20 Best Lead Magnet Ideas To Expand Your Prospect List

Everyone has at least once seen a form popping up after they had spent some time on a website. In most cases, they were offered a kind of an ebook or a free guide in exchange for their email address. That was nothing less than a lead magnet, something you will be ready to effectively use in your marketing routine after reading this post. 

So what is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a valuable piece of downloadable content. Marketers offer it to prospects as a sort of bribe in exchange for their contact information – an email address, as a rule. And since more than 70% of people who visit your website will never come back, lead magnets are what you need to use by hook or by crook. 

Qualities of a perfect lead magnet

What must be so magnetizing about a lead magnet that makes website visitors easily part with their email addresses? Features of a perfect lead magnet can be grouped around the codeword PRAISE:

Problem-solving
It must solve your prospect’s real problem and give them what they need. Don’t offer everything at once: tips, examples, patterns. The rule of a thumb: one magnet should tackle one problem.

Relevant
If you want your lead magnet to bring you people interested in your business, don’t palm them off something out of topic. Be clear about your target audience and their needs.      

Attractive
Your magnet must be eye-catching. Ensure its design and copy are as well-thought-out as the content you are going to offer. Besides, remember that people love freebies, so if you want your lead magnet to be attractive, it must offer value for free.

Instant
Your prospects should not wait. Since you promise to solve their problem, you should be able to deliver your lead magnet immediately. For example, you may place it on a thank you page after a prospect has entered their contact details. Or you can send it via email right after their subscription.

Specific
Don’t make your lead magnet too general. The more specific you are about the value it will bring to your prospects, the more leads it will help you generate. 

Easy-to-use
Your lead magnet should be easy to digest, so don’t offer too complicated ebooks or lengthy courses. Keep it simple. 

Best lead magnet ideas with examples

We have prepared 20 lead magnet ideas with examples you can try using right away. For convenience, we’ll present them in alphabetical order. 

Challenge

People love challenges so much that whenever a new one appears, it becomes viral in no time. The reason is that challenges make us leave our comfort zone and feel like we are a part of something bigger. 

From the marketing point of view, challenges make perfect lead magnets because they:

• Bring brand awareness due to the sense of community. Your prospects will feel they are not alone, and many other people are doing your challenge at the moment.
• Make your offer tempting by creating urgency. Challenges always have start and end dates, which moves people to get involved.
• Bring you better-qualified leads. Users who accept your challenges are commonly interested in your content.

Maximized Business offers a perfect lead magnet example:  

Checklist

This is probably the most converting lead magnet of all. Checklists look simple and thus are easy to digest. They bring key information within a condensed list and cost you nothing to create. Bluchic, for example, offers a free educational checklist on how to make your first WordPress website: 

If you are running a blog, why not derive ideas for your checklist from your articles? Or else, if you once created a guide as a lead magnet and feel it’s high time to change it, you may easily transform it into an incredible how-to checklist. 

Discount

Some people sign up for email offers to receive discounts, so it might be helpful to add them to your top list of lead magnets, just like Artifact Uprising did. The company seems to know how to attract prospects with special welcome perks:

By offering a discount right at the start, you will not only motivate potential leads to leave their email address but also may slightly push them to buy from you. 

Ebook

Overall, ebooks are not that converting, even though they are highly popular, so I would advise you to be careful with this type of a lead magnet. However, you have all chances to pop up: think about how to describe the value your ebook will bring to your prospects. For example, see what Search Engine Journal offers:

To show that your ebook will bring prospects real benefits, you can also give the outline of its main topics. Besides, if you want your lead magnet to convert, be specific about the length of your ebook as well. 

Example

People are looking for examples all the time, as there is nothing better to connect theory with practice. Autogrow, for instance, tempts potential leads with 29 examples of projects the company promises to do for them:

There is something else that makes this lead magnet compelling. The company decided to incorporate a kind of a survey with a dropdown list of answers, which is intriguing enough to arouse interest. That’s how elements of secrecy work their magic. 

Free class

If offering your prospects a lengthy free course seems not the best solution, you may always try with a free class. This way, your lead magnet will look more specific, as it will teach them one topic. This is exactly what Smart Blogger offers:

Look at how problem-solving this lead magnet is: the company understands that its target audience is mostly represented by blog writers, so it offers a wonderful solution for their pain points — higher wages and better work opportunities.

Free plan

If you have a plummy freemium, don’t let the perfect idea for your lead magnet go waste. We here at Snov.io are proud of our free plan that allows users to try our top tools and features within the unlimited time:

Free shipping

People prefer making a purchase if you offer free shipping. What is even more astounding, they are more likely to buy something at $5 with free shipping than pay $2.50 for goods and a $2.50 shipping fee. So, if you are running an online store, check how this lead magnet will work with your audience. Dot & Bo might be your lead magnet example to follow: 

Offering free shipping to users at the decision stage of the sales funnel may become your power move.

Free trial

This lead magnet is especially typical of SaaS companies. The game is easy: you offer an app or a software tool and get a subscriber’s email in return. Unlike a free plan, a free trial gives your subscribers access to some of your tools only for a limited period. For example, Shopify offers its users 14 days for free:

Guide

What makes guides perfect lead magnets is the value they can bring to prospects. People prefer having some clear steps at hand that would help them master the art of anything: cooking, selling, or… generating leads. Look at the lead magnet example Wendy Maynard offers:

A tempting message and a good sense of humor make this lead magnet irresistible. Besides, Wendy Maynard seems to know very well how adding numbers influences people’s response rate.   

Even if you can’t invent something exclusive to offer as a guide, just supply your would-be prospects with some portion of education on how to use your service. Alternatively, if you are running a blog, you may derive the ideas for a guide right from your posts. 

Infographic

It’s a well-known fact that people process images 60,000 times faster than text. So, why not give your prospects infographics instead of boring emails? First, it will make your lead magnet attractive. Second, it will be of high value due to the educational content you’ll put in there. Just look at how Mindflash accomplished it (but note that this is just a tiny part of the image):

Infographics help analyze complicated information by visualizing it. Therefore, it becomes easier to digest. 

List of resources

With a list of resources, you can gather links or assets that will be of tremendous value to your audience and save lots of their research time. Wild Apricot has prepared such a list, aimed at helping their organizations cope with COVID-19 crisis: 

The company has done all the research for users and came up with the lead magnet that would offer an enticing solution.

Newsletter

An incredible 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing. When it comes to lead magnets, they are also among the most popular types. And that’s what makes them hardly exclusive and thus not always high-converting. 

However, if your newsletter is astounding, why not try using it as a lead magnet? Season it with a persuading message the way Boostability does:

The company describes real value prospects will get from the newsletter. 

PDF version

This is an undoubtedly great solution for your lead magnet because PDFs are easy to create, download, and print. They are something your readers can always take away. So, if you are running a blog, you may offer your prospects to store your post on their device and get back to it later whenever they like. Look how Crazy Egg accomplishes this strategy:

The company pins this lead magnet to each post of their blog — a clever way of bringing value to their prospects, isn’t it?

Report

People often perceive reports as even more valuable than regular guides. So, if you want to be taken as an authority in your industry, a report may become your winning lead magnet, like the one from Clicktale:

The only challenging part about creating a report may be time, as you will need to put some effort into gathering data and compiling your findings into a digestible format.

Test/Quiz

The success of tests has a psychological background: people always want to learn more about themselves and their environment. That is why offering your website visitors a kind of self-assessment may sound like a good idea for your lead magnet. Jon Loomer, for example, picks new leads by offering them to pass a Facebook Ads quiz: 

The most charming thing about tests and quizzes is that they can apply to any industry and deal with any topic ever existed: from How strict a parent you are to How well you know the latest SEO trends. What’s also great about them – there are online quiz maker tools that can help you easily generate leads and engage your audience.

Toolkit

Do you think people would like to know what tools gurus use? Definitely yes. If your company is an expert in the industry, a toolkit will be a juicy idea for your lead magnet. Syed Balkhi has brought it to life already:

Apart from offering a useful resource to your audience, your business may benefit from a toolkit as well — by establishing partnerships with brands whose tools you have added to your recommendation list.

Video course

Video is an effective way to deliver information. If you know that your target audience needs instructions for various kinds of activities, a video training course will be a perfect lead magnet to offer. Here’s how Hubspot does it: 

Webinar

You should add webinars to the top list of your content ideas because they will help you bring value to your prospects, position yourself as an expert in your field, and keep your audience engaged. 

What makes webinars perfect lead magnets is the FOMO effect (fear-of-missing-out) they create because, as a rule, webinars are held once and at a specific time. Some marketers are even prone to adding time countdowns to their webinar lead magnets to boost the sense of urgency and make prospects rush and click. Neil Patel practices such an approach quite often:

Workbook

Using this lead magnet, you will be able to position your business as an expert in your field and help prospects get a good deal of education. Take a look at the workbook Melyssa Griffin offers:

She has added another trick, a quick survey, to get her website visitors involved and demonstrate her high level of expertise, as well as readiness to solve their problems. 

Who, When, and Where of your lead magnet

Knowing What you will present as a lead magnet is a part of success. You should also understand:

Who you’ll direct it to
What’s your target audience, their needs, interests, likes, and dislikes? 

When people will see it and sign up
What is their prime time for visiting your website? What’s the best moment for your lead magnet to appear in front of your visitors? 

Where your lead magnet will rest
Will it be a separate landing page? Will it be on a pop-up or a sidebar opt-in form?

To answer these questions, you should use your old true marketing friend — A/B test. Experiment with a variety of lead magnets to figure out which of them converts better. This way, you’ll not only multiply your high-quality leads but also get deep insights about your audience.

To sum up

Lead generation is like fishing: to catch a big fish, you need to have an attractive bait — a specific and value-bringing lead magnet. To come up with the irresistible one, remember that the best lead magnets are always inspired by your audience. So, analyze your prospects and A/B test different options to find your perfect solution. 

And if you want to complement your mailing list with high-quality contacts, rely on your secret tool, Snovio’s Email Finder, which will help you find and capture hundreds of new leads with 100% verified email addresses in minutes.