A lead magnet is anything that you are willing to give away in exchange for a visitors e-mail address. This could be a free ebook download, access to a video, or anything else of that nature. The point of having a lead magnet is so that it persuades a visitor to hand over their e-mail, and that means that it needs to offer value, otherwise people will not be pulled in by it.
The investment that you make by creating your lead magnet will pay off big in the end which is why you need to spend a lot of time on it. If the quality of the lead magnet turns out to be poor then people will rightly assume that the products will which will be offered are also going to be of poor quality. One of the worst mistakes you can make as a marketer is to neglect the quality of the lead magnet just because you are giving it away for free, because if it isn’t good enough then people will not stay very long in your marketing funnel.
It Is a Transition to the E-mails
You need to understand that the point of the lead magnet is to get a high open rate for your e-mail series that you will use in order to get sales. So in addition to providing high quality content that the lead will find useful, you need to nudge the audience in the direction of the e-mail series. This can be done by firstly stating quite blatantly that if they want more great info, such as that of the lead magnet
Do Not Create a Generic Lead Magnet
If your lead magnet is simply rehashed information that is very commonly available on most websites in your niche then your visitors will not get hooked by the lead magnet. It needs to be something that they have not seen elsewhere, and offers such great value that it will be difficult for them to turn down. Furthermore, it is not the length or size of your lead magnet that is important, because if you create a hundred page ebook that is written poorly then that will also work against you, because people will not even finish reading it. They will stop once they have had enough and then proceed to unsubscribe from your e-mail list. All you need is a few pages at the very least that gives something of value to your lead, and in doing so you demonstrate to them your ability to come up with content that adds value to their lives.
Make It Look Appealing
The lead magnet must look very appealing on your website, so if it is an ebook then you need to have a professionally done ebook cover, and alongside that you need to have a list of bullet points; for example, why they absolutely must have access to your lead magnet. Remember it is not about you, it is all about your visitors, you must explain to them how the lead magnet will help their lives. Give them a reason not to leave your website without getting the lead magnet and you will have a very high conversion ratio.
You can also use arrows to draw attention to the lead magnet, and try to have as little as possible in the form of distractions. In a lot of cases you will see a high conversions ratio if you have a simple website with a white background, and the opt-in form with the graphics representing the lead magnet being somewhere above the fold. Having lots of pictures, and Youtube embedded videos might appear to make your website look better, but all it does is make it look more cluttered and that will drive your opt-in conversion ratio down.
Split Testing
It is important as with all areas of internet marketing to test the different elements associated with your lead magnet. This can include the placement of the opt-in form on your website page, or it might include coming up with a few different lead magnets, and then seeing which one provides you with the best open rates for the e-mail series. The most common type of split testing is A/B testing and this involves running one version of the test against the other. So in the case of a lead magnet, you could simply run one lead magnet for a month, and then the other one for the next month. Then look at your numbers in order to see which one performed the best, and keep that one.
However, when doing split testing you must take great care to keep the results fair. This means controlling all sorts of variables such as the amount of visitors each version of the test gets, and the type of traffic that was used to get visitors access to the lead magnet. This is an important point because not all traffic types are equal; those coming in from high authority blogs are of a higher quality than from the search engines, because they tend to convert better to paying customers.
With enough split testing you should be able to arrive at a lead magnet that is of a very high quality and has the ability to draw in a very high portion of your traffic. And that in turn will give you so many leads your sales will sky rocket, thereby taking your business to a whole different level.
Did you like the marketing information that you read in this article about the lead magnet? If so then download the “Small Business Marketing Made Easy Guide”. It is packed full of hints and tips