How To Use A Lead Magnet To Get Way More Subscribers
So you can get more eyeballs on your products and stop feeling like you’re yelling your words into the void
Access the original Medium article here.
Get your free GrooveFunnels account here.
Listen to the Podcast
Or find it on Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts, Google or wherever you consume your podcasts.
Summary
How many times have you given up your email address for some nugget of wisdom that someone promised you? You were promised some kind of Ambrosia that was going to help you raise your game, only to find that there was no such magic within. What you end up getting in exchange for your email address is stuff you already knew, and an upsell to the real product where the real gold is.
The problem is, Lead Magnets work- they got your email address didn't they? And in this day and age, if you want to grow your email list, you've got to have one too.
First you've got to build it. You've got to get over your perfectionism and get something out there. It doesn't have to be perfect, it can even be recycled content. It just has to be enticing enough to get that email address.
And then you have to figure out how to deliver it. Via the Thank You Page? Via the first email? Via a Membership site? Some combination of all 3 perhaps. Building a list can be challenging- a Lead Magnet is going to make it so much easier.
Transcript
It's enough to make your blood boil, isn't it? How many times have you given up your email address for some nugget of wisdom that someone promised you, they promised you some kind of Ambrosia that was going to help you raise your game, only to find that there was no such magic within what you end up getting is stuff you already knew. And and that upsell to the real product where the real gold is.
The problem is, lead magnets work. They got your email address! And so if you're looking to build your presence online, if you're looking to build an email marketing list, you've got to have one too.
Hey, everyone, Andrew Burns here with you, founder of Running2KeepUp.com and AdventuresIn.Marketing. And this is the Adventures In Marketing Show.
Yeah, so lead magnets, they make us feel a little bit grubby sometimes. And, yeah, they can be frustrating. And I'm going to talk about some of the frustrations with you. But you've got to have one if you want to build your email list. You've got to offer your potential subscribers some kind of free gift that's going to get them to give up their email address, you've got to do it.
So what is it? What is a lead magnet? A lead magnet can be anything, it can be a free ebook, i.e. a PDF that you made. It could be a video series, it could be an audio series, it could be a white paper or a report. It doesn't really matter. It's got to be attractive. And it's got to be something that people are going to be willing to give you their email address for, because in this day and age, no one is just going to give you, or very few people are just going to give you their email address in exchange for the promise of you keeping in touch with them every week, or in exchange for the promise of keeping them updated or joining your community. Those things just, they don't fly anymore. And so we've got to give our audience a reason to join us, a reason to agree to hear from us.
So I wanted to talk about a particular lead magnet that I signed up for. And I've talked about this before. But the reason that I wanted to talk about it today is to is to let you perfectionists know that your lead magnet doesn't have to be all that you think it does right now. Okay, perfectionist, I see you. I feel you, I'm one of you. But your lead magnet doesn't have to be the be all and end all.
When I started building my Instagram following, I did what I always do, which is to go and seek out someone who's done it before, and to consume some of their content that I hoped was going to teach me how this thing was done. I didn't really understand Instagram, I didn't really get it. I didn't really know how to go about going from zero, which is where I was to, you know, the 1000s of followers that I thought I needed to sustain my online business.
So I signed up for a course- it was a free course, you know, I admit that it was a free course. And it was provided by someone who's pretty well known. He's an online guru, an SEO guru. And he has a free Instagram course and I signed up for it. And it was rubbish. It was! It made me actually angry. It was complacent, and didn't do what he said it would do.
I gave him my email address, I got access to the course, I started watching the course. One of the very first things he spoke about was the facility in Instagram to be able to use the swipe up feature from your Instagram Stories to link to offers that you wanted to make your audience.
Now his course was built as building your Instagram account from zero, which is why I signed up for it, because that's where I was. Now, as someone who had, you know, zero or or next to zero followers on Instagram, I knew that you can't make use of that feature of Instagram until you've got 10,000 followers.
The first thing that he was speaking to me about in his course, for building my account, my Instagram account up from zero was something that I couldn't access until I had 10,000 followers. He obviously has many more followers than 10,000. And he's forgotten that when you start out, you don't have access to that feature!
It made me really angry. And I actually didn't finish the course. And yes, particularly frustrating, a particularly frustrating experience with that particular lead magnet. Why am I telling you this? I am still on that gentleman's email list, he got my email, I joined his list, I got access to the to the lead magnet, which I hated. I didn't unsubscribe from his list. Why not? Well, I actually like his email content. I like receiving his emails, he provides lots of value in those emails. And the fact that I hated his lead magnet doesn't really make me unsubscribe from his email list.
So your lead magnet doesn't have to be perfect. What's important, once you've got people onto your email list, is to provide them value, is to be entertaining, is to keep them engaged via that email list. Even if they hate your lead magnet, they're still going to stay subscribed to your email list, in all probability, if they're anything like me. So we don't need it to be perfect.
Now, if you're a blogger, or you write on medium.com, you probably have access to content that you can repurpose as a lead magnet. So I really like a tool called Designrr, I think it's designrr.io. I'll put a link below so you can go and check it out. It's really cost effective. What it allows you to do is produce ebooks based on online content, so you don't even have to copy and paste your content into this tool. You can just put in the the web address, if it's articles on medium, or articles on your blog, you can put in multiple of these into your ebook, and it kind of builds it all together, and makes it really easy for you to produce an ebook. So I really, really like that. And I think it makes creating one of these lead magnets incredibly easy.
Maybe you've got a YouTube channel, when you've got lots of content on there, maybe you've got IGTV videos that you could repurpose. It doesn't have to be loads of work to create a lead magnet. And as I say, using my Instagram course as an example, it doesn't have to be perfect. But it has to be something enough to get your potential subscriber to fulfil that potential, to become a subscriber to your email list.
So think about content you've already got. What could you repurpose? How are you going to package it up into something that is appealing to get people onto your email list? Perfect.
Now we have to think about how we're going to deliver that lead magnet. How are we going to make sure that when someone puts their email address into the box on our on our landing page on our website and click Submit, how are we going to make sure that they receive the thing, the lead magnet that we promised them, okay?
There are a few different ways that we can look at that. So one way is to deliver it via the thank you page on our website, on our squeeze page. So someone comes to our website, we offer them the lead magnet, we have a signup form, they put in their email address, they click Submit. And then a few things happen in the background don't they? That email address gets added to our email service provider, whoever that might be. And then your new subscriber is then taken to a thank you page that says thanks for signing up.
Now you can deliver your lead magnet right there and then. You can put a button on that thank you page. So let's say your lead magnet is an ebook. You can save that ebook into Google Drive, or Dropbox or iCloud. It doesn't really matter, but one of those online storage services. And then you can put a button on your thank you page that says access your free gift here. They click on that button and it takes them to that file that you saved on Google Drive or Dropbox or iCloud. Really straightforward, really slick. really clean. Really nice.
You can also do the same thing in your first email, your first welcome email. This is a really good, good method because it gets your new, freshly minted subscriber looking for your first email. So on your thank you page you could say "check your inbox right now for for your free gift". They go and check their email inbox, they can see whether it landed in their junk mail and then add you to their whitelist, you can put some instructions on your thank you page at that same time. And that email contains a link to the file that you saved in Google Drive, or whichever online storage facility you used.
Both of those work really nicely, really easy to to deliver the free gift that you promised your new subscriber. The other way that you could do it and the way that I really like to do it, is to deliver your free gift via a membership site, via a membership portal.
The problem with those other two methods of delivery is that someone, you could imagine that someone could share your link, someone that didn't sign up to your email address could still get access to your free gift, your free file, your ebook or your video course or your audio course, or whatever it is that you've promised them. I have no idea whether that ever really happens. But you could imagine that it could.
A safer way potentially, would be to deliver your free gift via a membership site. This is something that that I like to do. This is something that you can achieve for free as well. So if you go and sign up for GrooveFunnels, they have a product in there called GrooveMember, I believe you can set up a membership site for free in that system. Again, I'll drop a link below. And you can go and check that out.
And what it basically allows you to do is to put your free gift behind a sign in screen, behind a password protected sign in screen. So you set up your membership site, you have one thing in there, that's your lead magnet, whether that's an E book or your video series, whatever you decided to deliver. And someone signs in on your signup page, they click Submit, from the thank you page you can direct them to to your membership site, or you can do it via email or both probably, and they go and they sign into their new members area and you deliver your free gift right there on that members area. Password protected, very secure, very slick.
This gives you a few other opportunities. What it means is that if you've got other products to sell, they're kind of connected to your lead magnet. So let's say my lead magnet is an Ebook on my five best productivity tips. And then I've got a course on productivity as well that I want to sell in that same membership area where I'm delivering my free gift, where I'm delivering my five great productivity tips ebook. They can also see that I've got the course right there. It can be greyed out, they don't have access to it, but they can see it. And now every time they come into that membership area to view that ebook, they've been told about the course I have for sale as well.
So it's another real opportunity to be able to sell the products that you want to sell your customers right alongside them getting access to their to their free book. So it's another another prompt, you're going to email them about that product that you have to sell. But it's just a prompt, it's already there. It's already in their mind, they've already seen it. They know it follows on from the lead magnet that you supplied them so really, it's another opportunity to sell to your potential customer, your new freshly minted subscriber.
So there you have it, I think a lead magnet in this day and age is so important. You've got to have one. Think about yourself, think about signing up for email lists. You don't do that readily. Your email inbox is already chock full of newsletters and people trying to get your attention.
So if you want someone on your email list, you've got to give them something of value that's going to get them to give up that email address. And it doesn't have to be perfect. Remember the example of the Instagram course. But it has to be something of perceived value.
And then you have to deliver that thing to your new subscribers. So you can do that on your thank you page, link straight to the file. You can do that via your first email with a link straight to the file. Or you can do that through a membership site, for example, in GrooveMember. And that will also give you another opportunity to potentially sell to your new subscriber.
I hope you find that useful. Go and produce your first lead magnet. Don't be too much of a perfectionist about it, get it done, get it up online. And let's start growing your email list. Thanks, everyone. I'll talk to you again soon.
Hey, my friend, thank you so much for watching the video, I really appreciate you spending the time to do that. If you found some value here today, I would ask you for a couple of favours. Please subscribe to the channel, turn on notifications, because that's what allows me to let you know the next time I post a video here. And drop me a comment. I love hearing from you. And it's your comments that are really going to drive the future direction of these videos. So yeah, let me know what you thought.
If you think there is someone in your world who could benefit from this video, please share it with them. That would be great. And oh, and check out my other channel Running2KeepUp There's a link to it around here somewhere. Over there, I talk about how you can become the most effective version of you that you can be. It's all about productivity. It's about habit formation. It's about limiting procrastination. If any of that sounds like it might be valuable to you go and check it out. And yeah, subscribe to that channel too. And, yeah, other than that, thank you very much. I'm Andrew Burns. I've really enjoyed talking to you today and I'll talk to you again soon.