Ideas for lead magnets

Why lead magnets? Boosting traffic to your website is one thing but if your visitors aren’t converting well and taking the next step on the path to purchase then there’s little point in having them there. The best way to do that is to create an effective lead magnet – something high quality for which they are willing to give up a little personal information, or even a little money, in order to access. The lead magnet can take many forms – it could be an online marketing video, a free report, a discount or coupon for one of your products, or something like the opportunity for a consultation with your team. Whatever it is – it will be useful and relevant to your prospect audience. That’s essential…

The key (as always) is to consider your audience, work out what lead magnet will work best for them and then effectively A/B test your offer to make sure that you receive as many drop-ins as possible. Struggling for ideas? Read on and we’ll take you through the pros and cons of some of the most effective lead magnets.

Discounts & Coupons

This is one of the simplest lead magnets to set up, manage and track. It’s also a great way of preventing people from abandoning purchases and never returning to your website – if you manage it carefully. You can use a tool like Optimonk to create a pop-up that only displays when a user is about to leave the website. This means that you can capture their email address and drop them into a nurture campaign that brings them back to the website to complete the purchase at a later date. We used this to great effect for many of our B2C customers who have seen measurable uplifts to to their bottom line.

This approach overcomes the main disadvantage of offering discounts and coupons as lead bait – you may end up offering a discount to someone who would’ve gone on to make the purchase anyway. This is more difficult if a large proportion of your traffic comes from mobile devices where it’s not possible to trigger pop-ups that appear when a user is about to leave a website. In these cases use Google Analytics to discover the pages on which visitors leave your website and set the pop-ups to appear there after a reasonable amount of time. The easiest way to discover what a ‘reasonable amount of time’ means is to check the page view duration in Analytics – always to measure the effect your digital marketing tactics are having.

Videos

Videos are one of the most effective ways of conveying a marketing message. Viewers generally remember 20% of what they read and 30% of what they hear but a staggering 70% of what they see and hear.

There are two ways that you can use video as part of your lead magnet. You can either create a marketing video with a call to action that encourages people to fill in their details and get your lead magnet, or you can create a video that is a lead magnet in itself. Specialised video hosting platforms that we use at Saucy Horse,  like Wistia, make it easy to embed videos that ask for an email address before playing. Alternatively, if you require more information you can ask users to fill out a form before being directed to the page where the video is embedded, or sending them an email featuring the video. Make sure the video is something they will want to watch though! It’s not a case of anything will do with successful video marketing.

Many businesses think that video is too complex or costly to have a place in their digital marketing strategy but, in terms of return on investment, it can be one of the most effective forms of marketing if you avoid the common pitfalls and take time to consider your audience before you begin.

Have we whetted your appetite? Then we’ve got a lead magnet of our very own!

Contact our digital marketing experts for a website review and find out for free where a lead magnet would increase your success in generating qualified leads.