Irresistible Lead Magnet Ideas to Grow Your Email Subscriber List

Obtaining a customer’s email address allows marketers to start nurturing leads and send targeted content to recipients. By starting an email campaign, you can gradually move more...

Anissa Maligat
Anissa Maligat September 18, 2020

Obtaining a customer’s email address allows marketers to start nurturing leads and send targeted content to recipients. By starting an email campaign, you can gradually move more leads down the marketing funnel.

All post-click landing pages ask for a customer’s email address. But you might be wondering:  how can you convince people to give you their email?

That’s where lead magnets come in.

What is a Lead Magnet?

Marketers offer lead magnets as an incentive to potential customers in exchange for their email addresses or other contact details. Your business can obtain leads through these resources or valuable assets.

Lead magnets can be any of these downloadable pieces of content:

Businesses and brands offer lead magnets to prospects through landing pages. A landing page provides your visitors with compelling details about your offer. It lists the benefits of downloading your content so they’ll subscribe and give you their contact information. This exchange typically happens at the second stage of a buyer’s conversion path.

Why are Lead Magnets Important?

Lead magnets give your prospects an incentive, making them an essential part of your marketing efforts. A magnet with a valuable resource can encourage a customer to give you their contact details, which they wouldn’t normally do for free.

These magnets also help build trust and authority. Your business or brand can show prospects that you’re not just after sales. Plus, you can prove that you mean business and are willing to help your customers.

Lead magnets help you grow email lists, as well. Some businesses have trouble engaging with their audience and delivering valuable content but an effective email marketing campaign can effectively end these issues. By analyzing what type of magnet works best and segmenting your email lists, you can deliver the right content, at the right time.

What Makes a Lead Magnet Great?

Lead magnets are like a trade: it lets you offer your expertise in exchange for the attention of your subscribers.

When you’re able to keep their attention for longer, you get more chances to turn prospects into customers. But what makes a lead magnet great for attracting leads?

  1. It solves a real problem. A lead magnet that doesn’t solve your prospect’s problem or fails to fulfill their needs won’t work at all.
  2. It promises a quick win. Your lead magnet should help your prospect achieve a certain goal.
  3. It’s very specific. If your lead magnet offers specific benefits, it can convert leads better.
  4. It’s quick to digest. A good lead magnet offers useful, bite-sized info and doesn’t make your prospects feel overwhelmed.
  5. It offers great value. Your lead magnet should offer value and align with what your prospects expect from you.
  6. It’s instantly accessible. If you can deliver a lead magnet immediately, it’ll make your business look more credible.
  7. It showcases your expertise or unique value proposition. A lead magnet with both these elements will help you get more conversions.

17 Lead Magnet Ideas to Attract More Subscribers

Now that we’ve covered everything about lead magnets, let’s look at some ideas you can use to build your email lists.

You can offer any form of digital content as a lead magnet — how you’ll offer it to prospects is all up to you.

E-books

Screenshot from Amplexor

This type of lead magnet is straightforward and easy to create. It’s the best format for blog post compilations that share the same theme. An e-book is effective since you’re offering relevant info from a single place, making it easier for prospects to find the info they need.

Email Course

Screenshot from Buffer

An email course lead magnet involves offering an e-learning program split into different parts. Taking the course provides value to your prospects over time.

Your course can contain weekly emails with homework, articles, videos, and other helpful resources.

Checklists

Screenshot from Reliablesoft

People easily consume checklists, making them a high-converting lead magnet. Checklists present concise, essential details in an actionable list. Moreover, producing these lists are quick and hassle-free. You can easily create and send a downloadable checklist to your email opt-ins.

In the example above, for instance, a visitor on the landing page for Reliablesoft can easily get the PDF version of their checklist once they enter their email address in the pop-up.

Cheatsheets

Screenshot from MakeUseOf

Cheat sheets provide users with a list of guidelines that they can easily follow to achieve a certain benefit. MakeUseOf offers a great example of this with its productivity cheat sheet bundle. What makes this lead magnet effective is so effective is that it offers a shortcut to a problem.

Templates

Screenshot from Hubspot

A template can be an outline or any starting point that your subscribers can use. From there, users can then fill in the blanks.

Hubspot offers lots of useful templates for marketers, including a social media calendar template. The template features a schedule tab, monthly planning calendar, repository for website content, and platform updates that you can fill in.

Planner

Screenshot from Shining Mom

Planners let you create daily, weekly, or monthly plans for your prospects. You can also offer these lead magnets as blank planners that people can use to make their own plans. Blank planners even help users organize themselves easily.

Designing a niche-specific planner is a great lead magnet idea. You can offer it as a free, printable download and as a PDF file.

In the screenshot, you’ll see an example of Shining Mom’s 2020 budget planner. It is available in free and deluxe editions, and the latter is offered exclusively for the blog’s email subscribers.

Workbook

Screenshot from Hubspot

Workbooks or worksheets help customers accomplish particular exercises or figure out a solution to a problem. They’re highly effective for service-based businesses.

Hubspot offers downloadable workbooks for free. The company’s content marketing workbook targets prospects interested in content marketing.

Printable Content

Screenshot from Day Designer

Printables are perfect if you work in the creative field because you can entice prospects through attractive posters, illustrations, or other types of media-rich content. You can also offer shopping lists, grocery lists, or another handy printable content to customers.

Consider printable content from Take Day Designer as an example. It sends prospects planners, worksheets, and other printables via email.

Case Study

Screenshot from Amplexor

Sharing your brand’s success stories in a case study can encourage your customers to take action. Case studies are great for telling readers about your client’s success, like Amplexor’s case study on Daikin’s web portal.

Gated Content

Screenshot from Fairygodboss

Gated content are online materials that require users to fill out a form before they can access them. Users can get a preview of the content, but the rest is hidden by a pop-up where readers can enter their contact details.

Since this lead magnet uses existing content, it’s one of the easiest magnets to create. Fairygodboss uses this magnet on its articles to encourage email opt-ins.

Guides

Screenshot from SEMrush

Like e-books, guides are a lengthy type of content that may take longer to produce. But they can play a crucial role in your sales funnel’s nurturing stage since they show customers why they should buy from you in the first place.

Free Trials

Screenshot from Adobe

You might’ve come across these lead magnets while shopping for apps or software. Most software developers, like Adobe, collect email addresses through a large call-to-action for a free trial or demo on their homepage.

Attracting customers with free trials is great because it encourages future purchases. You can even offer a discount once the trial expires for a more effective magnet.

Discounts

Screenshot from Macy’s

Discounts are one of the simplest magnets that e-commerce brands can offer. Prospects will receive an email with a unique coupon code after entering their contact details on a form.

Macy’s is a brand that attracts customers with a discount lead magnet. People will get a package deal that includes an extra discount coupon as well as the latest offers from the store when they subscribe to Macy’s newsletter.

Podcasts

Screenshot from Gary Vaynerchuk

Podcasts allow you to explore a topic further, which are just as interactive as videos. Plus, it lets you engage with your leads directly which boosts engagement. Try to change things up a bit and with a 60-minute podcast that dives deep into a topic and provides your subscribers with fresh insights.

Reports

Screenshot from Sensor Tower

Reports are excellent lead magnets for B2B businesses, and are effective if you’re in an industry that relies on data, statistics, or research. You can use the report for research purposes and collect data yourself or organize third-party data into a full report.

As seen in the screenshot, this lead magnet works well for Sensor Tower and its mobile analysis reports. By signing up on the firm’s website, you can get any of its reports via email.

Infographics

Screenshot from McCrindle

Some companies and brands drive site traffic with eye-catching, educational infographics. This type of content also works well for informative lead magnets.

In today’s day and age where people have shorter attention spans, keeping your audience engaged poses a challenge. With an infographic, you can grab your prospect’s attention and inspire them to take action.

Toolkits

Screenshot from JB Media Group

A lot of people are curious about the kinds of tools that pros use, and that’s why toolkits are popular. These lead magnets create more value since they combine multiple resources in a single file.

Toolkits can include one or more of the following: an e-book, whitepaper, checklist, calculator, template or video. Creating one doesn’t have rules; you simply need to find what combination of tools work best.

Attract Prospects with a Good Lead Magnet

Lead magnets can help you organically grow your email lists. They can turn prospects into customers and encourage you to create a website and content that centers on providing customer value.

After all, potential leads won’t pass up on high-converting lead magnets that offer value. A good lead magnet yields more qualified leads because they deliver exactly what your customers need.

If you’re looking to build your email lists with a lead magnet, Growth Rocket can help. Get in touch with us to start developing an effective magnet for your email marketing campaigns today.

More From Growth Rocket