Start Building Your Customer Base with Seven Unique Lead Magnets.
“SAVE 20% TODAY when you place your first order! Just enter your email here.” Internet coupons like these are the most popular form of a tool that’s booming in content marketing: the lead magnet. As defined by DigitalMarketer.com, the lead magnet is “an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information.” Coupons, like our 20 percent example above, are used to rapidly build a potential customer base, but lead magnets come in a variety of forms. Here, we save you time and list seven unique lead magnets that will help bolster your visitor traffic, increase your email marketing audience and attract leads.
Quizzes and Surveys
For those of you that want a user-friendly, high-converting lead magnet that provides valuable data on your target demographic, pay close attention to this section.
Let’s say you own a dog food business—with some stellar products, of course. When a prospect visits your home page, have your website ask them to take a quick quiz that will reveal what type of dog food is best for their pup. A few questions will suffice: What breed is your dog? Is your dog male or female? How much exercise does your dog get each week? At the end of the quiz, ask the prospect to provide their email address so you can send them their results. (If you’re feeling particularly bold, you can even include a few product or service offers right there in the email!) Even if they don’t bite on your offer, you’ll still gain vital information about who your customers are; and the more detailed your customer profiles are, the greater your ability to email market them.
Pro Tip: Use a quiz-building tool like Interact to get started.
State of the Industry Reports
You know more about your industry than your leads, so why not assert your position as an authority by providing your audience with useful and actionable insight? If you’re a content marketer, offer to send your proprietary State of Content Marketing in 2018: Maximizing Engagement report to a visitor’s email. Brownie points if you include big data and credible sources.
Pro Tip: Don’t give away all your secrets. You still want them to come back for your product or service.
Directly Related Offers
Simplicity is your best weapon. We don’t know who said it first, but if your business is service-oriented versus product-based, we whole-heartedly agree. Directly related offers, like a phone consultation, free limited access or a trial period convert extremely well, because you’re giving your prospect exactly what they want: a taste of your services.
Pro Tip: Ask for an email address in exchange for a value proposition that matches what they’re searching for. They won’t hesitate. Our award-winning Field Guide to Functional Content Marketing is a great example.
Gifts and Giveaways
You probably like free stuff. Rest assured: Your prospects are no different. (Thank God for human psychology, right?) If you’re an expert social media SEO marketer, give your leads a biweekly gift basket of your top Facebook posts, e-books and podcasts sent straight to their inbox. Virtual gifts work best because they won’t dampen your margins, and you don’t have to put up with the headaches of shipping. Or, if you’re product-focused (hello again, dog food business), have your prospects enter a giveaway. They might just win that expensive, luxury chew toy if they enter their contact info. Unlike a gift, only a percentage of people actually get the product, but you’ll get 100 percent of the prospect email addresses.
Pro Tip: In addition to email addresses, you can get prospect phone numbers and addresses, too, if you ask for them! So ask. (More on this in Part 2 next week!)
Community Access
We all like to belong to exclusive groups. Some of the best-converting magnets offer your prospects access to a forum or membership site where they can have a dialogue with your brand and interact with each other.
Pro Tip: If you’re an advertising agency, don’t hesitate to use social proof or fear of missing out in your magnet! Something like,“This forum is home to 101,245 active online marketers, so sign up now or risk not knowing the latest trends!” Just make sure you can deliver on your promise.
Live Webinars
A common theme—that we bet you’ve noticed—is that the best lead magnets not only provide lots of value but also require a degree of investment and interaction from your prospect. This is why in 2018, prospects are less interested in reading a free e-book—and are more interested in now. So, host a live webinar where you personally educate prospects on your product and service. By signing up with their contact info and then attending the webinar, your leads already show a high level of investment, and if they interact with each other and ask questions in the webinar chat box, you’re well on your way to having a bunch of new customers.
Pro Tip: Don’t have time to host multiple webinars? WebinarJam can help you automate this process.
Last Resort: The Ethical Bribe
If you don’t have the time or resources to build out any of these effective lead magnets, don’t worry! Just use your copywriting expertise to persuade them to send you their email. If you’re selling your content marketing services, try a pop-up with the following: “Do you want to double your engagements without spending a penny? YES – Enter email address. NO – I don’t want my content to go viral and get tons of engagement.” Which would you pick?