How to Use Lead Magnets for Attracting More Email Subscribers

Lead magnets let you build your email marketing list more quickly and with more targeted prospects. Learn what lead magnets are and how to use them in your small business.

Email marketing has been around for many years, and it is one of the most cost-effective lead building and lead nurturing techniques available. But getting people to sign up for an email list can be difficult. Depending on whose statistics you read, average email list signup rates hover around 2 percent and many businesses have even lower rates. One way to boost those opt-in rates (and improve the results of your email marketing) is to use a lead magnet.

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is something of additional value you provide every new subscriber in exchange for them providing you their email address on your opt-in form. Typically, it’s a discount or unique content that can be useful for your audience. Marketers often call lead magnets ethical bribes and they are proven to significantly boost signup conversion rates for any website.

In this article, we’ll show you the nuts and bolts of creating lead magnets and using them to build an email list. We’ll also provide a few incentive ideas that should help you get started.

How to Implement Lead Magnets: a Quick Step-By-Step Guide

If you are skeptical about the ROI of lead magnets, here are two facts that will convince you.

First, lead magnets convert website visitors into subscribers more effectively than generic “Subscribe to updates” calls-to-action, and you’ll find enough evidence of that online. Take the famous case study shared by an SEO expert Brian Dean who was able to increase subscription rates from .54%. to 4.82% using a lead magnet.

Second, implementing this tactic consumes less time than it may seem at first. Even if you decide that content is the only value you can offer in exchange for a subscription, it doesn’t mean you have to produce it from scratch. There are several formats we’ll talk about in this post allowing you to create a decent lead magnet in less than a few hours.

For you to get a better picture of potential time investment, we’ve broken down the entire process into specific steps.

1. Choose an incentive for your audience

For e-commerce websites, discounts, free shipping, and special deals might be the first, the most obvious, and the most effective idea. But what should you offer if you have a completely different business model not related to selling physical items?

Think from the perspective of your customer persona. As a business owner, you must have a good understanding of your audience’s pain points and the solutions they are looking for. When starting, you can use several sources of inspiration: comments on your blog queries your support team receives, user feedback, niche forums. If you’re still hesitating, a short website survey might provide valuable insights and be a great help. For example, many bloggers use the simple “What is your biggest business struggle right now?” to gather ideas for future blog posts and lead magnets.

2. Decide what the right format for your lead magnet is

Although eBooks used to be the most popular type of lead magnet, today people tend to be more incentivized by shorter forms of content. You can blame the infamous attention span or the volume of content available on the Internet, but chances are, a piece of information that can be consumed fast and applied instantly will be more popular than a multipage report.

And this is good news because you don’t have to allocate too much time and effort to lead magnet creation. Once you decide on the problem you’ll be helping your subscribers to solve, consider such formats as a checklist, a cheat sheet, a toolkit, a video tutorial. Given that you probably have all the required knowledge and experience to prepare it, creating a lead magnet should not take you longer than a couple of hours. Bryan Harris, the founder of Videofruit, even suggests creating lead magnets on the basis of your popular blog posts as a time-saving technique.

Depending on your business, other options may include access to a webinar, a series of video lessons, a free email course, a short consultation, and more.

3. Offer it proactively on your email subscription forms

Popups and slide-ins are the best way to promote a lead magnet and get new subscribers. They provide enough real estate to create an eye-catching call-to-action, and they are simply proven to be more effective at collecting emails. Even without any special offer, popups tend to drive at least two times more signups than an embedded opt-in form.

If you don’t know how to add a popup opt-in form to your website, there are quite a few apps available on the market. GetSiteControl subscription forms might be a good solution for you to start with. It allows for easily creating classic models, slide-ins, time-delayed, scroll-based, and exit-intent popups. Plus, with the $19/month price tag, it’s also quite affordable even for small business owners.

All you need to do is include the offer of a lead magnet on the most visited (and ideally the most relevant to the content of your lead magnet) website pages and set up the conditions under which a popup will appear.

4. Think through the delivery process

The most common way to deliver a lead magnet is through an email that follows a subscription confirmation message sent to every new subscriber.

Using your email marketing software, you can set up an automated email that will include a coupon code or a link leading to the promised piece of content. The latter can be a link to a PDF stored in your Dropbox and available for download – no reason to overthink this part.

Another way to deliver a lead magnet is through the subscription form itself. Once someone fills it out, right on the popup, you can display a “Thank you for subscribing” message along with the link for downloading the content.

7 Lead Magnet Examples From Various Business Niches

Now that you have the idea of what it takes to create a lead magnet in practice, let’s look at real-life examples: lead magnets that help different businesses collect email subscribers and don’t require creating new long-form content from scratch.

1. Discounted or free shipping. Naturally, these are the most obvious and probably the most popular options for e-commerce stores willing to build an email list. You can offer coupons a couple of seconds after a visitor lands on a webpage or right before they leave it – using the exit-intent technology. Both moments are when the visitors’ attention is at its peak.
2. Guide. Guides can be created based on the queries from your audience or your best-performing blog posts. Ideally, you want a guide to be relevant to the page it is offered on. For instance, in exchange for a subscription, Business Know-How offers a free guide with 33 ways to build an email list. It’s promoted on the pages relevant to the topic of email marketing and you get the link to download it via email once you confirm your subscription.
3. Toolkit. A “toolkit” is an umbrella term used for curated lists of helpful resources: tools, formulas, templates, and insights. For example, Semrush, a well-known SEO platform offers a toolkit for creating a successful PPC campaign. What makes their lead magnet offer truly tempting is a brief summary of what exactly is included to the toolkit and how long approximately it will take you to implement the tips shared there.
4. Cheatsheet. A cheat sheet is just a concise set of notes for quick reference conveniently summarizing lengthy and often technical pieces of content. People love cheat sheets because they are time savers and typically provide complex information in a digestible format. You’re likely to see them on IT-related blogs offering cheat sheets for using a specific technology.
5. Checklist. This is another great opportunity to repurpose some of your popular blog posts into a lead generation incentive. WPBuffs, a WordPress Website Support and Maintenance Company, offers 2 checklists to achieve high page loading times and make sure your WP website is secure as their lead magnet. When you download them, each one is literally a 4-page PDF with 12 checkboxes you can even conveniently print out if you want.
6. Templates and spreadsheets. If your audience includes beginners at any niche, templates can be a winning format of a lead magnet for you. We’ve seen these incentives offered by bloggers teaching social media, photography and videography, realtors, web designers, and even healthy lifestyle magazines.
7. Webinar access. If you’re planning to run a webinar on the topic you have unique expertise in, that could be a strong incentive for people to subscribe. Announce the date and time of the event and ask your website visitors to subscribe if they want to receive the access link. Jon Morrow, the founder of Smart Blogger successfully uses this technique to share his knowledge and attract new email subscribers.

Bottom line

As of now, email shows the highest ROI of all marketing channels. Therefore, even a 1% increase of your subscriber base will bring significant value for your business, and using lead magnets is one way to achieve that level of growing fast.

Our advice? If you’ve never tried using incentives to increase signups before, don’t go for perfection. For starters, pick a lead magnet you can create over a weekend, place it on the subscription popup, and A/B test the copy. Then optimize your offer until you see the desired conversions rates. Good luck!

Article Source: https://www.businessknowhow.com/internet/lead-magnets.htm 

Different Ways Of Generating Traffic, Leads And Sales For Your Affiliate Or Own Offers

When it comes to running an offline or online business, the most critical things owners need - besides the necessary license and equipment - are traffic, leads, and sales. Yet in spite of knowing this, the underlying question in most of their minds - is how to get more while spending less or better still, for free?

Having said that, this is what my article going to address today.

Now regardless of what they are called, they still boil down to one common factor which is people. Because without them taking action the way you want to be it seeing your offer, listening to and reading what you presented and taking up your free and paid offer, your business is not going to last. That is the brutal truth in traditional and internet marketing as well.

So the question is how do I get traffic?

To be honest, there is no right and wrong answer. But there are free and paid methods you can use.

However, before even doing so, it is important to identify if there is a market for your offer and connecting with people within that. This is absolutely necessary in order to build an audience as in groups of people who know, like and trust you. Especially when you focused on free methods which I touched upon later.

It is the same way with how you got to know your friends, boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse and how politicians do to get more people to vote for them and formed the government. You might also see that in networking events and seminars.

Below are both free and paid strategies I know and learn from more experienced marketers.

1. Free Article Marketing

This is by far the oldest but still workable method. What you do is write and submit an article like what you see now into relevant sites like Ezine Articles.

2. Blogging

This is more of a long-term SEO and wealth-building strategy.

You can write whatever you want in your blog - preferably WordPress into your own domain and hosting and then connect with other bloggers in your niche either through blog commenting or guest posting.

3. Classified Advertising

You might not believe this but this is how I got started making my first dollar in 2008.

This is a great alternative and test to paid ads.

What you need to do is to come up with an eye-catching headline and 2-3 lines ad with links before posting to relevant sites like Craiglist and Gumtree.

4. Directory Submissions

In the past, this used to work very well.

But in the wake of Google's relentless updates, many sites have come and gone so apart from Dmoz, they are no longer variable today.

5. Email Marketing

This works provided you have a quality email list of subscribers who are eager to read from, trust and buy from you.

But for this to work effectively, you need a high converting landing page and reliable autoresponder to send unlimited emails.

6. Forum Posting

Forums are online discussion sites in which people congregated and discussed common issues and interests.

To get started, there are important rules you have to abide by in order not to get banned.

Such as do not spam but provide helpful information in answering what they need and want to know with your blog and landing page links in your signature - which is the footer text below every post you make

7. Google SEO

If you provided good quality content in your blog in the form of articles and even videos with social media channel links - I will be talking about later, the major search engine will reward you with higher rankings on the first page for maximum exposure and even leads and sales from your searchers.

This also helps if you have comments and questions below your posts.

8. PDF Submissions

You can also compile a set of 5-10 articles into MS Word or Open Office into a report or e-book with an attractive cover before publishing in sites like Calameo, Scribd and Slideshare.

9. Press Releases

They are basically online versions of newspaper reports in which you can submit to related sites.

There are both free and paid services in which you can submit.

10. Social Media And Networks

You can also participate in social networks like Facebook where you can post on your timeline, create fan pages, live events, videos and joined and share in groups like what you do in forums.

Others include LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and Tumblr.

11. Video Marketing

This is where you create your videos from your own PC or iPhone camera, powerpoint slides or both with some music background and introduction or highlighted points text.

If you just want to show your face, you can use a camera.

But if you want to share your PC screen, I will recommend Jing and Camtasia Studio - the latter gives you a free 30-day trial before you pay a one-time fee of $197.

12.. Web 2.0 Properties.

You can also post your content in other blogging platforms like Blogger, Hubpages, Webs, Weebly and Wix.

In the past, these used to work like a charm in the form of the Google Wonder Wheel.

But now you can only post what you had not in your articles and blog posts.

This works best when you are doing e-commerce and your info products.

13. Webinars

They are online versions of seminars in which you can invite your subscribers and customers to attend before presenting your offer.

For this, I recommend Go-To-Webinar and Zoom.

B. Paid

For paid strategies, I will recommend 3 platforms in Bing, Facebook, And Google Ads. At the time of writing this, mobile apps and YouTube Ads also came about.

With that said, these are both free and paid methods I know of getting traffic, leads, and sales for your sites.

Amuro Wesley is an internetpreneur who promotes his own and other people's products online. For his step-by-step course on how you can do the same, check out here.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Amuro_Wesley/2395518

Why Targeting Is Pretty Much Everything For Your Sales Funnel

If you're planning to make money through a sales funnel, then by far and away the most significant thing to start thinking about is your targeting. In other words, how are you guaranteeing that it's the right person who is getting your autoresponder messages? In which way are you ensuring that the subscribers who find their way to start of your sales funnel are the right kinds of prospects?

This is what's called 'targeting' and it is genuinely the difference in earning substantial cash and making no money whatsoever.

The most effective way to demonstrate why targeting works really well is to think about sales. In sales, you have the individuals who start out their professions cold calling and selling things like training courses. These are individuals who will be picking up the telephone and trying to promote something expensive to a random stranger.

Now, some individuals will be very good at that and those people will probably be the ones who succeed. As they improve, they will be offered better and better jobs within their company and sooner or later this will lead to them generating big money.

What's the best position?

Selling to well-qualified prospects who have a lot of cash. Consider this: if you're able to promote something to strangers who probably haven't got much money, it will be easy to market to affluent people who have already told you they want to buy!

This is the concept that product sales is based on and it's how you're going to make sure your business is prosperous when you're making use of a sales funnel.

Because the equivalent with a sales funnel is simple and easy - this would mean locating targeted prospects and sending them to your site. It means finding people who are showing an interest in your specific niche, who are the right age and sex and who have the right income.

How?

With the help of PPC of course! PPC stands for Pay Per Click and this is a type of marketing where you only pay each time a person clicks on your ad. PPC ads can be placed either on Google searches (through Google AdWords) or they can be put on Facebook, where they will target people according to not only their age, sex and location but also on their hobbies, interests and job title!

If you can carry this out, then you can find the exact kind of individual who is likely to purchase from you and then make sure that these are the individuals who start their journey through your sales funnel. That way, you are destined to succeed!

Get niche specific pre-written autoresponder messages and lead capture pages for email marketing. [http://prewrittenemailmarketing.com]

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Frank_L_Jones/1193603

Facebook Marketing Strategy: Crush 2019 with Facebook Sales Funnels

A Complete, Step-By-Step Video Training on Facebook Lead Ads | 2017 Edition

Why You Need to Capture Leads, Not Sales

If your goal is to generate passive income, then you might well be hoping to accomplish that by selling a product. This could be a product you've made, or it might be a product that you are promoting as an affiliate marketer. Either way, you'll likely have set up a sales page, creating an ad campaign to send visitors there and then hopefully begun to rake in the profits!

The problem is that it can be tough trying to convince people who visit your page to buy. Your success in this endeavor comes down almost entirely to your conversions and the percentage of visitors that end up buying from you.

And to this end, many marketers will jump straight in with the hard sell. That means that they'll heavily push all the positives of their product and try to get the visitor to click buy as soon as they get there.

This doesn't tend to work. Although you probably want to make your sales process as simple and automated as possible, it's absolutely essential that you don't try to go straight in for the kill. Far more effective is to try to capture leads first instead. Here's why.

Why Cold Sales Don't Work

Just because you're making money passively, that does not mean that you should be impatient about how you are collecting your sales.

If you try to convert your visitors as soon as they land on your page, then this is the equivalent of walking up to someone you like in a bar and asking them for their number, without saying hello or even introducing themselves first. Or it's a little like walking up to someone in the street and offering to sell them a watch for $500. Would you be receptive to that sales technique?

Of course not! And the reason is that you know nothing about the person selling, you know nothing about the product and you have no reason to trust that what they're offering is as good as they say it is.

If someone lands on your page and you try to sell to them right away, then they'll think your site is essentially spam and they'll be frustrated at the lack of value. Chances are they'll leave.

How to Convert

So instead, talk to them about how they can get free information by signing up to your mailing list, or provide them with an article and then offer to share more through your Facebook.

Now you have the opportunity to build that relationship and to build trust and eventually, you'll find that this puts you in a position where they are more likely to want to buy from you!

You might be wondering how this model is still passive. In fact, though, it still can be: there's no reason you can't use automated emails for example through an auto-responder. Or you can write a ton of blog posts and then schedule them to post over time.

You can still make your model passive. Just don't go straight in for the kill!

Download FREE Passive Income Guide
http://TalkingFalcon.com

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/A._Hall/177291

7 Tips For an Effective Lead Generation Strategy

For any marketer, lead generation is the biggest goal. Apart from this, this task requires a good deal of time and effort. You may be surprised to know that only a fraction of marketers say that their campaigns for lead generation are working effectively. If this sounds like you, below are 7 tips that may help you with your lead generation strategy.

1. Use the correct data for best targeting

If you have the right data, you can target the right audience. In fact, the more you know about your target customers, the better it will be. Apart from this, communicating with your customers in the right tone is also very important if you want them to pay attention to you.

2. Use some tools to track your leads

Make sure you know how to find out your ROI. Besides, you should set aside some money to measure and trace channels to attract your customers whether you are going to use your site, email, direct marketing or social media to attract them.

With Google analytics, for instance, you can identify the pages that are generating a good deal of traffic for you. You can also use other lead generation software as well.

3. Focus on quality

This is obvious; however, most people just don't give any importance to this factor. Make sure you focus on quality instead of quantity. In other words, your sales force shouldn't spend too much time on people who just won't buy from you no matter what you do. You should only target potential customers or clients.

4. Have a solid grading structure

Your activity should have a solid structure, such as a short-term and a long-term campaign. This will help you concentrate on one type of prospects at a time. Aside from this, you may want to have a criterion to find out who can be your potential clients.

It's also a good idea to nurture your leads. You should also educate your customers using information so they can understand your products better.

5. Research your competition

You need to find out more about a product or service that your competitors have launched recently. You should keep an eye on the activities of your competitors and use the information you collected to run circles around them.

6. Develop relationships

You should aim high. You may want to create a list of customers that have gone through a chance in circumstances like a merger or a restructure. Apart from this, you should make sure you have a few big organizations that you can work with.

7. Use your site

You need traffic if you want to generate leads from your own business site. According to experts, you can use a number of techniques in order to make visitors click on your site. Below are two basic techniques that can help a lot.

• Use forums: you can use forums in order to capture the data of your prospect customers, especially smart forms that can help you develop your database.
• Make an effective call-to-action: your CTAs should be effective enough to turn visitors into customers. This is the only way you can make more sales.

Hopefully, these 7 tips will help you with your lead generation strategy.

Do you want to generate a few sales leads lists? Do you want to collect business contact data? If so, you should check out Sales Ripe.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Shalini_Madhav/2396631

3 Steps to Generate Leads Online - Is Your Lead Generation Process Outdated?