Before we dive into lead magnets. Why are we even talking about lead magnets in the first place?

There are plenty of reasons for a lead magnet, but the biggest one, and the one I like to focus on is creating a lead magnet to drive folks to your website and essentially to build your email list.

Why Invest Time and Energy into Email Marketing?

A robust email list gives you access to a loyal, receptive audience on an ongoing basis and helps you establish a relationship with people who are genuinely interested in you and your services. It’s one of the most effective tools to use to help move potential customers through your marketing funnel, starting from awareness all the way down to advocacy.

Email marketing is kind of like any other meaningful relationship building, its a long game. That’s the beauty of email thought, it lets you own your following and its relatively cost free *minus any paid email tools. (I highly recommend this email marketing tool)

SO WHAT IS A LEAD MAGNET ANYWAY?

A lead magnet is something of value you can offer your site visitors and your social audience in exchange for their contact information; which in this case is their email address.

WHAT TO CONSIDER BEFORE MAKING A GOOD EMAIL LIST GROWING LEAD MAGNET?

A good place to start with a lead magnet is to speak to the folks who are found within the top of your marketing funnel (in the awareness or discovery stage). This group is considered your “coldest” audience and so instead of diving deep into something they are not familiar with the content you create for your lead magnet is going to focus on brand awareness, or education of some kind.

It’s this content that drives awareness to any potential obstacles they are facing, or may not even know that they are facing, and provides information that helps them engage and find interest in your product or service.

EXAMPLES OF LEAD MAGNETS FOR EMAIL GROWTH

Checklists and Workflows/Roadmaps

EBooks

Free guides

Workbooks

Templates

Notion hubs (if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re not on Notion by now, yes you are)

Free Webinars

Free limited time trials or giveaways

Email mini-course

WHAT MAKES A GOOD EMAIL GROWING LEAD MAGNET?

IT’S RELEVANT TO YOUR AUDIENCES’ NEEDS

It touches on a pain point that is specific to your audience and compels them to opting into your resources, it’s an easy yes

YOU’RE SAVNG THEM TIME AND DOING THEM A FAVOUR BY TAKING THE RESEARCH PHASE OFF THEIR PLATE

It’s something they can’t just easily search for themselves or purhaps they can but the internet is so saturated with information, downloading your free resource takes the research part out of their workflow and off of their plate saving them lots of time and mental energy.

IT DEMANDS EASY ACTION AND IMPLEMENTATION

It’s short and sweet, no one wants to leaf through a 28 page document.

A good lead magnet is something that informs them of a problem and gives them a solution that they can use right away.

IT’S RELEVANT TO YOUR EXISTING WORKFLOW

A good entry-level lead magnet will help set up your visitor to be a potential client (Maybe that’s through informing them or engaging with them to adopt a certain mindset or philosophy so that they are on board with the way you go about business, or maybe that’s even including some preliminary steps to your on-boarding process.

For instance, my projects as a strategic brand and web designer always start with an in-depth strategy session, this requires my clients to dig deep and really understand what’s driving their business. So I might want to create a lead magnet that involves a workbook to help them identify the pieces of strategy that they might be missing. OR maybe it’s a checklist of; What you need to know or have organized before we start our rebrand together. etc.)

Maybe if you’re a wedding photographer its a PDF of your pricing guide.

I recently worked on this checklist for one of my wedding photography clients, Dorothy May, and received this message from her just the other day.

ONE THING TO ALWAYS REMEMBER IS THAT THE BEST LEAD MAGNETS ARE GOING TO BENEFIT THE READER AND YOUR BUSINESS ITSELF.

It shouldn’t feel forceful, and you shouldn’t feel like you have to “sell” your audience on it. If you do your research well, identifying your audiences needs, and craft a really valuable resource for them, its going to resonate with that intended audience.

NOW THAT YOU’VE CREATED YOUR LEAD MAGNET, WHAT’S NEXT?

You’ve created a banger lead magnet, now you need to implement it into your regular marketing strategies; sharing it over social media, adding it as a pop-up or inline form to your website etc.

Your lead magnet is the first step in building that relationship with your new audience members. Once you have that attention and the contact information of your potential customers, the next step is to continue the conversation and continue sharing value, building trust, and showing your shining personality through consistent email marketing.

All in on this idea but don’t know where to start? Send me a message and let’s chat!

Don’t have an email marketing system in place? I gotchu, you can grab an annual subscription to Flodesk for 50% off right here.

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