5 Steps to Grow Your Email Subscribers List Fast with Lead Magnets

You have a huge opportunity that business owners and marketers a decade ago would have paid big, big bucks for. Can you guess what it is? I’m talking about your email list. In that list is a group of people who want to hear from you.

They’re either your past or present clients or they’re people who have opted in to receive messages from you. That list is a marketing goldmine, and you need to keep growing it! One of the best ways to grow your email subscribers list fast is using lead magnets.

In simplest terms, a lead magnet is something your target audience wants that you can give to them for free in exchange for their email addresses. It could be a handy checklist, a meaningful ebook, or even a useful webinar. The choice is yours.

If you choose the right lead magnet and spread the word to the right people about it, your email subscribers list is practically guaranteed to grow! Here are five steps to do it for your brand or business:

1. Choose Your Lead Magnet

The first thing you need to do is pick a lead magnet. That means you need to know who your target audience is, so you create a lead magnet they’ll actually be interested in. Ask yourself these questions:

What problem does my target audience have?
What can I teach them that will make things easier for them?
Are my products or services relevant to this problem?

Once you answer these questions, you can come up with ways to provide those answers through the content of a lead magnet. For example, a health coach could offer an ebook about healthy eating filled with recipes, a clean eating grocery shopping checklist, or even a video showing people how to do specific exercises.

Keep in mind, if the lead magnet is intended not just to build your email subscribers list but to ultimately convert a new subscriber into a sale, make sure the item or service being offered for sale is highly relevant to the content of the lead magnet!

Once you think you know what your lead magnet will be, ask yourself these questions:

Does my target audience actually want this?
Does my lead magnet provide a tangible benefit or result for my audience?
Will my audience by satisfied when they receive this lead magnet? Is its value worth the value people put on their email addresses?
Does the lead magnet present my business or brand as trustworthy, helpful, and knowledgeable rather than self-promotional?
Does the lead magnet solve my target audience’s pain point and/or make their lives easier, better, or happier?

Your answers to these questions will tell you whether you’ve picked the right lead magnet or if you need to go back to the drawing board. For inspiration, here are 25 lead magnet ideas:

Ebook
Checklist
Workbook
Cheat sheet
Webinar
Timeline
Mini course
Template
Calendar
Recipe
Worksheet
Swipe file
White paper
Video
Resource list
Script
Plan or planner
Tutorial
Sample files or documents
Report
Infographic
Case study
Spreadsheet
How-to guide
Toolkit

2. Create Your Lead Magnet

Once you know what your lead magnet will be, it’s time to create it. Don’t skimp! The quality of your lead magnet will prompt recipients to develop a very specific perception of your brand, and that perception will directly affect their desire to engage with your brand or buy from your business in the future.

First impressions count, so hire an experienced copywriter and a great designer to create your lead magnet for you. I can’t stress enough how important this is!

With that said, I know that budgets can be tight, and there are some things you must try to do yourself. Here are some of my recommended free and low-cost tools to create great lead magnets:

Design Tools

Canva – Easy to use and includes many free images and icons to include in your designs.
GetStencil – Easy to use and includes tons of icons if you upgrade to a paid account.
PicMonkey – Easy to use and includes a lot of cool effects to make your images unique.
Paint.net – For Windows users, this is a free alternative to PhotoShop.
Gimp – For Windows and Mac users, this is another free alternative to PhotoShop.
Inkscape – For Windows, Mac, and Linux users, this is a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator.

Image, Icon, and Font Sources

BigStock – Avoid copyright issues by paying for your images at a reasonable price.
Photospin – Fewer images than BigStock but better prices.
Creative Market – Creative people offer their images, fonts, icons, and more for sale here.
IconMonstr – A great place for simple icons.
MyFonts – Tons of fonts to choose from.

3. Design Your Landing Page

With your lead magnet ready, it’s time to give it a home online. That means you need a special landing page. No, any old web page won’t do. Your landing page needs to be very well-designed, include your call to action and email form multiple times, and be extremely well-written.

Your landing page should communicate five things:

What you’re offering
Why the offer is beneficial to the audience
How to get it
Why it’s worth it to give an email address in exchange for the lead magnet
Why people can have peace-of-mind that they’re making the right decision when they submit their email addresses

You can communicate all five of these things in your landing page by writing an amazing headline, clear benefits copy that appeals to your audience’s emotional triggers, and effective calls-to-action. I highly recommend A/B testing your landing page to find the best mix of copy and design to maximize conversions. My favorite tool to create landing pages is LeadPages.

4. Set up Your Email Marketing Campaign

Before you start promoting your lead magnet, you need to set up the related email marketing campaign using your email marketing tool (I recommend ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft). Your goal in this campaign is to deliver the lead magnet and show the recipient that you’re a useful source of information that is meaningful to them.

If you’re using your lead magnet to ultimately sell a service or product, then you can use my 2-week lead magnet upsell email sequence.

Everyone who submits their email address to get your lead magnet should automatically receive your related email sequence. They should also be added to your email newsletter list.

5. Integrate Your Subscription Forms

Finally, you can give people multiple ways to subscribe. Just make sure you’re able to track where your subscribers come from! For example, you can add the form not just to your landing page but also to your blog’s sidebar, Facebook Page, and more. You can learn more ideas in my How to Convert More Website Visitors into Email Subscribers Infographic.

To make it easy for you to add the form to multiple locations, choose an email marketing tool that offers easy integration with your landing pages tool, Facebook, your website and blog platform, and so on. This way, subscribers will automatically be added to the right lists and receive the correct email messages. If you have to, you can use Zapier to set up some integrations and automations that will save you time later.

Don’t Forget

Not every lead magnet will work, but some will be very successful. One thing that is certain is you have to track your results, so you can tweak your lead magnet and your promotional tactics in the future. That’s the only way to maximize conversions and improve the return on your investment.

Review your Google Analytics reports for website traffic and referrals as well as your email marketing tool to track subscriber sources, message open rates, and the number of downloads of the lead magnet. Watch your Twitter, Facebook, and other social media statistics, too.

If you need more robust analytics but can’t afford something like the Hootsuite Pro reports feature, SproutSocial, or Agorapulse, try Cyfe. It’s not perfect, but the paid account is affordable and gives you a bit more data to work with for some social accounts.

As always, if you need help writing your lead magnet or developing and writing your email campaigns, I’m here to help! I can also help you strategize your entire lead magnet program, so you’re positioned to get the best results. Just contact me, and we can get started!

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Susan Gunelius

Susan Gunelius is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc. and Founder & Editor in Chief of an award-winning blog, WomenOnBusiness.com. She is a 25-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored 10 books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing.