Lead Magnets To Help You Build Your Email List
Email offers a personalised method to reach out to prospects and customers repeatedly. You can provide them with information that pertains to their needs and encourages them to move through the buyer's journey. It's perhaps because of this that 59% of B2B marketers say that email marketing provides them with their strongest revenue generation.
However, to use this channel successfully, you first need to build a healthy email list. You can do this by offering your site's visitors a little quid pro quo.
What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is an incentive you offer to your site visitors that convinces them to give you their contact information.
Customers today receive promotions and advertisements everywhere and are used to deleting massive numbers of emails out of their inboxes each day. You must provide them with a good reason to hand over their contact information. They don't want to give out their email address to yet another company, but they will if they feel you have something to offer them that is worth having. Think of their contact information as a form of payment.
Remember the experience of your customer at this point. They have an obstacle - a pain point. Something hinders their ability to move forward. They want to solve this problem and have turned to the internet, including websites like yours, to educate themselves about the issue and to find potential solutions. A lead magnet that speaks to this issue allows you to be both helpful to your visitor and also present yourself as an authority who understands their needs.
When you create quality lead magnets, you will capture the email addresses of your target customers. You'll have the ability to take a more direct role in bringing them back to your site and keeping them engaged with your organisation. Based on the material they consume on your website and the emails they engage with, you can gather more information about what they want to see and send them personalised communications that will bring them closer to a purchase.
The foundation of this process, however, lies in understanding how to create compelling lead magnets that work.
What types of lead magnet should I create?
Your lead magnets must demonstrate a solid understanding of your audience's struggles and what they want to see when they interact with brands like yours online. Your lead magnets should help the customer understand more about their struggle and begin to offer a solution. This person wants to know if you are going to be able to help them with their problems, and your answer - if you're going to convert them to a paying customer - should be a resounding yes!
When building your lead magnets, you need to think carefully about the type of person you're targeting and the kind of content they like to consume.
Take the lead from your customer
As you build your lead magnet, you want to make sure it solves a real problem for users, which requires a solid understanding of your target audience. If you have not constructed your customer personas before, you will want to do so, now. Think about:
What struggles this persona faces
The typical size, industry, and budget your customer deals with
What they need to know before making a purchase
The steps they have to go through before making a purchase, including if they will have to persuade others at their organisation
What will make you stand out compared to the competition for this customer
What information they already consume and their preferred sources
Gather this information by speaking with existing customers, looking at your site analytics and doing your market research.
Creating the lead magnet
As you create your lead magnets, think about the real dilemmas your customer faces. It should not be vague but demonstrate a clear understanding of their obstacles and how you can help.
This magnet should show that you are an expert. You have the information they need, and more besides which they will want to see as they move forward towards an eventual purchase. Demonstrating your knowledge in this way helps to build trust and have them see you as the leader in your industry.
Some types of lead magnets to consider
Lead magnets take a variety of different forms depending upon your business and the needs of your customers. Some lead magnet ideas you might use to get started include:
Checklists
Original research
White papers
Case studies
Cheat sheets
Printable worksheets
Guide books
Think about what will help your customers the most at their stage of the buyer's journey and pick forms of content that will allow you to offer them genuine help.
How do I maximise my conversion rate?
As people, we like to think of ourselves as highly logical. We imagine that we make purchasing decisions based purely on reason. In actuality, several psychological phenomena help guide our choices and influence what we want.
For marketers, these concepts can help us to design better landing pages and lead magnets. As you better understand how your customers think and what influences their decisions, it becomes easier to create a page that appeals to them. Here are just a few techniques you can incorporate into your landing page and lead magnet design to boost your conversion rate and email sign-ups.
Keep in mind the importance of A/B testing. Running tests to see which version of a landing page performs best allows you to determine the page contents, order, and format that work best for your audience.
Use images
The brain can process visuals 60,000 times faster than written text. Therefore, the images you select for your landing page can have a powerful impact on your success.
Carefully consider the images you choose. Although people generally respond favourably to pictures of faces and other people, they do not like anything that looks like an ad. Irrelevant images or cheesy stock that have been added to put something visual on the page will not benefit conversions and might even hurt them. Highly relevant images, however, can help guide people's attention. Even hand-drawn elements, such as arrows that point people's attention to the lead capture form, can help.
Write easy-to-read lists
The text you place on your lead magnet landing page also plays an important role. Remember that the success of your page lies with being specific and providing clear value for the user. Your copy should make this value abundantly clear and easy to understand.
Customers today do not have the attention span, or the desire, to read long blocks of text in every context. For landing pages, try short paragraphs and lists that allow visitors to scan the material and come to a quick decision. Where you want to provide customers with several reasons why this item will help them, lists work very well.
There is a gripping psychological principle at work with lists. Namely, the serial-position effect tells us that people tend to remember the first items and the last items in a list, best. As you construct your list, you want to place your most essential bits of information at the beginning and end as that is where your customers will pay the most attention.
Do not place too many fields in your form
Keeping in line with the specificity of your offer, make sure that your landing page has only one call to action. Your customers should not feel confused about what you want them to do, or for them to experience any choice fatigue. They should see that what you have to offer will help them, and all they have to do to get it is fill in a few simple form fields.
Remember, although the item you offer on your website might technically not cost money, that does not mean it is free. Your customers must supply you with their contact information in return, and this is a cost in their mind. The more information you ask them to provide, the higher the cost. This perception means that you want to limit the amount of information you ask your visitors to provide. Generally speaking, you want to ask only for the information you absolutely need.
Note that there are a few exceptions to this. Namely, if your customers would expect to provide you with information, they will convert at higher rates if you ask for this information. For example, if you are offering customers a free estimate, they will expect to provide you with the relevant information needed to make this estimate. Not asking for it will diminish your credibility.
Marketing Automation platforms, such as Sharpspring, allow you to build lead capture forms that recognise a returning lead and enables 'progressive profiling'. This allows you to keep your lead capture forms simple while gathering further details about your prospect and enables accurate lead scoring. This technology is something you have undoubtedly already encountered when you've signed up for multiple lead magnets from the same supplier.
Build trust and credibility
Customers are more likely to turn to you and make a purchase when they feel as though they can trust you to have their best interests in mind.
There are a few different strategies that you can use to build trust. Placing the logos of organisations who have already trusted you on your site provides social proof and can help inspire the belief that you can help new prospects as well.
Letting people know about others who have already registered for your newsletter or the number of people who found your research helpful will help convince others that they will appreciate what you have to offer as well.
Shopify has a lead magnet example we want to call your attention to. Right above the registration form, they announce that over 400,000 entrepreneurs gain an advantage by subscribing to them, thereby providing powerful motivation for prospects.
Play up the value of the offer
When you create a landing page for your lead magnet, you want to shine a spotlight on the problem you are helping to solve. Call people's attention to what they are struggling with and the ways it might hurt them. At the same time, help people envision solving this problem with your brand and how that will feel. Demonstrate how even this lead magnet can help them begin to solve their problem.
A recent example we saw from MarketingLand offered marketers a 'daily brief' with all the 'news, analysis and insights you need to succeed'. This offer is simple: marketers will receive the information they need to do their jobs better and they will feel successful.
Create a little scarcity
Scarcity can also play a role in convincing people that they should register for your offer right now. Telling people that you are offering a particular item for free for a limited time only, for example, inspires them to sign up before they lose the opportunity. When paired with the importance of the value of your magnet, customers realise that they do not want to miss this chance.
Inspiring your visitors to add their contact information to your mailing list with quality lead magnets and engaging landing pages is an ethical, reputation enhancing method of building your email list that keeps prospects engaged and moves them through the sales funnel.