If you’re telling visitors, “Sign Up For My Mailing List,” while your email account is growing slower than an iceberg … it’s time to consider offering a lead magnet that provides immediate value, builds your email marketing list, and paves the way for future sales.
What is a lead magnet?
If you’ve downloaded a webinar workbook, requested a home organizing checklist, or discovered your Myers-Briggs personality type, you’ve seen a lead magnet. Someone has your email now, and you’ll be hearing from them soon.
Why does that matter? When your business attracts the right people to your email list, you have a channel to start new conversations on auto-pilot, lead visitors back to your website, and generate revenue with new offers. You can identify and track subscribers by opens and clicks. And you can test new content and messaging on a warm audience.
Even with inboxes overflowing with messages from work, friends, and ads for every product viewed online, email works! In fact, it pays back a huge 4200% return on investment, according to a report from the Direct Marketing Association.
However, even tens of thousands of names on your email list won’t translate into more customers if your new tribe doesn’t want or need what you offer.
By sharing a resource in your area of expertise and solving a specific problem related to your offer, you pre-qualify new list members as potential buyers. You also position yourself as a go-to resource in your niche.
Get the Right Names on Your List with a Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a quick and simple solution for growing a marketing list full of readers who want to buy from you. It could look like a download you trade for contact information. It could also take the form of a software trial, an online course, or a quiz telling you why you’ve always felt an affinity to Margaret Thatcher or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Picking the Right Lead Magnet for Your Business
Who is your ideal customer? What are they struggling with right now? And how can you help? Your lead magnet is the perfect place to address a big question and move your reader one step closer to a solution.
There’s a lead magnet waiting to be made for any audience you can imagine. Here are 13 ideas to get you started:
Marketing Company – Case Study
SaaS Company – Free Trial
Cyber Security Company –Whitepaper
Parents – 27 Sanity-saving Summer Activities for Moms of Multiples
Food – 7 Savory Chocolate Sauces for the Summer Grill
Home Business – 20 Simple Steps to an Organized Home Office
Beauty – Get Glowing after 50 with 5 Fabulous Products Under $20
Marketers/Bloggers – 10 Free Graphic Design Tools You Can Use Today
Real Estate – The 50K Front Yard Checklist for an Irresistible Home Exterior
Fashion – The New Modern Italian Leather Primer
Health – The Quenching Crohn’s 2-week Starter Plan
Household – The Hip Homemaker’s 65-minute Emergency House Cleaning Plan
Professional Organizers – The Last Planner You’ll Ever Need
A note of caution: When planning your lead magnet, think about how you can take your reader one step closer to the results they want. If you give away the whole solution, you’ve just turned online publishing into an expensive hobby. Readers will be more likely to grab your resource and run, leaving you with unsubscribes, unopened emails, and a crummy click rate. Get them started … then lead them forward on your path to a bigger solution.
Good. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about creating your fabulous new freebie …
Designing Your Lead Magnet
It’s possible to create a high-performing lead magnet with everyday tools. For example, it takes only seconds to convert a simple Word or Google document into a PDF download.
Hire a professional to jazz it up. A professional copywriter or editor can help you inject personality into the text, make it readable, and eliminate typos. A professional graphic designer can transform a simple checklist into an attractive eBook your readers will download, save, and share.
There’s a designer for every business and budget. If you’re just starting out on a shoestring, check out the designer profiles on Fiverr. You’ll find affordable services with quick turnaround, so there’s no excuse for lacking a professional edge.
If you have a flair for design but aren’t sure where to begin, check out these online resources:
Canva offers free and low-cost graphics and customizable templates. Their tutorials show you how to create your own brand kit, how to select tasteful font combos, and more. Premium designs and photos cost $1 each. Design faster with Canva’s easy-to-use templates. You can modify these and brand them with your own logos, colors, graphics, and texts.
Gimp is free, open-source design software that gives you complete control over your images. It’s less user-friendly. However, this is the perfect choice for anyone running a Linux distro.
Font Squirrel and Google Fonts each offer a huge selection of gorgeous FREE fonts that are perfect for logos, design, and content.
Not sure how to choose the color palette for your download? Color Hunter will extract the perfect colors from pictures you upload. Fair warning: it’s somewhat hypnotic and slightly addictive. Design Seeds showcases color palettes from nature-based photos and displays the hex codes.
Adobe Color produces coordinated families of colors based on a starting code. Choose your palette based on any of the following color relationships: Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, Complementary, Compound, Shades, and Custom. Adobe also assembles custom palettes from photos and allows modifications: Colorful, Bright, Muted, Deep, Dark, and Custom.
Coolors generates multiple palettes for you at the click of your keyboard. Each coordinated collection is based on a single base color.
Pixabay, Pexels, and UnSplash are top faves for freebie photos. To avoid the generic stock look, choose images you might have captured yourself. Avoid images that scream, “I’m a model at a staged board meeting” and white gumby-like cartoons.
How to share your lead magnet
Now that your lead magnet is finished, it’s time to share it. Splash a picture of your freebie across your social banners. Add a link to email footers and social profiles. Drive warm visitors to a landing page with ads. Or make a new page for your website and feature your recommended resources, including your opt-in.
Conclusion
In as little as one hour, you can have a lead magnet people want to download and share. You’ll open a new opportunity to invite readers into a new conversation. And if they find value in what you offer, they’ll share it with others and do your advertising for you
