How To Build A High Converting Lead Magnet That Increases Opt-Ins AND Sales

How To Build A High Converting Lead Magnet That Increases Opt-Ins AND Sales

In today’s article, I’m going to show you how to put together a lead magnet – or a set of lead magnets – that make perfect sense, will increase your signups, open-rates and sales.

I’ll also drop some arbitrary disjointed anecdotes in throughout which have some merit to you.

It All Starts With The Product

There’s no point whatsoever in building an email list or collecting leads without a product to sell.

I know people say, “You should build your list from day one!” but it doesn’t make any sense if you have no product.

Why?

Because people sign up for a reason. If you have no product to sell, then the reason people sign up is not to buy from you. If you change the terms of the agreement on them, they won’t be happy.

Now, let’s assume you are selling something. That product massively affects what your lead magnet should be.

I see bloggers and businesses alike who’ll offer a free “social media consultation” or something only to then try and sell me on a paid SEO system or they’ll send me “33 tips to ultimate manhood” only to then try and sell me a fitness book or a business course.

People sign up for a lead magnet because they have a specific problem. If you want to then sell them a paid solution, you have to make sure that the lead magnet they’ve signed up for aligns with that paid solution.

Let’s say you’re selling an info-product. It might be a video or book or whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Chapter List:

1. How to do stuff quickly
2. Why doing stuff is the best thing you can do
3. How to be a professional guy that does stuff
4. Where to get the best “do stuff” education
5. What your life will look like when you do stuff

This sort of structure makes for easy lead magnet generation.

We just create a lead magnet for each chapter (which will hopefully lead to all of the potential customers being hit from the right angle.)

So our lead magnets could be:

1. “The quickest guide to get started with doing stuff.”
2. “5 Benefits you can get from learning how to do stuff IMMEDIATELY”
3. Quick report on the necessary qualifications for doing stuff
4. Five places you can learn to do stuff for free
5. Top ten lessons from this doing stuff GURU

That simple structure will give you as many miniature products as you have chapters – which is a massive list.

You won’t need to find any new information because for the most part, the information is a basic summary of your product anyway.

There are caveats though… particularly one particular element that the lead magnet needs. Let’s talk about that next.

Make It Easy And Quick

I tried giving people a seven day course as an opt-in once. It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, and so I replaced it with a simple “This is how to do something immediately” style guide which worked much better.

The reason it worked better, in my opinion, is that the whole name of the game is free. The thing with a lead magnet is that you’re hooking people who don’t want to invest anything. By that I don’t mean financially, but also in terms of commitment.

When a reader comes in cold – especially off an ad – you haven’t earned anything from them. They don’t want to read a hundred page book about the best way to restructure their life from someone who might be an idiot. They want to test you for your validity before they do that.

So make your lead magnet something probably obvious and easy to digest in a single sitting.

Hyperbole

Something like “How to fix your posture in thirty seconds” is perfect.

This means you might have to employ the hyperbolic benefit tactic here, because you can’t change someone’s life in ten seconds flat.

Now, you can’t lie, but you can be hyperbolic or give a person a temporary benefit that your main product will fix.

Let’s use that same example; fixing posture.

You might be some chiropractic whizz-kid or a YouTube fitness guru who has a $50 program for fixing people’s posture. Obviously you can’t give that away. Nor can you give away a reduced program for free to cold targets – again, they don’t know whether you’re legitimate or not.

So, you tell them, “I’ll fix your posture with this one simple trick.”

The trick is to stand up and breathe in fully until your lungs, diaphragm and everything else is full to bursting. Literally do that now so you can see what I mean.

You’ll notice that if you do this, your shoulders go back, your chest raises and aside from the massive gut you’re pushing out, your posture looks and feels healthier.

Now, this obviously isn’t a permanent fix, but it’s something that establishes you know what you’re talking about and a person can see it immediately. If you were to string this technique out and add some hooks (see later in this article) to your actual product, you’d make a nice ten to fifteen page guide – especially if you added another two or three instant fixes.

Relate the whole thing to a single chapter of your book or module of your course or whatever, and then point the reader to the product and there you are.

Hooks

Nobody should give anything away for free. A lead magnet is an exchange; their lead for your information.

To that end, you need to hook them in – either in the magnet or in the autoresponder.

There are plenty of people who will sign up for your mailing list and never buy your product. Worse, there are nefarious fellows who will sign up for your lead magnet and then unsubscribe after the download.

We don’t want them costing us bandwidth, so we have to limit it.

We do this by hooking them. In the initial “Here’s your free guide” email, the quickest way to ensure that they don’t run off is to say, “P.S. Next Week, I’m giving away X.”

X = another hyperbolic benefit small instant fix related to the one they’ve just downloaded. (Pro-tip: Make it the other lead magnets you’ve created in a sequential order.)

That’ll stop most of the “never opens.”

Now in the lead magnet, I already discussed this quickly above, but you want to start the push down the funnel towards the reader becoming a customer. This is why you should build your lead magnets around the product like I said above; they already want your product, they just don’t want to pay.

Sometimes, you’ll go on a guy’s blog and he’ll say, “If you want to get ripped, get my free ebook.” Then you’ll get the upsell on starting a business blog. This makes no sense. More importantly, it’s impossible to hook someone like that.

A hook is a subtle way of saying, “This temporary solution is good… but my permanent solution is better.”

Testing The Opt-In/Pop-Up/Ad

Use Thrive Leads for testing out ad iterations.

Each ad you make is comprised of three parts:

1. The Headline (Most important)
2. Three Bullets
3. Call-to-Action

You can test a fourth; an image, but usually it’s a book cover or something similar and so don’t put too much effort in.

With those three (possibly four) elements, run different popup boxes/ads with only one element changed. If you have three variations on each, that’ll be over twenty variations. That’s more than enough to keep you drowning in potential statistics.

If you’re not buying traffic to the opt-in offer, then test one thing at a time. So test your opt-in headlines against each and determine a winner. Then determine the bullet points. You aren’t going to have enough traffic to determine anything statistically if your popup only gets viewed ten times per iteration.

It all sounds complex but it’s not.

Final Thoughts

The above is a complete system for creating simple opt-in offers that’ll get you subscribers without you having to put too much effort in. It has the added bonus of converting to sales well too.

Added to that, I included a quick explanation for how to test the offers and increase signups further.

Creating lead magnets, opt-in offers and your whole sales funnel thing is important, but it shouldn’t be your whole business. This article is designed to help with that so you can get on with product creation and being good at your business.

That said, you shouldn’t leave any aspect of your marketing or funnel to chance or stuff you can’t measure. If you do, then you’re throwing money and time at stuff that might just be a waste of both of those things.

Again… this method works and you can test everything from the offer to the product to the ads and every little aspect of all of those things as well.