Have you ever come across a website where it’ll give you a free resource in exchange for your email address, and you typed in your information with no hesitation?
If you want to have that exact same effect on the people who visit your website and fill your email list with quality subscribers, then you’ve come to the right article.
That free resource that was given to you as soon as you signed up for their email newsletter is called a lead magnet. That’s usually the term you’ll hear in the Internet marketing world. So for the sake of this article, I’ll use that term throughout the rest of this article.
Have you ever come across a website with an email signup form and it has some text below it saying,
“Join our newsletter to receive updates about the business”?
Did it make you want to subscribe to their email newsletter? I’m willing to bet the answer is no.
And if you think that’s just the way things should be and you have that exact same signup form on your own business website, then you’re losing out on a lot of potential customers.
So then, let’s start with this.
What Is a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is a free (Or low-priced) digital resource that’s given out to the website visitor when they sign up for your email list.
And depending on how your business set it up, the lead magnet will either be delivered via email or through a link on a redirected page.
A lead magnet comes in many forms. The most common ones are PDF files, an email series (Usually they’re called an email course), a mini digital course, and videos.
The main purpose of it is to help that new email subscriber solve a specific problem he or she is facing relatively quickly.
Here are some examples of some good lead magnets I personally came across and used.
Leah Gervais’ Seven Days to a Side Business
As far as I know, she doesn’t offer this anymore. But when I first came across her business in 2018, her website had a lead magnet that offered a seven day email course that guided new subscribers to build the foundation of their side business. And each email had a call to action to book a strategy call that led to a coaching program offer. Not only did the email course provide valuable and actionable information, but each email promoted her high-ticket services, which is a smart move on the business side of things.
Ben Settle’s Free Email Players Newsletter
This lead magnet is a special one. Before I explain why, a little bit about his business. In short, his main product is a monthly print newsletter subscription where he teaches his knowledge of email copywriting and other marketing related subjects. At the time I’m writing this, he has already published over 100 issues.
When people join his email list, he’ll deliver the first issue of his newsletter for free in a PDF format. And I say this is a special lead magnet for two reasons:
1. He’s giving away a product that has a real price tag on it for free, which makes it a lot more valuable right off the bat.
2. When his subscribers see the extra sales they made by putting the information in the newsletter to use, that is rock-solid, right-in-front-of-your-face proof that his product actually helps businesses multiply their sales. And that will make them a lot less skeptical when they decide if they want to invest in his newsletter subscription.
Justin Goff’s Private Email List
So far, this is the only case where I’ve seen someone set their business up in a way that in order for people to join their email list, you have to submit an application. Even though, technically, there is no lead magnet, the value in joining his email list is the emails themselves.
Some people might say that’s a dumb decision on his part, but I think it’s genius because he’s filtering out the people who join email lists just to get free resources, which automatically increases the quality level of his email list.
I also like how that sets up a boundary of some sort between him and his potential customers. It’s similar to how I set up my freelance business, where I take people in as clients, but only if they’re on my email list because I share my application link with my email subscribers only.
So then, let’s get into the following question:
Why Is It Important to Offer a Lead Magnet?
Think about it this way.
Data privacy is something that’s being taken much more seriously now. And when it comes to email, people are very protective of their inboxes, they don’t want to receive any unsolicited emails. So to them, their email addresses are valuable. They’re not willing to just give it away to anyone (Unless it’s a throwaway email address).
So your lead magnet is something of value that you give to your soon-to-be email subscriber in exchange for their email address. It is their very first transaction with you. Even though it’s not a monetary transaction, it does serve as a gateway to build a relationship with them. And if you do it right, it’ll eventually lead to future transactions.
So in short, it’s important to offer a lead magnet because…
1. It sets that foundation of trust with your email subscriber.
2. It serves as an introduction to your business world and brand.
3. It’s simply an incentive for people to sign up for your email list.
Creating Your Irresistible Lead Magnet
Now let’s get into the good stuff, creating your lead magnet. Before you do though, there are things you need to keep in mind and some homework you need to do beforehand.
Do Your Market Research
Aside from making profits, the main goal of all businesses is to help solve their customers’ problems. So no matter what you provide, no matter what you do, it all has to go back to your market research.
And with the existence of the Internet, doing market research is so much easier now. In my book, How to Become an Email Titan, I have a chapter dedicated to teaching you how to market research along with three effective and reliable methods. But that’s not included in the sample chapters.
However, I will give you one tip right now.
When you do your market research, there’s no better place to get your information than from the source itself, your target customers.
Find them, talk to them, and pick their brains. Ask them questions that’ll guide you to creating the most attractive lead magnet.
Some of these questions can be along the lines of…
“What do you secretly want the most?”
“What makes them frustrated?”
“Who or what are their enemies?”
“What similar products or services have they tried, but didn’t work?”
Keep digging out the information from their brains until you have an extremely detailed target customer profile.
Focus on One Thing
This is marketing 101. I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying, “If you try to help everyone, you’ll end up helping no one.” It doesn’t just apply to life, but in business as well. More often than not, focusing on one thing will get you better results than if you were to focus on multiple things.
I’ll give you an example: Selling through email.
I’ll explain this with a case study. Neville Medhora, who’s the face behind Copywriting Course, used to own a dropshipping business called House of Rave, and it was pretty successful. Before he sold it, it was generating enough income to pay his bills, grow his savings, and he still had enough money leftover to splurge on whatever he wanted.
He also had an email list of over 7,500 customers, but he’d never send a single sales email out until a friend of his told him to start doing it.
He’d start sending out a monthly email newsletter that showcased a bunch of his products in a catalog. He got high open rates, but little to no sales.
After seeing those poor results, he tried a different approach.
With the help of his friend, he wrote a long plain text email promoting only one product. When he pulled up the results, he saw that he made 120 sales in just two hours.
That’s one example of the power of focusing on one thing at a time, or in this case, selling one thing at a time.
Now, how does this apply to lead magnets?
You want to make sure your lead magnet is focused on solving one specific problem your target customer is facing. I’ll use myself as an example. I’m in the email copywriting and email marketing world.
I already have a lead magnet, which is the sample chapters of my book, How to Become an Email Titan, which lays out the framework on getting started on building a robust email marketing system. Overall, it’s a topic that’s more on the broader side.
But I can dive deeper into one of the topics I talk about in the book and make that my lead magnet like: Building a quality, responsive email list, how to write eye-catching email subject lines, or how to plan email launch sequences.
First Impression Is Everything
Let me start this part of the section off with an instance that you may, or may not, have personally experienced.
I recently, at the time I’m writing this, joined somebody’s email list. This particular person is a coach who helps freelancers get more high-end clients.
After being on this person’s list for a good while, I looked back at the emails and noticed some things that were off-putting. The two big things were:
Seeing words in the subject line that weren’t separated by spaces.
And when the person would manually send out a reminder email for a webinar, they would cc every single person’s email on the registration list.
Those may be minor things to you, but to me, it says something about the person’s attention to detail and their knowledge on email etiquette.
There was another case where I was on someone’s privacy policy page (For absolutely no good reason at all). When I clicked on their website hyperlink, it directed me to a completely different person’s website, which led me to believe that this person copied someone else’s privacy policy and pasted it on their own website. That made me question the website owner’s attention to detail.
So here’s what I’m trying to get at.
It’s important to give your new subscribers your best first impression because it can really make the difference between the new subscribers becoming your new customers and dead leads. It’s really no different than meeting a new person. If you meet someone new who gives you a bad gut feeling, you may decide right then and there that they’re unfit to be a new friend, partner, business partner, acquaintance, or whatever.
So make sure the subscriber’s journey from opting into your email list to receiving your welcome email(s) is clean and as close to perfect as possible.
I personally made a mistake of not making sure my optin journey was free of mistakes.
When I promoted my opt-in page using Facebook ads, the page wasn’t mobile friendly. When people clicked on my ad and scrolled through the opt-in page, the email sign up form wasn’t placed correctly, which made it impossible for people to join my email list. I didn’t realize until about $30 in and somebody posted a comment pointing out the mistake.
As a result, I made a terrible first impression, lost a handful of potential leads that time, and wasted my ad spend. So don’t make the same mistake I did.
Always Include a Call to Action
This is arguably the most important aspect of a lead magnet. If there’s nothing for your subscriber to take action on, then the lead magnet is useless.
Now when I say to include a call to action, there are two parts to this.
The first part is to include a solid piece of actionable advice that your subscribers can take to improve or solve a certain problem in their business or life. After all, you want your lead magnet to actually help them and not just let it be a useless bargaining tool to get them to join your email list, right? The last thing you want is for them to get your lead magnet and let it sit in their hard drive collecting cyber dust.
Another thing I’ll say about this is that you want to give advice that’ll help solve only one problem. I know I mentioned this earlier, but it’s that important. It’s almost impossible for you to solve every single business problem your subscriber is facing. And even if you did, it wouldn’t make sense from a business perspective because then your subscriber wouldn’t need any further help from you, and your lead magnet would have way too much content in it, which your subscribers wouldn’t have time to go through. That’s why I believe the mindset of giving away all your best knowledge is flawed.
Now, the second aspect is to include a call to action that’ll give your new subscriber the opportunity to do further business with you. That can range from directing them to a page where you sell your paid products, booking a sales call with you, or taking them to a webinar registration page. Basically, you’re doing an upsell, or cross-sell depending on what your business is.
I know the people who complain about info products always saying things like, “This product has zero helpful information, it’s just fluff!” or “This is basically a sales pitch” will not like what I wrote. They’ll think that it’s unethical or shady.
No my friend, that’s business, and let me tell you something about business.
Upselling and cross-selling is done all the time!
Yes, that includes at the restaurants you eat in. Does “Do you want fries with that?” sound familiar to you?
It’s also done in online stores. Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” section is a perfect example of cross-selling.
A lot of times, you probably don’t even know you’re being upsold or cross-sold until you realize you spent more money than you intended.
I’ll stop there before I go on a long rant.
So before I end this off, I’ll just say one last thing.
Once you follow what I said in this article and set everything up correctly, you should start getting some new subscribers onto your email list (Assuming you’re driving traffic to your opt-in page). Once they’re on your list, it all comes down to building that relationship with them.
In my admittedly biased opinion, the best way to do that is to write engaging sales emails that I teach you how to do in my book, How to Become an Email Titan.
To get the sample chapters of the book, click the link below.