9 High Converting Lead Magnet Ideas To Grow Your Email List

In life like in business, first impressions are everything. Differentiating your offer from the competition can be quiet hard nowadays, especially with this flood of content marketing and marketing automation. And this is why you need a high-quality lead magnet to make that impression. Lead magnets are all about luring your potential consumer by offering them value, in order to seduce them to give you their contact information and therefore retarget them in the best way possible.

What’s a leadmagnet?

Lead magnets are one of the most effective ways to build your email list. It is like a content piece, a free consultation or any other valuable knowledge; that will make prospects share their email addresses to receive it. A good lead magnet is designed in a way to help your potential customers solve the problem that brought them to your business, and at the same time maximize the number of targeted leads you are getting for an offer. This is a great way to build your email list with the awareness that email subscribers mean potential profit.

What makes a good lead magnet?

To be efficient and effective a lead magnet has to:

• Solve a real problem: it needs to give your prospects something they really want; otherwise it won’t work.

• Promise and deliver quickly: it should help them easily achieve something.

• Super specific: the more specific you are about the benefit of your lead magnet, the better it will convert leads.

• Deliver high value: by high value, we mean both high perceived value and high actual value.

• Promptly accessible: it needs to be delivered right away. People love immediate satisfaction.

• Demonstrates your expertise or unique value proposition: this helps turn leads into customers at high rates.

9 useful lead magnet ideas:

It is really important to know what types of content are good lead magnet options for your business. Here are 9 lead magnet ideas that you can curate from the existing content on your website or around your business:

1- Offer content upgrades:

Imagine that you are writing an article on “10 techniques to come up with fresh ideas for your blog”; you can create a content upgrade, by displaying only 5 and enabling your readers to access the other 5 if they provide their email address. Proof this works: when Brian Dean tested this tactic on Backlinko, his conversion rate of readers to subscribers increased from 0.54% to 4.82%.

2- Build your own capture tool:

Although this tactic is one of the most effective allowing you to capture leads at a 30-40% conversion rate; it is also one of the most underexploited. The main advantage of this tactic is to provide your visitors with something personalized and valuable right away. Who wouldn’t like that? One of the easiest ways I can suggest you to build your own capture tool, is Leadformly. Otherwise, you can hire a developer on Freelancer.com – however this will likely take longer and cost more. Hubspot’s marketing grader is a good example of this tactic; after entering your website’s URL and email address, the tool generates a report on how you can improve your website.

3- Offer Cheatsheets, templates, and scripts:

They give the user a list of recommendations or a process that they can follow over and over again to achieve a specific result. All the user has to do is to fill in the blanks.

The Magic Email Template is a great example; it’s something that entrepreneurs and small business owners can simply copy and paste, modify a few words, and then send off to instantly connect. Scripts also are a great lead magnet if your buyer persona needs something to help them speak or write. For instance, if they need help with cold calling, you could offer them a script for pitching their offer to potential customers.

4- Create Infographics:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, an infographic can take that concept 10X times. By integrating attractive graphic design and information, such as statistics or related facts, you can create a story tell in a single image.

Infographics are typically the type of content you’ll use for generating traffic to your website since they do so well on social media. However, they also work very well as educational lead magnets. Indeed, so many people need to visualize a concept first, before they can fully understand it and therefore buy it. So why not make it simple for them and illustrate your idea with an infographic? This extra level of detail and creativity will make your lead magnet stand out much more.

5- Give expert free consultation:

Many lawyers offer free consultations as lead magnets. This could be a great base of your funnel. If you offer a service, or you are positioning yourself as an expert in your field, you could try to create a lead magnet that offers your visitors the chance to receive a free expert review. The best thing about a free consult is that it gives you a very natural excuse to ask for their email address, and even a phone number and other relevant information. If you prefer talking on the phone to writing emails, then offering a 30-minute free consultation is a practical lead magnet. This procedure doesn’t demand a lot of preparation and resources. This advantage goes straight to authentic, human connection; the new “subscriber” becomes then a business relationship. If you can deliver valuable insight and help educate, free consultations will take you closer to making the sale.

6- Ebook, free guide and reports are always a good idea:

An eBook, a free guide or a report are the most classic types of lead magnets; what they all have in common is to provide a lot of data in a compact form. However, they are not all alike, especially in term of conversion rate.

-An e-book for business is like a white paper but covers more comprehensive topics in a more entertaining way. One thing though, they should be influential, but not too technical so that they can be accessible to a larger audience. I personally don’t recommend using eBooks as a lead magnet because they tend to be lengthy and difficult to consume. I personally think that is not worth spending weeks to write an entire eBook when you can get better conversions from a PDF that will take you 15 minutes to put together. However, sometimes an eBook can work, and for that, you really need a very strong benefit, otherwise, why should someone take the time to read your eBook?

-A guide is similar to an eBook but it is a longer lead magnet to create. However, guides can work really well, when you use them in your sales funnel as educational tools for your prospects about why they should buy your products. One good example is the guide from HubSpot: The Definitive Blueprint for Lead Management. This works because it educates their users on why they need a lead management product like HubSpot.

-Reports, personally they are my favorite in this category, they are especially good lead magnets for B2B businesses, but they can also work in every industry that relies on data, statistics or research. You can either collect the data yourself, or you can pull together data from different sources into one, inclusive report.

7- Free trial, and samples Vs coupons:

-Free trial and samples are usually offered as a lead magnet from software companies. Bidsketch, a SaaS proposal building application, does this particularly well by offering a free sample proposal as a lead magnet to capture potential customer’s email addresses. Anyone who wants to see the product in action can enter their email address. They are immediately taken through an interactive demo of how the tool works to help them grow their business and get work done. Each lead is also added into an autoresponder that follows up with them if they don’t go through with the purchase. The main reason this lead magnet works, it’s because people love tools that help them save time and be more productive; but only at one condition “the simplicity of signing up”.

-Coupons are also a very common lead magnet; in fact, promo codes and free shipping were used as a basic component of e-commerce marketing from along time ago. But the idea of your visitors entering their email address to own the discount is stimulating and offers a strong catch for e-commerce sites to build their own email list of potential customers.

Personally, I do not prefer discounts and coupons because a customer who buys with coupons will always buy only whenever a coupon is available.

8- Entertain with quizzes and surveys:

Why do site like the Oatmeal and Buzzfeed feature so many quizzes? In short, they generate huge amounts of social engagement and are great for capturing email addresses. Surveys and quizzes are quite possibly the most amusing lead magnet on this list, and that’s why they convert so well. A quiz has the user answer a series of questions and then spits out a result, a survey is on the other hand mainly for your benefit as market research. An online quiz or survey can be a very engaging way to generate new leads. To get the results of the quiz or survey, participants must give an email address. The results will then be delivered to that email address. Why do they work? Simply because people are vain. We always want to know more about ourselves as well as compare ourselves to others. The vast majority are willing to enter their email address to discover some information about themselves. You can use a quiz building tool like Interact to create these quizzes.

9- Offer Video content:

You probably already know it: "video content is the future". Videos include both a visual component and an audio component as well. Plus, you can put real people in front of the camera to really boost your brand and make a connection with your customers. But the best part is, videos have a higher perceived value, making them much more irresistible. You can also opt for webinars; they also have high perceived value. In fact, they are even more appealing because they have another main component: urgency. Since live webinars only occur at specific times and may have only a limited run, they play on the “fear of missing out”.

If none of the above works with you, or you don’t have enough content already developed, a good brainstorming session can be useful for organizing your thoughts. But remember, a lead magnet that will encourage your target audience to share their information, has to be specific to your business.