing and has a large family; she doesn’t have time to keep her house clean, and your cleaning company can help her with weekly visits. This answers all of the questions above and provides a great jumping-off point for the next step.
2. Identify Your Value Proposition
Your value proposition is the reason for engaging with your material. When you’re creating a lead magnet, you need to provide something worthwhile for your potential leads. Otherwise, they’ll have no reason to download your offer.
When you’re identifying a value proposition, consider your ideal customer and their pain points; a great lead magnet should solve one of their problems. It doesn’t have to be a huge resource or something you could sell. Instead, think narrowly and offer a five-minute solution for something immediate and irritating.
Consider the client designed earlier—a 50-year-old marketer with a large family. If she’s struggling to keep her house clean, you could offer a video for cleaning a microwave in minutes or a guide about removing ground-in stains. Both options can solve an immediate problem and demonstrate your expertise.
3. Determine What Type of Lead Magnet to Create
After you’ve identified your value proposition, it’s time to choose a delivery method—as in, what kind of lead magnet to create.
Some value propositions can be delivered in multiple ways; for instance, almost all types of information can be conveyed in a video, article, or slideshow. Other value propositions are more nuanced and require some creativity.
Either way, when deciding what type of lead magnet to create, you should consider these two questions:
- What format aligns with your service?
- Does the format in question appeal to your target audience?
“Aligning” with your service involves keeping your messaging consistent. For example:
- If you already offer a lot of video content, then a one-minute video demonstrating how to do something is a great complement to your existing library.
- If you want to highlight your design skills, consider creating an infographic.
- Does your product or service require specific client info? Offer a quiz with personalized results.
Choosing the right type of lead magnet—whether that’s a checklist, recorded webinar, or something else—also depends in large part on your ideal client. If they’re a busy person, they might prefer consuming short and snappy videos. Or, if they’re highly educated and well-informed about a topic, they might appreciate more in-depth pieces of content, like an ebook.
4. Create a Quality Opt-In Page
Once you’ve hammered down your lead magnet’s value proposition and format, you can start developing a landing page for it—which is also known as an opt-in or squeeze page.
This is the page where people can choose to opt in to receive your lead magnet, and it’s the most important part of the process. Here, a potential lead decides to trust you with their email address.
Just because someone’s landed on this page doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily submit their info. For this reason, you should put as much thought and effort into your opt-in page as you put into your lead magnet itself.
There are four important elements to a quality opt-in page:
- Your value proposition
- A breakdown of the benefits
- Quality visuals
- A call to action
Your value proposition can live in the page’s headline. Be descriptive, but keep it concise. Numbers and action words are great for catching the eye. The breakdown of benefits doesn’t have to be long, either. For short lead magnets, you can even mention the single important benefit in a subtitle.
Visuals vary from brand to brand. You want your page to appeal to your ideal client while directing the eye to the most important part of the page: the call to action.
Large buttons, clean designs, and contrasting colors are all excellent ways to guide the eye to the opt-in button. Your call to action should give your potential leads a concrete step to take: taking advantage of the lead magnet by giving you their email. It should also incite a sense of urgency. Try using words like “today,” “now,” and “free.” These help the reader make a quick decision instead of hesitating, and lock in your lead.
5. Put It All Together
Once you have your ideal client, value proposition, type of lead magnet, and an opt-in page, you’re ready to put together a top-quality lead magnet.
If you have the time and production skills, you can make a lead magnet yourself.
However, if time and resources are a concern, consider outsourcing the creation process to a qualified designer or writer. These experts have the skills to put together a professional, useful lead magnet that will give your leads a good impression—and such an investment can be more cost-effective than creating it yourself in the long run.
One lead magnet can generate leads for years; doing it right in the first place will ultimately save you both time and money.
Real-life lead magnet examples
Learn best by example? If that’s the case, let these three awesome lead magnets serve as real-life inspiration for your own business.
MattressFirm’s Mattress Matcher Quiz
MattressFirm’s Mattress Matcher quiz is an excellent lead magnet example that captures all five aspects of a quality lead magnet.
For one, it offers a clear value proposition: Users will receive personalized suggestions for mattresses according to their specific needs and preferences.
To that end, the quiz is focused on finding out more about the potential lead, with questions like “What common mattress problem is most problematic for you?” and “What size mattress are you looking for?” Not only does this help MattressFirm give its leads personalized results, it also creates a segmented email list.
The quiz then ends with a simple but effective opt-in page—one that showcases mattress recommendations and offers a $100 discount if quiz-takers get their results emailed to them.
From the user’s standpoint, it feels like double the value, since they’ll receive both their quiz results and a coupon in exchange for just their email address.
InvoiceBerry’s Free Ebook
InvoiceBerry is an invoicing company that strives to help small businesses track their finances quickly and effectively. It offers a free ebook as a lead magnet: Small Business Finance 101.
This free guide is aimed at a specific demographic: small business owners who aren’t confident in their finance skills, and may not feel comfortable keeping track of their income or expenses themselves.
The guide covers important financial topics such as the important numbers a business should track and accounting mistakes to avoid. It’s useful for business owners, of course; however, it also emphasizes the sheer amount of information that needs to be recorded and the consequences of certain financial mistakes.
As a result, not only does the ebook demonstrate InvoiceBerry’s expertise, it encourages the lead to consider using a professional service like InvoiceBerry.
This opt-in page is heavy on the benefits of the ebook and even mentions that the ebook may help the reader get paid faster. In this way, it reminds readers of their pain points, offers relief, and implies that not reading the book will make the pain worse. This is a potent combination of motivation for potential leads.
Venngage’s Pre-Recorded Webinars
Imagine you’re looking to improve your skills in a particular subject. You read blog posts for tips, and one particular post offers a free webinar related to the very subject you’re trying to learn about. To save your spot, you just need to register with your email.
This is exactly what Venngage does with its webinars. The infographic-making company’s blog posts link to relevant lead magnets, presenting them as supplementary information that can be consumed in a different way (video). One example is its webinar about accessible design.
The webinar gives off the impression of being live with a CTA like “Save your spot” on its opt-in page.
In reality, it’s pre-recorded—so Venngage’s team doesn’t have to fuss over the logistics of setting up a live webinar. Instead, using WebinarJam, Venngage’s team can automate replays of its webinar but still run a live Q&A chat.
Because any new lead can sign up and access the recording regardless of when they stumble upon the squeeze page, this strategy is far more sustainable than hosting a one-off webinar.
Lead magnet tips & best practices
There are two main things to keep in mind when creating a lead magnet funnel. One, it needs to be valuable to your target audience. Two, it should be related to the services your business provides. In other words, the best funnel culminates in a win-win situation.
Here are ten actionable tips on how to create such a funnel:
1. Create Targeted Lead Magnets
As I pointed out earlier, people like free stuff. So when you run a paid ad on some generic item, there’s a high chance that lots of people will sign up to get the freebie.
But a great lead magnet is not supposed to attract “lots of leads.” That’s not good enough. It should bring “lots of qualified leads.” Qualified leads are people who might buy your products in the future.
So how do you attract qualified leads?
You need to research your target audience. Find out what makes your prospects tick, their interests, pain points, etc., then build a magnet around this data.
Consider this example from the Search Engine Journal. From the title, it’s clear that they are targeting SEO beginners. People signing up through this page will go through a funnel that is specifically tailored for beginners.
It’s a straightforward lead magnet funnel.
This unified communications quiz from Nextiva is a bit more complex. They share their content upgrade with people who complete the quiz. It’s a nice way of segmenting an audience before delivering an offer.
That segmentation comes in handy as it means Nextiva can send more relevant marketing content to people who accessed the free resource.
In summary, build a buyer’s persona and use the data to create a relevant lead magnet. The magnet should solve a product or service-related problem your target audience is struggling with.
2. Addresses An Immediate Issue
The best lead magnet funnels solve an immediate problem. Again, you’ll need extensive research to know what issues your potential customers are going through. Then find a way to create a magnet that addresses the issue.
Let’s say you have a digital marketing agency and you want to attract more leads in the affiliate marketing niche. What’s one of the biggest problems that affiliate website owners struggle with? Keeping up with Google core updates and ranking their websites. Therefore, you can set up a webinar discussing something like “2021 google ranking trends affiliate marketers need to know.”
The webinar addresses an existing problem and attracts a targeted audience.
Brian Dean of Backlinko has a similar funnel. He shares a guide instead of a webinar to get subscribers:
The magnet is perfect for his niche. It addresses an issue that his target audience relates to and gives him leads to whom he can market his services down the road.
3. Use Different Lead Magnets For Different Funnel Stages
Very few website visitors convert during their first trip to a website. It normally takes multiple interactions before a prospect can become a customer.
Your website will always have first-time visitors who are typically at the top of the sales funnel and return visitors who might be towards the bottom of the funnel. If you want your funnel to produce the best results, target both sets of prospects with separate lead magnets.
Leads at the top of the funnel are usually not ready to make a purchase. You can offer something warmer and educational, like a checklist or a guide.
Leads at the bottom of the funnel are usually ready to make a purchase. So you don’t want to waste any more time taking them through lengthy guides and whatnot. Give them a free trial or consultation to speed up the conversion.
4. Give A Sneak Peek Of Your Content
Consumers are generally reluctant to share their contact details online. So your lead magnet could be enticing, but some prospects will hesitate to sign up. That’s especially true if they are not convinced about the value proposition.
To avoid this, make sure the prospects are aware of the full value of your freebie. What better way to do that than through a quick sneak peek?
So if your lead magnet is an eBook, give a clear description of what it contains and how it solves your prospect’s problem.
If you’re a SaaS company offering a free trial, lay out the powerful features it comes with. If you’re using a webinar, provide a detailed description, or a sneak peek footage of the conversation.
5. Make Use Of Your Most Successful Content
Sometimes building a lead magnet is as simple as repurposing your most successful content. If you’re in that position, tap yourself on the back.
All you have to do is repurpose the content into a downloadable eBook, cheat sheet, etc. Then build the perfect form to attract subscribers.
You can use the same approach with virtually any piece of content. You can take the most successful testimonial from one of your loyal customers and build a case study around it. Then use the case study as your magnet.
Do you have a random webinar that blew up out of nowhere? Good, put it behind a form and let it generate leads for you.
6. Use Content Upgrades As Lead Magnets Within Content
If you don’t want to repurpose your precious best-performing content, consider creating a content upgrade.
Let’s say you have a weight loss blog and your best performing article is on a general topic like “what is the keto diet.” Instead of repurposing this blog post, create an extra piece of content that builds upon it. You could, for instance, create a 7-day keto diet meal plan or even a 30-day meal plan. Then display this meal plan somewhere on the Keto diet article.
The content upgrade will ride on the success of your best-performing article to give you more leads. SmartBlogger uses a similar approach:
The free training is included in an article discussing how to make money blogging. Therefore, people who land on that page are probably interested in learning about the most profitable niches as well.
The article is also ranking number two on the SERPs, so it’s definitely generating a lot of traffic.
7. Don’t Limit Yourself To eBooks
There are several reasons behind the popularity of eBooks as lead magnets. For starters, eBooks are generally well-detailed. That means prospects can get more value from it. Meanwhile, eBook creators get an extensive platform to showcase their expertise.
However, there are scenarios where eBooks are simply not that effective.
In such a case, something like a quiz could get you the results you want without breaking the bank or wasting your time. A simple but interesting quiz funnel with around ten questions is enough to get you the email addresses you want.
That’s what the copywriter Ashlyn of Ashlyn Writes does. She has a brief quiz magnet of just 11 questions. The goal of the quiz is to help business owners identify their brand voice. The quiz is a mixture of personality questions. At the end of the quiz, she asks her prospects for an email address to send the results. It’s a simple, super-effective strategy.
Quizzes aside, you can also use cheat sheets. These are a bit easier and cheaper to create compared to eBooks. So you can make one for skincare, haircare, and other product categories.
The bottom line is you should not limit yourself to eBooks simply because other people seem to be getting impressive results from them. You need something that your target audience is interested in.
8. Provide A Package Deal
The whole point of a lead magnet is to present an irresistible deal. But everyone knows this, and that’s why lead magnets are commonplace in the digital world. So what can you do to make your value proposition stand out? Simple, raise the stakes by providing more than one resource.
So, instead of giving your prospects a “checklist every aspiring blogger needs,” take it a step further. Include a top 10 or 20 list of the most profitable niches. You can even take it as far as providing a guide on SEO copywriting. And make sure to mention all the resources in the description.
Will this approach consume more of your time and finances? Yes, it will. But on the bright side, your package will probably be more compelling than what most of your competitors have to offer.
9. Test Lead magnets With A/B Testing
The performance of a lead magnet varies from one industry to the next and how you present your freebie. For example, a sidebar form could be better than a pop-up. Even the landing page design can influence how many people sign up to your email list.
That’s why A/B testing is an integral p art of lead magnet funnels. You need to perform split tests to see which variables favor you.
So test different magnets, change up the CTAs and design of your landing page, switch your signup form from a sticky sidebar to a pop-up, and so on. These tests will show you how to get the most out of your lead magnet funnel.
10. Consistently Deliver High-Quality Content
One of the biggest mistakes you could make with your funnel is to make a promise you fail to deliver. Remember that a lead magnet is only effective if it has value. It must solve an existing problem and show your business positively if you want the prospect to be impressed.
You have to create a high-quality freebie. There’s no way around this. Think of something your audience can’t get with a simple google search. Create an actionable resource, not some general, vague stuff. And avoid using clickbait on your landing page.
Conclusion
Lead magnets are a powerful lead generation tool. In short, they demonstrate your brand’s expertise, help your potential leads solve a problem, and build a quality email list along the way.
Of course, not all lead magnets are created equal. Done poorly, your lead magnet will either net zero leads or only lure low-quality ones. That’s why it’s crucial to create a top-notch lead magnet.
Identifying your ideal client and value proposition is paramount to creating a lead magnet that leads to conversions. Make these choices thoughtfully, and you’ll develop a lead magnet that brings in new clients for months—even years—to come, without any further investment.
