How to Grow Your List with Lead Magnets

If you are building a website in order to grow your business, one of the most important pieces of your online business setup will be your email marketing. So grow your list!

Why is email marketing important?

It is rare for a business, especially service-based businesses (although this applies to those of you selling products too), to make a sale on the first visit to a website. This does depend on how the visit was initiated. For instance, did you speak with someone and then refer them to your website (warm lead), or did they hear you on a podcast and then visit your website (warm lead), OR did they stumble across your website from a Google search or new social media find (cold leads)?

Cold leads typically need more interaction with you and your brand before purchasing. This is especially true for big-ticket items – services and products at a higher price point.

One of the best ways to do this is to get people onto your email list. When you grow your list, a user will come to your website and if they like what you have to offer but aren’t ready to buy, you might be able to convince them to get on your email list instead. From there, you can send them an email (with useful information that gets them to know/like/trust you) on a weekly basis, or you can space them out a bit more.

How a lead magnet can help grow your list:

First, you need something to entice them to give you their email address. This something is typically called a lead magnet.

Sure, if they really like your stuff, they may just give you their email for the promise of hearing more from you. But, the common practice these days is to give them something in return.

What should that something be?

Ideally, you want to give them something of value – afterall, they have to want it enough to give you their email address. It should also tee up another action. This means that you might give them a free taste of a program you sell, and then the next action would be to purchase the program for more.

For example, on my Quit The Pill website, a resource for women coming off of hormonal birth control, I have a 3-Step Quit The Pill guide that goes over how you can set yourself up for success when coming off of hormonal birth control like the pill. It’s good information and provides some specific actions and recommended supplements, but it’s limited in scope.

This way, as I stay in touch with them, I can encourage them to seek out more support via the affiliate programs that I sell or the detox program that I created myself. (Detoxification is one of the steps in the guide).

In order to come up with your lead magnet, here are some other ideas:

Think of boiling down the steps of your process and then providing one takeaway for each
Provide a how-to guide that includes your product or service – but also offers other actionable tips
Give them access to a key resource that you use with all of your clients – make sure its useful but doesn’t give away all of your support strategies
A guide to your philosophy – this gives people a strong taste of what you’re about, but those who need support implementing it will still need to work with you

You can also have more than one lead magnet. Read this post about how I use multiple lead magnets to grow my list at Quit The Pill.

Once you have your idea, make sure that you pull your lead magnet together in a way that looks professional.

If you’re a writer, type out your guide and then style it using Adobe InDesign or Canva.

For video, make sure that you record in a well-lit space. For recording how-to’s using free software, checkout my SkillShare course about using both Zoom and Loom.

(Pssst… you can get two weeks of SkillShare free with this link).

Once you have your lead magnet, you’ll set up delivery and an email opt-in on your website and start growing your list! If you need help delivering your freebie in MailChimp, check out this YouTube video.