How To Create High Converting Lead Magnets To Grow Your List Like Crazy

You’ve probably heard the saying that “the money is in the list.” And it’s true! Your email list is one of your most valuable assets as a business owner or marketer.

Building a qualified list can be tough, but by being more intentional about the lead magnets you can actually attract a better customer into your business.

So let me give you a hand with that in this article.

We’re going to jump into the steps that you can use to create a converting lead magnet that will rope customers into your business and your pot of gold (your email list).

First let’s cover how you decide what to giveaway and then let’s go through the process of how you can use a lead capture tool like OptinMonster to create optin forms and your lead magnet.

What Is A Lead Magnet?

If you’re not familiar with lead magnets, they are pieces of content (freebies) that people give away to capture leads into their business and nurture them into customers.

You see a lot of people giving away free PDFs, eBooks, checklists, even mini-courses.

Lead magnets are one of the best ways to grow your email list because they capture leads who are interested in what you are offering and create a jumping-off point to nurture that lead into a customer.

This seriously pays off in the future especially if you have a high ticket offer to sell later down the line to the prospects you gather on your list.

How To Come Up With A Great Lead Magnet Idea

The goal is to create a lead magnet that gets quality people on your list that are not just a bunch of random freebie seekers so you end up with a list full of prospects who want to buy from you in the future.

And “splintering” is a great strategy to help you do that.

Splintering Your Main Offer 

One of the best ways to create a congruent lead magnet is by “splintering” your main offer into freebies (lead magnets) worth giving away.

Splintering means taking the components that make up your main offer and splintering them into little pieces of that. Then you create a free lead magnet around that smaller “splinter” of your larger offer.

You want to begin with the end in mind by making sure there is a really congruent path for someone to download this free offer – to end up buying your big main offer later on down the line and becoming a customer.

There should be a super logical step of “now you got this first thing, you should get this next thing so you can end up getting more of that thing you really want.”

Here’s an exercise to help make this happen.

Say your “main offer” is broken down into 3 pillars and each pillar has 3 steps – how could you make a good digestible lead magnet for each step?

Here’s an example.

At my agency we can help people with three things. We can help them with their funnels, their traffic, and their email.

 

These are the three pillars that make up our core service offering.

 

 

If I broke each one of the pillars into three little steps I could come up with three sections for each one.

Funnel	Traffic	Email
Offer	Strategy	Autoresponder
Pricing	Ads	Broadcast
Landing Page	Targeting	Re-engage

 

That’s nine different components that make up the core service offerings that we have at my agency.

Then I’d look to splinter out one of these little sections to create one free lead magnet that is easy to consume and helps people understand that little part of our bigger offer.

By creating our lead magnet this way I’m absolutely sure that whatever I’m giving away for free leads back to our main offer because it’s just a small piece of the whole pie.

Without giving away something that relates to our main offer we would end up with a bunch of leads on our list that don’t convert in the long run.

With that said, let’s jump into some do’s and don’t for creating your converting lead magnet.

The Do’s For Creating A Converting Lead Magnet

1. Make it specific 

Your lead magnet should be specific to your main offer and the specific customer you want on your list. 

Here’s 5 ways to make your lead magnet more specific:

• Make a specific promise – tell them exactly what the lead magnet will deliver. 
• Give a specific example – case studies are a great way to do this.
• Offer a specific shortcut – lists, handouts, flowcharts, templates, cheatsheets, etc. 
• Answer a specific question – figure out what the most frequently asked questions are around your product/market/website and make a lead magnet that answers it.

2. Make it easy to consume, valuable, and actionable 

You want to solve a specific problem for a specific customer with a specific solution that’s easy to consume. 

A really long eBook? No thanks. 

No one wants to read a 100-200 page eBook from someone they barely know. 

Instead create something easy to consume, to get value and action from in 5-10 minutes. 

Some great example of quick to consume lead magnets are:

• Flow charts 
• Templates
• Checklists
• Scorecards
• Cheatsheets 

Pro tip: PDF checklists tend to convert really well because they are quick and easy to digest. 

3. Make sure it has the next step

At the very end of the lead magnet you have an incredible opportunity to tell people what to do next by taking out a full page ad at the end of whatever you’re giving away. 

Here’s an example of an ad we did at the end of one of the PDF checklists we gave away. 

 

 

Something like this makes sure your customer knows what to do next at the end of the lead magnet.

The Don’ts For Creating A Converting Lead Magnet 

1. Don’t make it too long or complicated 

Again we want to make it short, sweet, and oh so valuable so it converts!

2. Don’t make lead magnets just for the sake of giving stuff away 

Plenty of people make lead magnets just for the sake of getting leads.

What they end up with is a lot of leads and none of those people converting over time. 

You can easily avoid this by simply making sure your lead magnet is aligned with your main offer. 

3. Don’t give away general content 

A great example of this is one of our clients who had given away a general checklist of, “5 Ways To Improve Your Sales.”

Everyone wanted to improve their sales so they got lots of leads coming in but those leads were never converting down the line because they weren’t speaking to their ideal customer. 

When we changed out their lead magnet to something towards a specific type of person, we generated fewer leads but we got more customers because we were more specific with who we were talking to and the solution we provided.

Optimizing Your Lead Magnet 

Now that you know what to do and what not to do to create an irresistible lead magnet you can create a handful of them and then analyze which one resonates best with your market. 

Ultimately you want to end up with one or two lead magnets that attract the right type of person and have a good conversion rate to get more qualified leads over time. 

Using A Lead Capture To Start Getting Conversions 

So once you’ve got your super attractive lead magnet, what do you do with it?

The best thing you can do is make sure it gets in front of all your current traffic…psst add them to your website!

You can use a lead capture tool like OptinMonster to easily create optin campaigns on your website like: 

• Popups on blog posts that are specific to certain content 
• Slide-in scroll boxes
• Floating bars
• Fullscreen welcome mats
• Inline campaigns
• Gamified spin-to-win wheels
• Gated content lockers

 

 

You can easily personalize all of these to show different lead magnets on different pages depending on the content the user is viewing. 

Here’s some examples from our website. 

This is an example of a popup on a specific blog post. 

 

 

You can insert a sidebar optin form on your blog page like this. 

 

You can also use OptinMonster to embed your lead magnet inside specific blog posts (using inline boxes) like this. 

 

 

The more specific and targeted you can make your lead magnets based on the specific content the reader is consuming on your website the better! 

Conclusion 

Phew, we’ve covered a lot here, but the big concept is using splintering to make sure that you are creating lead magnets that are going to attract your ideal customer over time. 

Now it’s time for you to take the pen to paper and break down how you can pick splinters out of your main offer so that you can solve specific problems for your ideal customers and get the right prospects into your world!

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