10 Best Lead Magnet Examples
Are you struggling to get more potential customers for your business? Let's talk about lead magnets – the most important element of any effective lead generation strategy.
In today's post, I'm going to define what lead magnets are and how you should go about choosing one to generate leads effectively.
I will also provide a list of 10 best lead magnet examples and ideas you can use in your own email marketing campaigns.
Okay, let's start with the theory first.
Table of Content:
What is a lead magnet
Why are lead magnets important
10 best lead magnet examples and ideas
How to choose a good lead magnet for your campaign
Editor: Want to expand your email list faster? Learn how the GetResponse Conversion Funnel can help you attract tons of new leads in no time.
What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is a free incentive that you give away to visitors to your site. It is meant to catch their attention and convince them to give you their contact information - usually an email address and a name.
Lead magnets are also often called registration incentives, registration offers, content upgrades, freebies, opt-in bribes and many other terms.
Why are lead magnets important?
Website visitors have become immune to ads and pop-up forms that provide them with no value. Their natural reaction is to click away or click the cross, without feeling even a hint of remorse.
Take a look at your own registration forms. What is their conversion rate? If you don't offer any kind of sign-up incentive, chances are they're in the low numbers.
That's why marketers came up with the idea of offering lead magnets. A natural way to exchange something of value (eg a piece of content) for a user's email address.
Eye-catching, interesting and relevant lead magnets are an important part of any effective lead generation strategy, especially if you use marketing funnels.
It is also important where you market incentives for opt-in. Squeeze pages and landing pages are the best choices, but your home page will work just fine if you have no other option.
10 Best lead magnet examples and ideas
1. Infographic
Infographics can be both fun and useful.
Many people like them because they can quickly provide key information on a particular topic and do so in a format that is enjoyable to watch.
It is also not uncommon to see infographics get many social shares and backlinks.
But there is one problem with infographics that must be mentioned.
It is that some of them have a relatively short lifespan. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you are trying to take advantage of a particular event or a particular season.
On the other hand, if you do not want to continue creating infographics too often, you will develop one that will help you generate leads for several months to come.
How can you do that?
Check your existing content. See which posts or videos get a lot of engagement and traffic from the organic search throughout the year.
Most often, you will be able to find content that is very popular and that is worth reusing, ie being turned into an infographic.
Then do a Google search for images and see if there is already something similar out there. If so, make sure yours is better and can outperform the existing one.
What if you do not have content that is ranked well yet?
In this case, go to the question and answer types of sites like Quora.
These get a lot of organic traffic in pretty much every niche you can think of.
Search through the categories, find the one that is relevant to your niche, and check out the questions posted there.
Look at the ones that get a lot of views, followers and comments.
Then all you have to do is choose a specific topic, gather all the best answers and turn them into a neat, shareable infographic.
You can also use tools like Ahrefs to identify the best infographics and be inspired by what has attracted many social divisions in the previous year.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet examples?
People like infographics as they are both entertaining and informative. Your audience doesn't have to make a lot of effort or spend time reading them. In addition, you can design them relatively easily by using ready-made templates you can find online.
2. Spreadsheet
In some niches, spreadsheets are very popular.
Take online marketers or personal finance bloggers, for example.
People in these industries often come up with various spreadsheets that help them optimize their work.
And it turns out that there are many people with similar needs to yours, so all these bloggers and marketers need to do is share their existing spreadsheets with the others.
What's even better is that these often don't even need to be very complex. Like social media or editorial calendars with different columns and rows prepared for individual online marketing channels.
Other times, the spreadsheets will contain more complicated functions and detailed explanations of how to use them.
These are even more powerful as most users will not be able to develop them on their own.
Also, when you know someone put a lot of effort into creating a spreadsheet, you don't feel bad about having to offer your email address in exchange. You know you're getting real value out of this deal.
In either case, spreadsheets can help you speed up your email list building process.
All you have to do is put them behind a sign-up form and them to the thank you page or an automated thank you message.
It's that simple 🙂
Above is an example of a page that does just that. What's interesting about it, though, is that instead of paying with an email address, you're asked to share the resource to access it.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet examples?
Spreadsheets are similar to templates and planners in that they save time. The more tedious or complicated the task you solve with your spreadsheet, the better it will be at converting visitors to email subscribers.
3. A cheat sheet or list
The longer you work in a given industry, the more experience and knowledge you get - at least in theory!
Some of it is probably difficult to find or access for someone who is new to the business.
So why not take advantage of the years behind the belt and put them into a downloadable list or a cheat sheet?
We tend to forget this, but there are people who prefer shorter content like cheat sheets over e-books.
They do not have time to download and read long-form content. They prefer something faster to read that can help them make significant changes in strategy quickly.
This is a win-win situation.
Making a cheat sheet should not take you too long - after all, you already have the knowledge needed to develop it, so all you need to do is combine it in a logical way.
You will also get more subscribers actually using your content, instead of just downloading it.
Shouldn't this be a goal for all our content?
The interesting thing about lists is that they can be used in all industries.
You could create a list of:
recipes (e.g., gluten-free, Halloween themed, or for organizing a picnic),
tools (e.g., for marketing automation, for start-ups, or those that are free of charge),
resources (e.g., on a specific topic or for a specific group of customers),
workouts (e.g., for those who are traveling or working out at home)
looks (e.g., clothes for summer vacation or business trips)
As you can see, all of these ideas can be turned into a lead magnet that would generate tons of new email subscribers.
For your inspiration, take a look at this website that used checklists as their opt-in incentives.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet ideas?
Again, it's about solving users' problems and saving them time. If your cheat sheet or checklist does, you're ready.
4. Ebooks, guides, and whitepapers
There are still many people who like more long-form content.
E-books, guides and whitepapers. All are great lead magnets and can help you expand your email list faster.
Although it can often take a long time to put them together or require special software if you want them to look particularly good (I use InDesign), the lifespan tends to be very long.
The argument that supports the use of e-books is that they are often perceived as more valuable than an infographic or a cheat sheet.
Some marketers who use e-book magnets even go so far as to say that their guide is worth hundreds of dollars, but this time they give it away * for free * - in exchange for your e-mail address.
This does not necessarily mean that all e-books need to be very comprehensive. I see many downloadable guides and whitepapers that provide little or no value whatsoever.
But that is not the approach I would recommend.
You should always pay attention to the contents you put in the lead magnet.
You want your new subscribers to be happy with the exchange they have just made.
If they do not, you will probably observe high opt-out and complaint rates - and this will be counterproductive to the delivery capability and success of email marketing.
Unfortunately, we see this quite often for autoresponders with single messages, most of which are thank you emails.
As you can see in the screenshot above, taken from our recent study, their engagement rates are high, but so are their unsubscribe and complaint rates.
Ask yourself – who usually signs up for an email list and immediately unsubscribes?
Apart from your competitors, my intuition tells me that these are the people who are unhappy with what they have received in the thank you message.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet examples?
Many people prefer to download a single e-book instead of spending time going through several blogs. They are often well structured and full of knowledge, which makes them very valuable.
5. Coupons and deals
E-commerce marketers know this the hard way.
You usually do not make much money on first-time buyers.
That's because you have to invest to get them - to get them on your site, to get them to check out your products, and ultimately to make the first purchase.
These costs increase quite quickly, and it is often not enough to convince new visitors to make the first purchase.
This is why many e-commerce marketers choose to add coupons as their main magnet.
The coupon is meant to give it extra push to help users make the first commitment.
However, some marketers worry that offering a coupon right away is a bad practice and that it will reduce their profits.
That's true in the short term. But if you manage to convince first-time buyers to order from you again - you will win in the long run.
Through care campaigns, automated emails including product recommendations and other tactics. If you do it right, the effort will pay off.
If you are unsure whether to give away coupons in exchange for an email address, you can add some restrictions.
For example:
Your coupon will only be valid for a one-time purchase over a certain amount.
Alternatively, it may be valid for a new purchase instead - this way you will motivate first-time buyers to commit to.
There are several ways to use coupons both as lead magnets and regular incentives meant to engage existing or inactive customers.
Do the math, see if you can afford to use them, and do not worry if your profit margin on first-time buyers is not too high.
While my explanation of using coupons and deals up to this point referred to products you sell yourself, it's worth mentioning that this doesn't have to be the case.
The offers you offer do not have to be on your products.
They don't even have to be tangible products at all.
There are many marketers out there who run affiliate sites that send you great deals in exchange for your email address.
If you buy any of the products or services through them, you will get a good discount and they will earn a commission.
Perhaps one of the most famous sites that work in a similar way is Appsumo.
It brings together hundreds of thousands of marketers who are either looking for great deals on tools or trying to launch their product to the specific target audience.
And based on the kind of deals they're running (even up to 80% off), it's safe to assume their email list is growing fast.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet?
If price is the only thing that separates you from your competition, a discount can help you gain the lead. Additionally, a decent discount can motivate your customers to buy more of your products.
6. Event tickets
There's yet another great idea for a lead magnet – event tickets.
If you organize your own event – great. Instead of giving away a free admission, ask people who are interested in the event to register and leave their email address.
What if you don't run any events?
Then, you can try and partner up with those who do. Quite often, partnering companies (who either pay a certain amount of money or help co-promote the idea) can get a certain number of tickets for free.
Then you can use those free tickets as your lead magnet.
This tactic is pretty popular among companies that organize events.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet ideas?
People like to take part in various events, like industry conferences or trade shows. If the tickets you're offering are expensive or in-limited supply, you've got a very promising lead magnet.
7. Online tool or web app
Many SaaS companies choose to create free tools that can be used by their target audience, almost completely free of charge.
Almost, because all the user needs to do to access the free tool is to provide their email address in exchange.
This tactic can be very effective, especially if the tool you offer provides a lot of value to your users and is something they will access regularly.
Not sure what I want?
Take a look at the following tool called LSIGraph.
If you're not familiar with it, it's an online tool used by SEOs and other online marketers to help you find semantically related keywords.
So every time you optimize a page or write an article, which you want to rank higher in SERPs - you should check out LSIGraph.
You can use the tool for free, but it has a limit on how many analyzes you can do per day.
If you want to use it in more than three sentences per day, you can increase the limit to 20 by leaving your email address.
It's a very clever tactic that helps the people behind LSIGraph attract a wide enough audience and convert only those who are serious about using their tool.
Those who need to use the free tool more often must have already realized its value to their business.
This means they will be more motivated to leave their email address.
In addition, if they reach the new daily limit several times in a row, they will probably even consider going for the paid plan.
Here’s another example of a tool that marries lead generation and offering value successfully.
This one was so interesting that I decided to contact Olga Rabo, from Iconosquare, to share in her own words the story behind the Instagram Audit Tool they developed.
Creating new tools can be a great way to promote your main offering.
Iconosquare offers best-in-class Instagram analytics for brands and businesses, and last year we came up with an idea to start creating side tools to our main offering. One of the tools we created was the Instagram Audit Tool.
The process is simple: you log in with your Instagram account, and let the tool evaluate your Instagram account based on specific metrics, such as posting frequency, engagement rate, use of hashtags, etc.
It gives you an instant score to tell you if you're doing a good job. If you leave your email address, you'll get a full, detailed report with tips on how to improve your Instagram performance. When you complete the audit, there is a "Start Your Free Trial" button, which gives us several hundred leads, but trials, per month. And there are also good attempts that convert to paying customers later.
Currently, the tool appears on the first page of Google results when you look for "Instagram revision" and has organically acquired 102 backlinks from 55 domains.
How did we promote the tool?
The usual "checklist":
-Blog post on the Iconosquare blog, to cross-link it with the tool,
-Newsletter (to our blog subscribers and customers),
- Social media marketing,
- Some AdWords and paid socially,
- Dropped it on Product Hunt.
This was basically it.
The success of the audit tool does not lie in the marketing tactics, but in the fact that the idea itself came from our users, so we knew that there was a demand for such a tool. Every day we receive dozens of emails from customers and subscribers, asking us to go through their Instagram accounts and tell them where they can improve. So why not use the feedback from the audience, create a simple solution and use it as a new way to generate trials?
I just added another backlink to this list.
Apart from, as you can see, tools like these can work very well, not only for expanding your email list, but also for SEO.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet examples?
Web-based tools are great for generating leads. If yours offers a lot of value, users will be happy to provide their contact information in exchange. Also, the more they use it, the more familiar they become with your brand.
8. Case study
Case studies can be very effective when you try to convince others that your products or services are exceptional.
Here's why.
They show the process - exact steps and tactics your customers may take - to achieve good results.
This process may not be quick or easy, but you are the expert and can help others achieve good results as well.
In other words, you help your potential customers imagine what the desired results are, and show them that you know how to get them.
On top of that, case studies show that your brand is reliable and desirable.
After all, great brands would not have teamed up with you and relied on your expertise if you gave off a suspicious mood.
But let's talk about using case studies as lead magnets.
My opinion is that case studies in most cases should not be placed behind the payment wall or a registration form.
It is often too early to ask the user to leave their email address, as you still need to earn their trust.
At the same time, you can use them as a lead magnet if you prepare two versions of your case studies.
One that is a summary of the results and tactics that were used to achieve the great results.
And the other, the one you can put behind a registration form, which goes deeper into the whole process that your companies had to go through to identify and analyze the problem, formulate tests, come up with alternative scenarios, and finally how you ran the campaign.
In this way, you get the best of both worlds - a quick case study that can help you inspire potential customers and another that helps you generate potential customers.
So if you have a success story to share or are in the process of developing one, consider creating two versions that will help you build your email list.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet ideas?
Case studies can help you demonstrate your expertise and the process you follow when working with clients. If someone downloads them, there is a good chance they are a very qualified lead.
9. Toolkit
This idea in a way overlaps with what we have covered in some of the points above.
Still, I think it's worth mentioning the fact that your lead magnet does not have to consist of just one individual material, such as an e-book.
Promising more material at once can give you a better chance of converting site visitors into leads by email.
Consider the following example.
What you can see here is a toolkit - a large file consisting of various PDFs and frameworks that help you create your own platform.
Although this particular example does not require users to leave their email address to access the files, it is easy to imagine that it works this way.
Why put all the files together in one package, instead of offering them one by one?
The truth is that you only need the user's email address once.
While it is tempting to split your files and tag each resource they download separately, it seems that the brand wanted to give as much value to potential customers as possible.
By offering them all the files at once, they definitely do it.
And if you have read any of these frameworks or files, you will know that they are quite complex.
If someone thinks they are too difficult to go over on their own, they will know exactly who to contact to ask for help.
Here is another example, this time from Shopify.
We have actually used this particular tactic for GetResponse as well.
This is the idea behind our resource center, which I have already mentioned before.
Users only need to enter their email address once, and they can access all the e-books, reports, infographics and other material we publish regularly.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet examples?
What is better than a single tool, guide or framework? A whole bunch of them! The only downside is that people can be overwhelmed by the amount of content they get right away, so consider checking out users' progress or sending them content as part of an email course instead.
10. Swipe file
Another idea for a lead magnet you can use is sweep files.
While this is primarily relevant to your niche for copywriting, advertising and web marketing, you can apply them to any other genre of writing or topic.
Think of examples of great headlines, jokes or storytelling structures, opening lines for presentations and design inspirations.
In fact, we've created a swipe file for great welcome emails.
The idea behind it is simple.
Step 1. Gather and organize tools that others will find useful.
Step 2. Put them behind a web form.
Yes, it's that simple.
In short, why is this a good lead magnet?
Sweep files are great for getting your users inspired and helping them reach their goals. The larger and more relevant the swipe file, the greater your chances that people will download them.
How to choose a good lead magnet for your campaign?
There are many ways you can generate potential sales and expand your email list.
In one of our previous articles, we have listed almost fifty building ideas for email lists.
Most of them involve offering something in exchange for customers' details.
But offering anything is not enough. Your lead magnet or opt-in incentive must be carefully selected to suit your campaign.
After all, lead magnets are not just meant to give you the prospect's contact information. They are meant to help you start a relationship.
People who download your lead magnet should leave with a good feeling. If they feel it was not worth their contact information, no amount of nursing care will help you convert them.
This is why when choosing a content upgrade, it's worth answering these four questions first:
Q1: Does the lead magnet get me closer to my business goal?
This may seem like a strange question at first, but your lead magnets shouldn't be chosen without your business goals in mind.
Naturally, a goal of an opt-in incentive is to generate a lead. But what kind of clue?
Do you want thousands of email subscribers, a small percentage of whom will be slightly interested in your services?
Or maybe you prefer to gather a group of 100 highly qualified prospects from a specific niche?
A guide for higher education institutions can help you collect fewer subscribers than, say, a guide that explains how any marketer can increase their email metrics.
But the chances are high that these will be more qualified leads that are exactly the type of target group you want to reach.
Q2: Is the lead magnet appealing and interesting?
It should capture the visitor's attention and pique their interest so they don't click away or close the browser window.
You can achieve this by matching your lead magnet with the content of the page you're promoting it on.
Let's say someone has visited your article on the best Halloween party snacks.
If for your lead magnet you'd like to offer a few more recipes or DIY Halloween decor ideas, there's a good chance your website visitors will want to grab it.
Q3: Is the lead magnet relevant to them?
Would your main magnet interest a CMO and a college student researching their dissertation?
Chances are good that your content will have access to different types of audience.
Unless you use complex algorithms to display lead magnets based on users' behavior, you should at least try to make them relevant to the page where they appear.
For example, if it's an article on home exercise routines, your content upgrade might be a list of healthy breakfast recipes.
Q4: Is it worth switching to an email address?
One of the ways to increase the conversion rate on the sign-up form and landing pages is to increase the value of the content upgrade.
Although it is often difficult to determine the actual value of your lead magnet, it should not stop you from wanting to maximize it.
If the content you offer is not easily accessible elsewhere, it will take a considerable amount of time to find it elsewhere, or it has something unique (eg your expert comment or your point of view), then you are off to a good start .
Some marketers like to estimate the value of their sign-up incentives. They show a three- to four-digit price tag, which they then cross out for those who are ready to join the newsletter subscription.
It's a good strategy, but only if your content is really that valuable.
Adding a price tag to something of poor quality will not magically turn it into gold.
And even if it gets you some extra subscribers to your email list, it's likely that you'll also see an increase in the unsubscribe and complaint frequency.
For more lead magnet ideas and examples, look around
I just explained what lead magnets are and shared these 25 lead magnet ideas you can use in your own campaigns.
If you do a new Google search, I'm sure you can find posts with more than 100+ ideas for freebies, bribes, or how you prefer to call them.
But I recommend that you start by looking around instead of typing the next search in the search engine.
Take a look at your desktop, the wall right next to it, Slack, Google Keep and email.
I'm sure you have some sort of folder with useful shortcuts, links, tips or other things that enhance your work.
Is a bell ringing?
Now take these and think about whether you can turn them into a lead magnet.
Can they benefit your customers? Will they make someone's life easier or more fun?
If it's a yes, there are two things I want you to do.
First, the obvious, use it to expand your email list.
The other, a personal service, just tell me in the comments what it is you have decided to use as the main magnet :).
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