Effective Lead Magnet Ideas - Increase your Lead Generation

For which content, information, product or service would you give a company your highly personal contact information like your email address?

Your company has to ask and precisely answer this question to find out how to get sensitive contact information of your potential customers and website visitors to transform them into leads.
One promising solution for a successful lead generation in online marketing is an effective lead magnet.

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is a marketing tool that generates leads by giving away valuable marketing assets, mostly a piece of digital, free downloadable content, items or services, in exchange for contact information of prospective customers.

Why are Lead Magnets so important?

One of your company goals should be to generate more significant customer loyalty to consequently generate more sales in order to maintain your company sustainable.

Through a good lead magnet, a bridge from awareness of your company's existence to sympathy and trust in your company can be built. Therefore, it can be one beginning of a valuable customer relationship.

Relevant information and contact details of potential customers are collected while they are filling out your options form to get your offered incentive. Consequently, your company can stay in contact with already generated leads. Your offer, therefore, conduces the expansion of so-called “list building”. Finally, lead magnets are an effective medium to support your company's lead generation.

Creating a good lead magnet provides you with more information about the needs and interests of your target group. Thus, your company can generate new customers, which results in higher sales. Hence, the more qualitative leads your company captures, the more possibilities you get to increase your sales. This is why it is so important for your lead generation to present your website visitors an effective lead offer.

Providing your company with an email address, which is a very personal detail, can represent an obstruction. Your potential buyers are not giving you their email address for free, your company has to give them a compelling reason.

What makes a Good Lead Magnet?

The following checklist will provide you with an overview of what makes an effective and convincing lead magnet.

✔︎ It solves a problem of your potential customers
To make a lead magnet work, it should give an exact solution to solve a concrete problem. Apart from that, it should give the website visitor what they want so they will be interested in your offer.

✔︎ Promise one success
Your offered incentive should help interested prospects easily achieve their set goal.

✔︎ Specified offer
The more specific your lead offer is about its benefits, the more website visitors will convert into leads.

✔︎ Easy to digest
Your prospects should not feel overwhelmed by the length or complicated input of your free provided product or service.

✔︎ High value
Your company's lead offer should communicate a high perceived and actual value to convince website visitors to give you their email address. Besides content, clear statements are supportive.

✔︎ Instantly access
You should deliver your promised material right away so instant gratification can be guaranteed.

✔︎ Present your expertise
Within the lead magnet, you should demonstrate your expertise or unique value to purposefully turn leads into customers.

To create an attention generating lead magnet, you have to know your target group and their needs. If you can identify them, you know what challenges they face and thus can provide a perfect fitting offer. At the same time, you can promote your company's products and services.

Most popular Lead Magnet Categories with Examples

Next, the most popular lead magnet examples are pointed out.

Useful Lead Generating Magnets

Lead generating magnets offer one specific, actionable solution for a defined problem of your potential customers. They can consequently save time and energy which makes you attractive for future needs.

- Template

Lead magnet example, providing a template in exchange for the email address of a website visitor. Source: https://www.robin-data.io/en/free-consultation

A template delivers an already done outline for your potential customers, they just have to fill in the blanks. Super easy.

- checklist
A checklist simplifies everything your website visitor needs to know in a quickly compiled and easily consumed list.

- Cheatsheet
With this lead magnet, your potential customers will receive a guideline which leads the way constantly step by step to a specific benefit. It is kind of a variation of a checklist, but the benefits of a non-time-consuming creation and easy consumption remains the same.

Other useful lead magnet examples that your company can deliver are calculators, scripts or resource lists, calendars or worksheets. This will let your website visitors help you to expand your email list.

Educational Lead Magnets

These teach your audience something new about a specific, highly relevant topic. It should be understood as a supportive conviction of why website visitors need your product or service in order to become a qualitative lead. Your brand awareness and credibility are also constituted on education. That is why you should present your company as an expert in the field you are working on.

- Tutorials

Lead magnet example providing a tutorial after the prospects enter their email address. 
Source: https://therisetothetop.com/

A tutorial, for example, in the form of a video or a pdf file, is used to explain how to do one specific action. By using headlines like “10 steps to create the perfect tutorial”, interested prospects know exactly what they can expect.

- Gated content
Your company can, for instance, divide your blog post into two parts. One that everyone can read and another exclusive one that only email subscribers can get access to. This lead generation offer is using already existing content, it is just hiding the “premium” content, which is why it is so easy to create with no great effort.

- Reports and infographics
These are two good lead magnets that are useful to generate traffic to your website since it is particularly good for a B2B business, consequently for B2B lead generation as well. It is still time-consuming to create a report which is most of the time complex and specific topic. However, infographics help people to visualize a concept to fully understand. This is why infographics work perfectly as an addition to your report.

How-to guides, webinars, mind maps, e-books, newsletters, event tickets and predictions are other options of educational lead magnets your company can use. This will help to have a convincing reason for website visitors to enter their email address.

Community-Building Lead Magnets

These are mainly used to cause an interaction between interested prospects itself as well as with your company and the brand. In this communicative process, your company culture can be built by your company's most important people: current and future customers.

- Challenge
Within a challenge, everyone is potentially engaged and while your audience is in conjunction facing the same challenge, a sense of community can be developed. Moreover, anyone who is part of your challenge will turn into a highly qualified lead.
Your company's brand awareness is resultant growing as a nice side effect as well. By setting a start and end date for your challenge, urgency consequently turns your lead magnet into a more compelling one.

- Membership site or forum
Creating your own membership site or forum for your audience with free registration, asking and answering questions can be shared with each other. Phenomena like social proof and fear of missing out will assist your community in pushing your lead generation.

- Facebook or Slack group
Instead of creating your own membership site or forum, your company can use already existing conversation supporting sides like Facebook or Slack which are already used by many other companies as well.

Bottom of Lead Magnet Funnel

Most of the time, moving top-funnel prospective customers into the middle of your funnel represents the goal of lead magnets. But what about potential customer group who are at the bottom of your lead magnet funnel? Just because they are not yet on your company's email list doesn't mean they are not interested in buying your product or service. They just need one more reason to do so. It is your job now to convince them to turn into leads.

- Free consultation

Example of a lead magnet providing a free consultation in exchange for contact information 
Source: https://www.robin-data.io/en/free-consultation

The perfect fitting lead-generating magnet for companies offering a service can be an easy approach to ask for relevant information like the email address and phone number of interested prospects.

- Free trial
A free trial or demo version of your company's product or service represents an effective lead-generating magnet. It will easily convert leads since trying something for free before buying is a universally known method to convince prospective customers.

- Case Study
Case Studies can be a highly effective lead-gen magnet to show your potential customers the value of your products and services. Give them one last push they need to become a customer.

Additional bottom of lead magnet funnel is coupons, free shipping, free quote or a catalogue as well as a waiting list when your product is not saleable yet.

Entertaining Lead Magnets

These are used to inspire or entertain website visitors, but they still pursue the goal of converting a prospective customer into a lead.

- Quiz
A creative and diversified quiz related to your company can be entertaining for your interested website visitors. In order to get the result, participants have to leave their email address.

- Giveaway
Offering the opportunity to win a free product or service of your company can be appealing to potential customers but make sure your prize is relevant.

Other entertaining lead magnet ideas include surveys, a mobile app or a manifesto.

Your perfect fitting Lead Magnet

Whenever your company wants to collect information about your audience, you should use a lead magnet, the perfect fitting one of course. Take an individual measure by creating lead magnets. It should be adapted to your target group and their problems and interests. This blog post is providing you with some effective lead magnet ideas, but now it's your turn to create the perfect fitting one for your company!