3 Ways to Harness the Power of Lead Magnets

Every business has an obvious similar goal — to sell its products or services. But with this “simple goal” comes the challenge of converting cold or warm leads into hot leads or sales. One of the most effective ways of encouraging a sale is to create lead magnets on your website. Lead magnets are more than pop-up windows asking for newsletter signups. A lead magnet offers your potential customers something they find valuable in exchange for their contact information. In an ideal situation, that contact info would then be utilized in a CRM (customer relationship manager) to nurture the lead towards a sale. 

Lead Magnet Ideas

Lead magnets are a part of an inbound marketing approach — catering to the unique needs and interests of your potential customers. That means you’ll have to know who your ideal customer is and why they want or need your product or service. There are many types of lead magnets, but not all of them may be right for your business. Let’s talk about three lead magnet ideas and how they could help turn your website visitors into paying customers. 

Types of Lead Magnets

1. Gated Content
2. Subscribe and Save
3. Quizzes

Gated Content Lead Magnets

Picture this. Someone is on your site browsing your offerings or reading a blog post (or on your social media or sees an advertisement) when they are prompted with a call to action. The call to action offers up a free tool that dives deeper into a topic (typically the one they’re reading about) to help them solve a niche problem. All they have to do is drop their email and some contact info into a form, and you’ll send the free tool straight to their inbox.

You’ve created a document, report, video, tutorial or checklist that can help them solve a problem they’re facing or achieve a goal. No fees, no checkout. Just a free but ultra-valuable tool for the low price of their contact info. Not only are you helping them achieve their goal, but if your advice is sound, your potential customer will see your business as a trustworthy expert they can rely on to solve other problems. 

Aside from the obvious benefit of utilizing their contact information for future email marketing campaigns, it also provides insight into which topics they care most about. If you’ve set up your CRM correctly, you can keep track of which documents or topics they’ve downloaded to cater your follow-up messaging to those areas of interest. 

Gated content: 

1. Contributes to a goal or solution of your potential customer
2. Highlights your business’ expertise in a topic — creating trust and authority
3. Exposes your potential customer to your product or service
4. Provides you with contact information to retarget your warm leads
5. Contributes to a more robust marketing strategy

Subscribe and Save

There’s no doubt about it, email contacts are valuable to businesses. With a direct line to your potential customers, you can achieve many goals — including but not limited to increased sales, referrals, brand awareness, brand loyalty and a higher click-through rate (CTR). If your brand produces a regular newsletter, you’ll want subscribers. One way to encourage subscription (and one of many great lead magnet ideas) is to offer a benefit to the subscriber. Promo codes are a great way to not only offer a value-add to your subscribers but encourage an immediate sale. 

There are several ways to reveal this offer on your website:

1. In a pop-up that puts your message front and center but can irritate customers trying to view something else
2. In a pop-up on “exit intent” — or when the mouse appears to be leaving your site — to potentially overcome visitor annoyance from typical pop-ups
3. As a pop-out (from the side) to avoid obstructing the view of the visitor
4. Placed in the footer as a stationary feature
5. After a certain amount of time on the page. 

Given the opportunity to save a few bucks with an immediate discount code, customers are more likely to sign up and spend.

Lead Magnet Quizzes and Results

There is much to be said for gamification. Quizzes offer potential customers the opportunity to interact with your site, determine if your product or service is right for them, and have a little fun in the process. Quizzes allow you to take a peek into the lifestyles and circumstances of your true potential customers. If used properly, quizzes can act as customer surveys. With questions that serve intentional data points, you can inform your internal decision makers with key insights on product improvements, consumer pain points and merchandising decisions.  

Quizzes allow you to: 

1. Ask qualifying questions
2. Dial into the challenges your customers are facing
3. Learn the level of interest your viewers have in making a purchase decision
4. Suggest a product or service that best fits their responses
5. Offer a call-to-action
6. Offer a limited time promo code they can use right away
7. Offer up the results right away, or make it gated content by asking for an email to receive the results
8. Follow up with future email drip campaigns

The benefits of lead magnet strategies ripple in both directions toward your business and your consumers. The true value is in the data that you collect and your response to it. Now that you know some of the most effective types of lead magnets, get started on your own! Need some help getting started? We’d be happy to help.