7 Lead Magnet Examples To Grow Your Email List
Supercharge your marketing with irresistible special offers.
If more leads, better targeted leads, and leads with higher levels of interest sound appealing to you, boy do we have something special in store today. One of the most powerful weapons in a marketers customer attraction arsenal is a lead magnet, and there’s a chance you’ve not given them the attention they deserve. Lucky you, today’s blog post is all about the different types of lead magnets and how to use them effectively to acquire and qualify inbound traffic leads.
What is a lead magnet?
Put plainly, a lead magnet is a compelling offer that you give away in exchange for a prospect’s information, often their email and sometimes more.
Check out this example from Digital Marketer:
What do you see here?
- A dedicated landing page (we highly recommend Leadpages)
- Super focused sales copy
- Some sort of downloadable content piece (in this case, templates)
What you don’t see if some sort of email capture, but that happens once you click the “Download Now” button.
This lead magnet example brought in almost 36,000 leads in about two months for Digital Marketer! Seems like something worth trying out, doesn’t it?
But a lead magnet isn’t simply a free giveaway in exchange for an email…it’s much more than that. Every marketer aims to push potential customers further down their funnel just like how every marketer’s job becomes infinitely easier when prospects are qualified and clearly interested in the product or service being sold.
A properly designed lead magnet can act as an accelerant for your marketing funnel. And at scale, too.
Why you may not be ready for lead magnets.
Hopefully by now you get it: Lead magnets are awesome, and they work wonders. But if they sound too good to be true, there’s good reason. Lead magnets come with two crucial requirements:
- They must be highly specific and highly targeted
- They must provide instant and impactful value
So, what’s the big deal with all that? Well, for starters it is absolutely imperative that you have an unrivaled understanding of who your customer is, what they care about, and how to speak to them. Second, your offer has to be produced so well that the prospect is left with an undeniably strong impression and forced to wait patiently by the phone for your sales call!
As an offshoot of the second requirement above, pay special attention to the instant part of that sentence. Lead magnets work best when their effects are felt quickly, so leave the 6-week email courses and 100-page eBooks on the shelf for now.
Lead magnets offer you a chance to quickly demonstrate your subject matter expertise while giving your prospects something real that they can utilize to improve whatever it is they are looking for.
7 lead magnet examples.
Now that you’re fully inspired to join the lead magnet revolution, it’s time to start thinking creatively about the kind of offers that will attract the best possible prospects for your business and how to present their details. Here are seven ideas using seven examples from real-life brands killing it at the lead magnet game to get you started on this journey.
Knowledge Guides
Probably the most often-used lead magnet content, knowledge guides include eBooks and PDFs and even video tutorials. Unbounce, the landing page template service, utilizes downloadable eBooks focused on specific areas of marketing often in its lead generation efforts. This specific example was actually inserted into the end of a blog post on the same topic.
T-shirt Giveaway
Who doesn’t love free swag?! I remember back in 2011 or so I came across ads from New Relic, a software analytics platform, offering free “Nerd Life” t-shirts for new accounts. I signed up immediately, even before I knew much about the company, cause why not? It turns out the brand gave away over 75,000 t-shirts as part of this marketing program. 75,000! The one trap to be aware of when giving away things like t-shirts is the potential to have leads with no real business interest in your services, just people who want cool stuff.
Resources & Lists
You know what’s even better than one free thing? Many, many free things. An approach to lead magnets that has seemingly gotten more popular over the last couple of years is to aggregate a long list of resources and offer them in one neat download. A great example comes to us from Kopywriting Kourse, in which the lead magnet is a curated list of hundreds of power words for sales and marketing writers.
Standalone Product
This one is for the marketers with coding skills…or those with developers at the ready. The idea is to build a product that either acts as a slimmed down version of your full offering, or satisfies another tangential need of your audience, and set it up as a standalone service. Here is an example from the aforementioned Leadpages, a free Landing Page Grader. Another similar example is Hubspot’s Website Grader.
Reports
Mattermark, a data analysis company servicing startups and venture capitalists, used to charge a fee to access its annual Startup Traction Report, but then switched to giving it away free as a lead magnet.
Pre-recorded Webinar
Webinars are a classic B2B lead capture mechanism, allowing companies to have face-to-face experiences with customers without all the heavy lifting and logistics of actual in-the-flesh events. They work best for more complex products that require guided demonstrations. Webinars are also great for deep-dives on educational topics, like what Kissmetrics did with advice on optimizing AdWords practices. The benefit of a pre-recorded webinar vs. a live one is that you won’t be hamstrung by a one-off event.
Free Software Trial
If your product or service is a paid one, a free trial is a proven method to getting new prospects in the door. But for the purpose of lead magnets, we’re not talking about get-a-free-month-when-you-sign-up type stuff. Follow the lead of Peek by Usertesting, in which an immediate, try-it-before-you-buy-it offer is promoted heavily to capture warm leads.
