Email marketing is one of the most impactful marketing tools, especially for online businesses. You can use it to attract new leads, nurture prospects, and strengthen your relationship with existing customers.
Additionally, you can get far ahead of the competition if you combine email marketing with a strategy like lead generation using a lead magnet.
But with so many strategies to choose from, how do you know which type of lead magnet will work best in your email marketing campaign? In this blog post, we explore everything you need to know about finding high-converting lead magnets for your email campaigns and give some handy tips on getting started!
A lead magnet is a form of digital content that provides value for visitors in exchange for their contact information. It can come in many forms, but generally, lead magnets come in the following formats:
- Free reports
- Ebooks or whitepapers
- Checklists and templates
- Infographics or other visual guides
These and hundreds of other forms of content assets can be used as lead magnets, primarily to attract interest and gather email addresses from potential customers.
How Do Lead Magnets Power Your Email Marketing?
With so much distraction on the internet, you will have to offer something in return if you want your audience’s attention. That’s what a powerful lead magnet does seamlessly for you. A lead magnet is a targeted content or offer that grabs the attention of your leads and incentivizes them to subscribe.
Lead magnets are vital for successful email marketing. It gives your audience something valuable they can use to solve their problems. Whether you build a personal website or run an organization, lead magnets work for every niche and every audience.
Let's uncover some steps you need to take to find the perfect lead magnet for your email marketing campaigns.
Finding and Setting Up a High-Converting Lead Magnet for Your Email Campaigns
When it comes to using a lead magnet in your email marketing campaigns, there's nothing like a one-size-fits-all approach. Every business has different goals and needs, that's why you have to be creative in this step.
Of course, you will find a winner after regular A/B testing. Have a practical A/B testing approach to know what works the best for your brand. The steps mentioned below will help you get started!
1. Decide Your Goal
First off, you need to decide on a goal for building an email list. This point requires you to think about the broader, eventual goal from your lead generation efforts.
If your goal is to get someone onto a webinar, you might create a lead magnet that shares a part of your webinar for free. If the goal is to sell an ebook or a product, you might offer a discount coupon as a lead magnet.
The critical point here is thinking about what will convince people to give away their email. To do this, ensure that your lead magnet has a specific goal and offers something valuable in exchange for an email address.
Like any other form of marketing, lead generation is a challenging yet rewarding activity if you take the proper steps to plan it properly. Deciding your goal will help you make efforts in the right direction and hit the right pain points.
The CTA of your campaign should not be confusing to the audience. Several Call To Action examples are available online to take inspiration and refine your goal strategy. Make sure you do your homework and have a crystal clear goal in mind before planning your lead magnet.
2. Identify Your Target Audience and Clearly Define the Problem You're Solving for Them
Defining what you are offering to your audience in exchange for their email address plays a vital role. The lead magnet should solve a particular problem and add value to the readers' lives.
The first step here is to identify your target audience and their typical set of behavior patterns. One set of audiences might have different needs and demands, and based on that, they might or might not be interested in your offer. So, you need to be very precise with your approach.
For example, CXO-level executives of an organization might have problems generating quality leads, improving profitability metrics, and offering better training or business scalability. On the other side, the executive level employees might need solutions to boost their productivity, skill-building, or quick cheat sheets to organize their work.
Your lead magnet will only hit the nail at the right spot if you’ve clearly identified your target audience and their interests. It’s important to find a sweet spot with a lead magnet that targets the right audience and at the same time, helps you achieve your campaign goals.
Once you figure out whom to target, it becomes easier to plan and execute your campaign.
3. Choose a format for a High-Converting Lead Magnet
This step requires you to think creatively and find a lead magnet format that captures the attention and hooks your target audience.
Here are some of the most high-converting lead magnet ideas and formats you can work on:
- Multi-part content series: One format is a video course or webinar
- Free Training from your course or webinar
- Free access to content that is usually available for purchase or paid-membership programs
- Ebook, white paper, checklist, and cheat sheet
A checklist or cheat sheet is a great lead magnet format if you're solving an in-demand problem. Checklists and cheat sheets are easy to share on social media and rank high up in the marketing funnel.
You can use this specific type of content as both a lead for your blog posts (building credibility and authority) and building an email list.
The choice of the format of lead magnet will depend on your business and the audience. Don’t overthink this step, just choose something compelling enough for your audience, and you’ll be ready to go.
For example, if you think that short videos and quick checklist PDFs are doing well in your industry, then you can go for them. According to HubSpot, dividing your content assets according to your customer’s buyer’s journey helps smoothen up the process and target the right demands and needs.
Before you start preparing your lead magnet, ensure that the content is to the point, and your company's branding should be minimum.
Branding is important as well, but it should be subtle and not overshadow the primary purpose of the lead magnet, which is providing value.
4. Decide the Content of Your Lead Magnet
Whether you prepare a cheat sheet, a compact ebook, or a handy report, think from the audiences' perspective on what you want to include in the lead magnet. This essential step will ensure you’re solving the right problem and providing a valuable content asset for your audience.
Here are some ways you can use to decide the content of your lead magnet:
Keyword Research
Keyword Research helps you sneak a peek into what your targeted audience is searching for online. It will help you smoothen up this process as it will give you an idea of what important topics to include in your lead magnet.
For example, if you’re a coffee maker, and your audience is searching for a how-to guide or comparative guide on coffee-making tools, a lead magnet on this topic will capture attention. Additionally, It will help you gain better visibility on Google and other search engines.
Here are some ways you can use to decide the content of your lead magnet:
Keyword Research
Keyword Research helps you sneak a peek into what your targeted audience is searching for online. It will help you smoothen up this process as it will give you an idea of what important topics to include in your lead magnet.
For example, if you’re a coffee maker, and your audience is searching for a how-to guide or comparative guide on coffee-making tools, a lead magnet on this topic will capture attention. Additionally, It will help you gain better visibility on Google and other search engines.
LSIs are similar keywords to the primary search phrase that the audience searches online to find relevant solutions.
So, targeting them with content optimization will help you grow your lead magnet's reach on organic channels while ensuring your lead magnet is solving the right problem.
Surveys
Conducting surveys among your target audience will give you a direct overview of your audience’s wants. Polls and quizzes amongst your existing audience will help you capture this data.
You can do a poll about the common problems that your potential customers face in their business. These surveys ease your research work and provide you with more accurate data about the audience.
5. Build a Landing Page to Present Your Lead Magnet
Like any other product or offer, your lead magnet should have a landing page where you offer it along with an opt-in form. Your landing page does not need to be fancy, but it should include a clear headline of the offer and an opt-in form. You can employ any landing page builders available online to create a conversion-focused page.
It's also essential that you create a conversion goal for your landing page: What do you want people who visit this page to do? Do they need to fill out their email address with a long opt-in form, or just the email address would work?
Whichever you choose, make sure it is consistent throughout your landing page.
It’s important to focus on one offer throughout your landing page as having multiple offers can reduce the conversion rate up to 266%, reveals a study by Truelist.
The design and structure of your landing page might have a significant impact on your conversion rate. You want to make sure your target audience experiences the least friction in leaving their email address. Using social proof and testimonials helps build trust and boost conversions.
6. Promote Your Lead Magnet Through Social Media & Other Channels
Once your lead magnet is ready, you need to educate your audience about it.
Make sure your lead magnet reaches a suitable audience base. Social media brings in a pool of opportunities as most leads prefer social media platforms to interact and consume content.
The best part is, you don't need to start from scratch and build a completely bespoke strategy to promote your lead magnet if you’re promoting it to your current social media audience.
For example, this post by ActiveCampaign targets their existing audience on social media for a webinar that might interest them.
It’s a great way to capture attention and leads as only the audiences with high engagement and interest levels will drop their email and join the webinar.
You can go one step ahead and send a message to your audience on social media. Social media tools that integrate with Facebook Messenger make two-way conversations quite easier.
You can leverage paid ads and communities like Reddit as well to promote your lead magnet. To create an impact, you have to be on the right platform and the right content format.
You can perform a quick competitive analysis to check which platform generates the highest traction, and use it to reach the right audience.
7. Integrate the Lead Magnet with an Email Marketing Campaign
Your lead magnet is incomplete until you integrate it with an autoresponder. Ensure that as soon as someone drops their email address, you have an automated email sequence set up with lead nurturing emails.
Most email newsletter service providers have the option to set up automated emails.
The objective of your lead magnet is to get potential customers into your sales or marketing funnel. And once you have the email, the next important step is taking these people further down the funnel by nurturing them and providing relevant content.
However, it is vital to be mindful about how frequently you are pushing your marketing or nurturing emails to them. According to Harvard Business Review, an average worker receives more than 120 emails per day on average.
If you go wrong at this step, you might end up losing a strong lead. So, your emails should justify a strong reason why anyone should open the email and interact with the content.
Preparing and automating these emails in advance helps you be ready with your email campaign and you can freely launch your lead magnet.
8. Collect Feedback & Improve
Growing your email list is an iterative process, and for nurturing it well, it's essential to take regular feedback from the subscribers. You can send a feedback form once a month to gain more insights into your readers' needs and preferences.
The trends change in no time, and to stay relevant in the business, you need to keep up with the new concepts, ideologies, and hacks that keep the audience engaged.
Once a month or once in two months, go ahead and interact with your audience to improve the customer experience. It should always be a two-sided conversation that guides you on the next steps.
Honest feedback from engaged subscribers can help you improve your communication and eventually engage with your audience better.
Final Thoughts
Integrating lead magnet with your email marketing is a powerful strategy.
Both the lead magnet and your email content should be a seamless experience for the audience for the best results. If you are just starting out, you can pick any of the free email marketing services available and start building your audience.
Keep experimenting and testing your strategies to grow your email list. Good luck!