Sales stand and fall on leads, but attracting prospects and optimally converting them into buyers is an art that many have yet to grasp. About 61% of marketers consider generating traffic and leads their biggest challenge, according to Hubspot. Why?
Three problems currently hamper the visibility of a website. First, the digital competition is all optimized for Google’s search engine. Second, new privacy policies in Europe and the U.S. restrict data collection, limiting diverse marketing opportunities. Finally, consumers are showing increasing concern about the benefit-cost calculation of handing out their contact details to businesses.
Facing difficulties doesn’t mean all hope is lost, though. On the contrary: Those who strategically align lead generation with the goals of their potential buyers will gain a significant advantage. The key is building a foot-in-the-door technique for continuous engagement — lead magnets.
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Let’s explore what lead magnets are and how you can design and implement them effectively to build a strong customer relationship from scratch.
Many companies are quick to overlook that the timing of when a lead magnet is displayed influences user behavior.
The enticing charm of lead magnets
In physics, the movements of the +/- poles in magnetic fields generate energy. It’s similar for websites: By incorporating different magnets that trigger various actions, you create a robust environment for sparking a users’ interest. A lead magnet is on-demand content that incentivizes users to provide their contact information (“a sign-up”), so you can engage them in the future. In a survey conducted with 1,000 bloggers, we found that those using lead magnets were 57% more likely to report strong results from their content marketing.
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Today, 96% of visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. Instead, they are either becoming familiar with your brand (awareness stage) or considering your products as one of many options (consideration stage). In these initial phases, you want potential prospects to put their contact details down so that you can engage them with personalized emails in the future. Unfortunately, very few customers just hand over their data like that. This is exactly where alluring magnets enter the equation.
Essentials for creating high-conversion magnets
Magnets can be anything that provides additional value, whether benchmark studies, guides, interactive quizzes, short or long-form video content, or anything else. The purpose is exchanging a contact, just like an ethical bribe. To effectively design magnets for several buyer personas and decision stages, you need to ask yourself the following questions first.
Does the magnet solve a problem?
If your lead magnet doesn’t solve a visitor’s problem, or if it doesn’t help them achieve their goal, then your hard work has gone to waste.
To find out if your magnet fits a purpose, you need to listen to your audience. Here, SEO tools come in handy, allowing you to do keyword or search analysis. Browsing through the long- and short-tail keywords with the highest search volume will help you quickly discover what kind of answers potential leads are looking for.
With the help of data collected by your CMS, you can check which of your on-page website content has longer visit times and which pages receive more clicks. Such insights show you the website content that is perceived as particularly valuable by your customers, making the creation of a magnet worthwhile.
You can also use social media listening in groups and on competitors’ pages and users’ comments on existing content to identify what they like to learn about. Or, you could simply ask your audience what content they might be interested in on your social media channels or website by using a poll or short survey.
Does it deliver value to the individual visitor?
Before wildly distributing lead magnets all over your website, look closely at each website visitor’s decision stage (sales funnel) and separate your magnets into categories. During the interest stage, most people will value articles that expand their knowledge. When deciding on a purchase, a user will benefit from content that describes exactly how your service or product works.
Don’t create a lead magnet covering something general — such information can be provided by blogs and website content where no sign-up is required. Especially when it comes to engaging consumers at the early stages of the purchase, demonstrating your expertise or unique value proposition (UVP) is key to enhancing brand awareness. That’s why educational content tailored to an industry or product has proven most effective, for both B2C and B2B marketing.
How does it deliver value?
Your lead magnet should offer and deliver rapid success for your visitor. So, it’s key to check what type of content is easy to digest and fits your services or products. GetResponse found that text-based lead magnets have the highest conversion rates. In fact, 58.6% of marketers said written short-form content, such as newsletters, checklists or e-book samples outperform other content.
In the same study, visual-heavy industries like publishing, arts and entertainment, fitness and e-commerce have reported that video works better than text-based content. With the growing presence of video content and video consumption (78% of people watch videos online every week), we recommend using educational webinars or videos that explain your product or software as persuasive lead magnets.
How about running a four-week video tutorial where you give free advice on topics related to your company’s expertise? Offering a long-term course instead of a single event will help you keep your leads engaged, increasing the likelihood of building a solid relationship with them.
Whatever the type of content, short-form usually performs best. Only 27% of the respondents said they saw higher conversion rates with long-form videos, and 41.4% saw higher conversion with long-form written content. Although e-books or long reports can overwhelm an audience if they are not ready for purchase yet, especially in the B2B market and when offered in the later stages of the buying process, they are often the deciding factor for choosing a service or agency.
Are you addressing your customer’s ROI?
The science behind lead magnets is simple. Before a prospect gives you their email, they’ll make a cost-benefit analysis. Nobody will take action until they have calculated an ROI in their mind: Is the return of the download higher (perceived value) than the required investment (leaving contact details and spending time-consuming the magnet)? Mentioning how much a customer can save or make with your solution really pays off.
Free products and freemium access are often perceived as highly beneficial for attracting leads, but not every startup can offer numerous free products or subscriptions. Instead, smaller companies can help themselves by employing engaging webinars and designing product demos and unique and detailed content.
Does your design include the 3-Ps?
Now that we understand it’s all about the customer’s ROI, it’s time to study the way to manipulate the perceived benefit and costs: through design and copy. Here you can stick to the 3-Ps rule: prominence, promise, proof.
Prominence means that you can draw the attention of the visitor to your offering by using the right colors and images or symbols. We’ve analyzed thousands of designs of lead magnets, and the best ones point toward the appeal, such as a portrait giving a visual cue where to click, or an arrow pointing toward the lead magnet. You can also use a play of colors to draw greater awareness.
Let’s say your page uses many warm colors, like red, orange and yellow. Adding a layout of cold complementary colors, like green or blue, will automatically draw the viewer’s attention to your lead magnet offering.
However, avoid red and black combinations. People who cannot detect red will confuse red and black, so the item will not be legible. Further, don’t choose red and green combinations, as approximately 5% of people cannot distinguish between the two.
Another way of improving visibility is working with strong contrasts. If you have a white or slightly colored background, your magnet’s dark and contrast-rich design will help manipulate the users’ consideration of your offering.
“Promised” and the “proof” are all about the type of copy you choose. The anatomy of a high-converting form is hierarchic and straightforward. The headline describes what (the promise) and the subhead should explain the why (and include the proof). A well-converting criterion is a statistic or quote of how people have benefited so far from the knowledge presented in the lead magnet.
The call to action (CTA) is the last-minute nudge about what will happen if the person exchanges their contact details for access. For example, adding the word “free” leads to much higher conversion rates. At the same time, using phrases that create a feeling of exclusivity (such as “unlock premium content” or “get unlimited access”) boosts engagement immensely.
The general formula for a high-performance CTA is:
I want to… what?
Because… why?
To give you an idea of how the whole design could look:
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Placing your magnets on your page: Pop-up vs. embedded
Many companies are quick to overlook that the timing of when a lead magnet is displayed influences user behavior. For example, you can use standard or exit-intent popups that notify website visitors of new products, discounts and other benefits after they’ve already spent some time on your page.
Pop-ups can be triggered by scroll movements or by time. Scroll movement sends readers a notification about signing up for additional content or a newsletter after they’ve scrolled through about 50% of the text. It also means you can lose potential leads that don’t perform that action.
Alternatively, you can analyze the average time users spend on your website and schedule an automated pop-up after a user has spent some percentage of the average time on the page. While our recommendation is 50%, you should A/B experiment with different ratios, as the right interaction point also relies on industry, content type and typical audience. Exit-intent means the software tracks mouse movements and scrolling behaviors of website visitors and detects when this visitor is about to leave your website, thereby engaging them on a last-minute call.
Pop-ups can often feel intrusive, so it’s essential to stick to some rules here. Pop-ups can be mistaken for ads and be outright discarded by some users. That’s why you need to provide an easy way for visitors to close the window on every pop-up. Additionally, don’t show the pop-up window on every page, and do it only once for each visitor.
Since too many flashing windows can distract visitors, often it’s better to rely on embedded magnets, for instance, on your sidebar or embedded on your posts. Like following the 50% principle for pop-ups, you can place an embedded form after 40%-50% of the text. Embedded lead magnets and their value propositions must match the content of the website, which also means that images and text shouldn’t be simply placed, but embedded in compliance with the 3-Ps rule described above.
Guarantee privacy
Privacy is a hot topic in the marketing world and the highest priority when requesting personal contact information. But new privacy guidelines like the EU’s GDPR are not the only reason why businesses should be careful with private data. About 78% of U.S. consumers are very protective of their financial data, and 92% say that companies must be proactive about data protection.
To safeguard your leads’ privacy, use a checkbox for their agreement to the privacy terms and include a link to the full privacy statement. By ticking a box, they will agree to a written statement on their willingness to receive marketing communications or a private message by one of your salespeople. For instance: “By clicking ‘Create account,’ I accept the Terms of Service, the Anti-Spam Policy, and the Privacy Policy.”
Even though this might reduce the number of leads signing up, you will gain high-quality leads. The ones putting their details down are aware and willing to receive communication. Additionally, make sure their privacy rights are not only guaranteed on paper, but you implement processes and policies to protect them.
Don’t measure the wrong ROI
Most beginners will want to figure out how many people exchanged their contact for the lead magnet. However, this is a common mistake of misinterpreting what lead generation really is about, thinking that generating as many leads as possible is the end goal. In reality, you want to attract high-quality leads, prospects that have a true interest in getting to know you better and will open your email newsletter instead of ignoring them.
To measure the ROI of your magnets accurately, you need to assess whether prospects who have signed up for the magnet end up using it, so you measure e-mail open and download rates. Now, there are two potential scenarios why an email recipient doesn’t download the magnet: Either that person lost the initial interest (or got distracted) or the download process isn’t self-explanatory and seamless enough.
Test the latter by noting how quickly the email lands in an inbox, which should be an immediate auto-reply, and how easy the “download and open” action is. A prospect gone cold, however, doesn’t mean you need to hang the flag of surrender. Instead, you should re-engage the lead within the next 24 hours and offer the same lead magnet to the customer again.
Features like Google Analytics can measure how many people download your lead magnet, but not which lead they downloaded. As a solution, you need to make some changes to your mailing archives. Most email platforms allow you to tag additional information to your subscriber profiles. This can be the URL of the sign-up page or the downloaded file’s name, and should be automated with a command or add-on feature.
The goal is to identify how people get into your funnel, rather than just having them pop up in your subscriber list out of nowhere.
Prepare your work on memorable aftermath
To wrap up, send each sign-up a personalized welcome email with the lead magnet enclosed and a double opt-in confirmation. Let’s not forget: You designed the lead magnet to receive contact information and start nurturing that contact with email follow-ups and newsletters. A double opt-in confirms the lead’s interest in receiving future communication.
Even though this may result in lower conversion rates and increase the cost-per-lead (CPL) by 20%, it could easily be outweighed by an increase in deliverability, higher-quality customer data and a more engaged audience. So think twice before you choose only to pay attention to low CPL like single opt-ins.
Now that you have collected new contacts, nothing stands in the way of expanding communication and gaining loyal customers.