How to Create a Lead Magnet that Grows Your List
Are you trying to grow your email list, but it feels like no one's signing up? Learn how to create an irresistible lead magnet that attracts your ideal subscribers.
What is a lead magnet?
Your lead magnet is the incentive you offer people who join your list. A lead magnet can come in a lot of different forms. Basically, it’s a valuable free resource that you give to new subscribers. Here are some lead magnet examples:
PDF
Checklist
Audio file
Mini-course
Video
Why you need a lead magnet
If you want to grow your list, you really do need a lead magnet because people just aren't signing up for updates. They don't want to just hear about what's new in your business. You need to give them a little incentive to join because email is a super effective channel for marketing, but only if you can get subscribers. So you need to give people a reason to join something exclusive that they can only get when they sign up and share that email address with you.
Your lead magnet should solve a problem for your audience. It should be high value and it should be easy to digest because you want to give them a quick win. That's one reason I don't like giant PDFs or 30 day challenges because it's too hard for new subscribers to actually extract the value from something that big. So when you're coming up with a lead magnet, think of that. Make sure that it's something that's quick and easy for your new subscriber to get in, get some value from and actually start using and get a win from it.
How to pick the perfect lead magnet
So how do you come up with a lead magnet? How do you find the thing that is actually going to connect with your audience and really address the problems that they're having and give them a solution? You're going to research. You're going to listen to your audience.
The best way to find a great idea for lead magnet is look at the questions that you are getting all of the time already. Are there frequently asked questions you get via email or social media? Are there common questions that come up in your industry all the time? Think of a way that you can address these questions and get people one step closer to their ultimate goal.
For example, let's talk about my lead magnet, the Open Rate Booster Checklist. This lead magnet was born out of research. I created this lead magnet after doing some audience research in Facebook groups and seeing the same question pop up all the time. So many people wanted to know if their email open rate was good. They wanted to know what stats they should be going for and where they landed in the benchmark of what's a good email open rate.
After doing that research, I created a PDF that lists what good open rates are and gives you five ways to improve your open rates.
Facebook groups are one of my favorite ways to research anything in my business. There are so many entrepreneur groups that are full of my ideal clients, where they are posting and sharing their problems. They're sharing questions. It's really easy to just listen in and see what they're asking that you can then go and create.
Social media is another great way to research your audience. You can even go on YouTube and search other videos that are in your niche and see what comments come up. Another great way to research your audience is to survey them and just ask them: What are you struggling with? What would you love to learn from me?
How to create a lead magnet
Once you hit on the perfect idea for your lead magnet, it's time to create it. When it comes to lead magnets, PDFs are the easiest to create and deliver. They're also super fast to create. You can just write out the content in a Google doc and then do some designing and create a quick PDF.
If you want to make a pretty, I recommend you checking out Canva (affiliate link). Canva is totally free and you can design all kinds of different graphics for your business. It's my go-to because it's easy to use and super user-friendly. You can create some beautiful stuff, even if you're not a designer.
Canva offers a lot of great pre-made templates that you can use. You can customize them with your branding, add in your info, and you're ready to go. You can also get Canva templates from a designer or you can go someplace like Creative Market if you want a template that is not quite as overused as some of the free Canva templates.
Basically, just dive into Canva (affiliate link). You can use any of the templates there to create your lead magnet, customize it with your branding and download it. And then you are ready to go!
And once you have that lead magnet created, you can start to share it all over the place. Promote it in all of your opt-in forms so that you can get new subscribers seeing this great value that you're providing and signing up for your list.
If you want to check out my lead magnet, you can grab your copy of the Open Rate Booster Checklist below!