Lead magnets are great list-building tools for capturing your readers’ and potential customers’ email addresses. However, crafting the ideal lead magnet that highly converts isn’t easy, many times requiring a trial and error approach, and A/B testing. Suppose there was a complete lead magnet checklist, then it wouldn’t have to be so complicated.
You’re right. It doesn’t have to be. In this blog post, I take you through an 11-point lead magnet checklist that will help you hone your lead generation skills.
But first, what’s a lead magnet?
What’s a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is something of value, often a digital product that you give your website visitors in exchange for their email addresses or other personal information. Many refer to a lead magnet as a freebie, a tripwire, or a free download. The essence here is that it’s free.
A lead magnet thus is fundamental in growing your email list organically. An organically grown email list is targeted, permission-based, and results in higher returns as your business grows.
Remember an average user sends and receives an average of 122 emails daily.
No one wants another sender in their inbox unless they are presented with an offer they can’t refuse: a Download-worthy lead magnet.
Therefore, you should make your lead magnet very appealing and actionable. People don’t want another freebie, they want a great freebie. A great freebie solves a problem that a particular audience has.
11-Point Lead Magnet Checklist
Let’s get right in and explore this checklist.
1) Solves a Challenge.
Your lead magnet should provide a solution to a challenge that your readers encounter in their day-to-day business around their niche topics.
If you are in the email marketing niche, one of the challenges that your audience face would be low open rates. Providing a single actionable solution that helps your audience avatar to increase open rates and engagement would be a great lead magnet idea
2) Promises One Win
‘How to master email marketing’ is a lead magnet idea that promises a dozen of solutions. Though this can work with an eBook, it is not an ideal tripwire for your email marketing audience.
Take time to break down your idea until you’ve got one single problem and one single solution. Problems that you can derive from the promise above could be:
- Low deliverability
- No email engagement
- Low open rates
- Building a list
Your tripwire should only and only solve one single real problem.
3) Promises Quick Win
Your freebie is a painkiller. Your audience has a headache. A quick win is pain relief. A great freebie is one that offers instant gratification. It should be able to solve a problem quickly. Quick wins for our case above would be to increase open rates. That’s an exciting promise, but it’s actually a win that can be achieved within a short period.
4) Quick to Digest and Implement
We are at the age of instant gratification. Your solution should be simple to understand and implement for immediate results.
Solutions to increasing open rates could be sending emails in the morning as opposed to early afternoons, crafting better headlines, or moving to a reputable email service provider. These are quick wins
5) Your Best Work
You always have enough ideas to create premium products, do not hold back important information in view of selling them. Your freebie has to be your best work. Your prescription has to work, even if you are giving it out for free.
If you deliver amateurish freebies, your subscribers will not take you seriously and will end up unsubscribing.
Your lead magnet is what determines whether your subscribers would look forward to receiving your emails or not.
Make a great promise, then deliver it.
6) Make it Targeted
Your readers land on your blog because they are interested in the topic you are blogging about, and secondly because there is a problem they are trying to solve. You need to offer them a great download that helps them solve this problem.
To make your lead targeted, you will need to create various lead magnets for different categories of your content. Today, there isn’t one size-fit all approach to marketing.
7) Actionability
Another thing to consider when designing a lead magnet is practicality. Your solution should be practical, with clear steps on how to go about it. It should be digestible, you may use visuals if necessary to support your idea, as well as help your subscriber visualize and act on the concept.
8) Visual Lead Magnet Design.
One aspect that many bloggers neglect is professional packaging. You want to send a strong brand message to your readers, and thus delivering a product that is poorly designed can give a whole different perspective about you and your website.
Learn to put some thoughts into everything that you do on and off the web.
Great content is good, but before uploading it to your website, make sure you have it professionally designed.
This includes both internal designing and cover design. You can create great covers and pdf documents using an online platform such as Canva
9) High Perceived Value
Think about the value. Recall that your freebie should be your best content. You want to offer something quite irresistible. In fact, you need to offer something that you would have otherwise charged $197! This way, your subscribers will willingly share it with your friends and fall in love with every email that you send them
10) Strategic Display.
While this has got nothing to do with the lead magnet itself, it’s got everything to do with its success. Your targeted lead magnet should get as many eyeballs as possible. Post-specific freebies do well just after the post, as content upgrades or bonus packs.
It doesn’t do any harm to display the magnet twice on the post, the other placement being two or three paragraphs into the post.
11) Instantly Accessible.
Digital products do well as lead magnet ideas as they are instantly accessible. You should set up your email service provider to automatically send the freebie to your subscribers upon signing up. Nobody loves waiting. Offering services is not a good freebie idea as it is more demanding and can’t be delivered instantly.
Your Turn
You’ve had it. 11-point lead magnet checklist to help you create better lead magnets because when it comes to online business, good isn’t good enough, and ‘not bad’ doesn’t cut it anymore.
