Did you know that a standard email marketing is capable of generating $36 on average for every $1 spent?
Email marketing is a cost-effective yet efficient way to convey your message to the intended audience and generate traction for your brand.
However, the success of your email marketing campaign depends on the size of your email list and the activity status of your recipients.
To grow your email list, you may consider collecting relevant information from your target audience as they visit your website. The only problem is that people are generally reluctant to share their personal information.
An efficient strategy to convince them is to leverage lead magnets. It’s your way of offering something of value in exchange for the information provided by your visitors.
To get you started, here are the twelve lead magnet ideas with examples that may help you grow your email list with ease:
What Is a Lead Magnet?
When it comes to increasing your email list, people might not feel comfortable giving out their personal details to you. Therefore, it is important to motivate them to take necessary action using a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is any valuable offer given to your target audience in return for them sharing the required information. It could take the form of an e-book, a cheat sheet, a white paper, or a free template. You can utilize any learning material or resource to inspire the target audience to give you the necessary information.
What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?
An effective lead magnet is one that aligns with the desires and interests of your specific audience. It helps them reach their objectives by providing access to beneficial information.
A lead magnet should focus on your audience’s needs. It’s important to consider the issues that your target audience is currently dealing with and assist them in overcoming these roadblocks.
A successful lead magnet fits with your audience’s objectives and addresses their challenges while tackling a specific issue.
12 Lead Magnet Ideas to Grow Your Email List
1. Cheat Sheet
If your target audience comprises professionals, a cheat sheet may serve as an excellent lead magnet to grow your email list.
Professionals receive hundreds of emails on a daily basis. So, they are less likely to subscribe to email lists or open emails.
However, they may consider subscribing to yours if they expect to receive valuable resources from time to time that may help them get better at the things they do.
No matter the industry, professionals are always looking for relevant resources and hacks that may help them check tasks off their to-do list with ease.
So, leveraging a cheat sheet may serve as an excellent strategy to make professionals subscribe to your email list and provide the required information to you.
To fuel your ideas, the following lead magnet from ZerotoMastery may serve as a fitting example here and inspire you to design cheat sheets as per your respective niche to attract a relevant audience.
2. Ebooks and Guides
Another excellent way to grow your email list is by using ebooks and guides as lead magnets. They can be excellent resources for an audience that seeks relevant information and can help bring your brand into the limelight.
People generally use them a bit less because compiling an ebook or an extensive guide may require a lot of research and time.
However, putting in a little effort to create such lead magnets may help you generate traction and cultivate authority in your respective niche.
Ebooks and guides are excellent resources to attract people who look for relevant information to solve their problems. And when you facilitate their access to the insights they need, they may listen to what you have to say, making it easier for you to pitch your solutions to them.
The following lead magnets may serve as great examples to fuel your lead magnet ideas.
3. Free Courses
Free courses are an excellent way to attract a target audience comprising professionals, aspiring entrepreneurs, and freelancers.
Basically, for people who are interested in learning something and refining their skills, online courses may appeal to them. However, not everyone enrolls in them, as they generally ask for a registration fee.
So, offering free online courses may be an excellent way to generate traction and make people subscribe to your email list.
You don’t necessarily need to design an online course for advanced learners, as it may be cumbersome and demand more time or effort. Just try to offer some value through your course to people subscribing to your email list.
Select a topic around which you can create a course with ease and use it as a lead magnet to attract the intended audience.
This is pulled off in an amazing way by Hubspot, as they offer a variety of free online courses to get the required information from their visitors.
4. Free Trial
Offering a free trial is a great way to generate traction for your brand and make people want to consider your solutions.
People are generally reluctant to purchase products or services they’re not familiar with. This is the reason why 55% of people seek reviews and customer feedback before making a purchase.
So, a viable strategy used by businesses is that they allow their target audience to use their solutions for free for a limited time. This helps people figure out if the solutions are best suited for their needs and worth purchasing.
Offering a free trial works as an excellent lead magnet to grow your email list. To claim a free trial, you ask people to share certain information with you, like their names and contact details.
You can use this information later to pitch your solutions to them once their trial expires. This is a common tactic used by leading businesses to gather more leads and boost their conversions.
Take Moz, a leading SEO solution, as an example here. They offer a free trial to their visitors, enabling them to take the tool for a spin before making a purchase.
5. Expert Roundups
Relevant insights from industry or expert roundups can be an excellent lead magnet to grow your email list. Here, you create content around topics that your audience may be interested in and share it with people subscribing to your list.
This is an excellent way to attract professionals or people who want their daily dose of content from a respective industry and make them come back for more. The content may encompass facts and statistics or extensive reports showcasing highlights from a respective industry.
This is amazingly executed by ChartMogul, where the website leverages a SaaS roundup as a lead magnet to increase email list subscribers.
6. Infographics
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So, leveraging visual content may be an excellent strategy to engage the intended audience and grow your email list. Content with good images attracts 94% more views than those without.
Leveraging infographics may be a great strategy, especially when your content revolves around facts or statistics. Making such content image-based compared to plain text may prove to be more engaging and get you more eyeballs.
Creating an infographic may be more time-consuming than compiling the usual reports. They may not only require extensive research but also design efforts to create an effective lead magnet.
However, the effort would be worth the outcome, as infographics are likely more engaging than text-based content.
A lead magnet used by CampaignCreators may serve as an excellent example here to fuel your ideas.
7. Newsletters
One of the best and most commonly used lead magnet ideas is using newsletters to grow your email list. It’s an old-school tactic to make people subscribe to your email list in exchange for their daily dose of content.
However, people generally don’t subscribe to newsletters. So, the key to making this a success is making people perceive the value of your newsletter content.
Sharing generic content through your newsletter may lead people to unsubscribe from your email list. So, covering relevant and trending topics may be an excellent strategy to keep your audience engaged.
Check out the following example to see how CXL uses its newsletter to attract a relevant audience and grow its email list.
8. Webinars
Webinars are another type of visual content that businesses use to attract their intended audience and grow their email lists.
Webinars encompass virtual presentations or discussions around relevant topics that are pre-recorded and made available to the target audience.
Using webinars as lead magnets makes it possible for you to grow your email list significantly, as video content is generally perceived to deliver high value. It’s more interesting to consume, making it easier to comprehend the information provided.
Recording webinars around evergreen topics that align with your niche may be a brilliant lead magnet idea and help you attract relevant audiences for an extended period without much effort.
The Content Marketing Institute does it brilliantly by using on-demand webinars as lead magnets to attract people who may be interested in what the company has to offer.
9. White Papers
White papers encompass detailed reports that may help you attract business professionals or aspiring entrepreneurs.
This type of lead magnet provides the intended audience with access to relevant resources that may help them get acquainted with industry insights. White papers also showcase effective strategies and growth hacks for businesses to take inspiration from.
Plus, they may also be used to present solutions to a particular problem or showcase current best practices.
White papers are generally made available as downloadable resources. So, they may serve as excellent lead magnets to collect emails from the target audience.
Here’s how NetLine Corporation leverages its white papers to engage its target audience and gather the required information from them:
10. Free Templates
Another lead magnet idea that you may want to consider is offering free templates to your target audience.
These lead magnets are designed to facilitate the intended audience and make the tasks at hand easier for them. So, it’s a no-brainer that people would perceive such resources to be of great value and wouldn’t mind giving away their contact details.
The use of templates as lead magnets may come in handy for diverse use cases. They help people save time and make it easier for them to keep up with their deliverables. Just make sure that you have added clear instructions and guidelines to help your audience know how to use the templates in an effective way.
Marq uses a variety of templates as lead magnets to engage its target audience. Professionals can leverage these templates for free and customize them as per their requirements.
However, they have to provide the required information to save changes to the document, which in turn helps the company generate quality leads.
11. Live Demo
Live demos serve as amazing lead magnets for SaaS marketing. They help you attract an audience that may be interested in the solutions you offer but is unable to make a buying decision.
They are often in doubt about whether or not the solutions are best suited for them and fit their needs, which may cause them to be on the fence when it comes to making an investment.
Through live demonstrations, you showcase the features and capabilities of your solutions and help your audience make up their minds.
These lead magnets serve as an opportunity for you to make your solutions stand out from the alternatives in your respective industry and get more eyeballs in comparison.
Zoom, a renowned video conferencing solution, leverages a live demo as a lead magnet to collect useful information from prospects and showcase the functionalities of the software.
12. Coupons or Discounts
If you work in the e-commerce industry, coupon codes or discounts may work as an excellent lead magnet for you.
It’s reported that 60% of people do not complete their purchases due to the extra amount added to their cart during the checkout process. The extra amount in most cases is either the shipping cost or taxes, which may lead businesses to struggle with cart abandonment problems.
Sharing coupons or discount codes may be a viable strategy and help you secure your conversions.
Plus, people actively seek discounts to make their preferred products or services seem like a really good bargain. So, using them as lead magnets may prove to be useful and help you collect the required information from your customers with ease.
Here’s an example of Obvi using discount codes as a lead magnet to grow its email list and entice people to purchase its products.
How to Promote Your Lead Magnet
Once you have designed and deployed a lead magnet that offers value to the intended audience, you should consider promoting it in several ways to maximize its impact.
The goal here is to attract and engage a relevant audience. So, try different ways to reach out to them, and leverage multiple platforms where your audience is active to generate more traction and drive the best results.
Here’s a list of ways you may want to consider when promoting your lead magnets:
- Create a dedicated landing page for your lead magnet
- Use website banners for promotion
- Leverage entry and exit popups
- Leverage webform opt-ins
- Create a resource center
- Add a link to the lead magnet in your blogs
- Cite lead magnet as source of information in content published on third-party platforms
- Add link to lead magnet in your social media profile bio
- Add link in description of your videos published on platforms like YouTube and TikTok
- Promote by adding a link in your social media posts
- Promote through relevant social media groups and communities online
When it comes to promoting your lead magnets, one size doesn’t fit all. What works for someone else may not work for you. So, it’s best to try different methods and stick to the ones that give you the best results.
Final Words
There you have it: twelve proven lead magnet ideas to grow your email list with examples that fuel your inspiration.
Email marketing is an excellent way to generate traction for your brand and promote your solutions to the right audience. However, for your email marketing campaigns to be a success, you need to have a sizable email list comprising active recipients.
Growing your email list may not be as easy as it sounds but leveraging lead magnets may prove to be useful and help you increase your email subscribers.
