3 ways lead magnets can drive revenue for your business

Wanting to learn more about how lead magnets build real value for your business? You're in the right place. Lead magnets are an efficient way to create leads that build revenue through the use of the sales funnel. For small and mid-sized businesses, converting email addresses to sales is especially important, and can be difficult. Curating your lead magnet content to better match the buying intent of your target audience can help your online presence become a highly lucrative lead conversion tool. Here's how to increase your conversion rates and customer insights using effective lead magnets as part of your marketing strategy. 

How can a lead magnet make your business money?

Lead magnets can be highly effective lead generators with engaging content that focuses on your target audience. While lead generation begins at the awareness stage of the funnel with an opt-in incentive, it's the work that happening mid-marketing funnel that lays the groundwork for revenue increase. While lead magnets make the initial connection between browser and brand, the nurturing that happens afterward establishes familiarity, then trust.

Nurturing leads involves continuously delivering relevant content to your leads as you build their relationship with your brand. This can include accessible, useful information relevant to your audience's interests and needs. It should be targeted at specific buyer personas, using a marketing automation platform. Understanding buyer profiles helps you better understand the type of content that's relevant to individual buyer personas.  

Establishing trustworthiness with a potential customer through lead nurturing will reward you with more customer insights and conversion paths. Being familiar and having given them useful, trustworthy information in the past gives a nurtured brand relationship a highly competitive edge.

When the target consumer is ready to buy, they'll remember the way your brand makes them feel. This is part of the reason many of today's brands are more vocal about their brand values, which are often very relatable. 

What types of lead magnets work best for small to mid-sized businesses?

Lead magnets come in all shapes and sizes, and the type of content you consider for your business should be based on your audience and scaling goals. Small and mid-sized businesses can benefit especially from three strategies when considering which lead magnets will work best for their brands. Consider your goal, and the paths that can help lead you to it. Some lead magnet examples include:

1. E-books
2. Checklists
3. Coupons & discounts
4. Video series
5. Educational courses
6. White papers

Many small to mid-sized businesses report video and text based content works best for nurturing the brand-client relationship. This is especially true for short form content. A potential customer early in the funneling process might only give your brand content a few seconds of consideration before scrolling. 

Point 1: Convert New Email Subscribers 

Lead magnets aren't worth much to a brand without conversions. This is why building a relationship with new leads and nurturing that relationship is important. Converting email subscribers and site visitors into high-value leads may take time. The good news is, once you understand patterns in behavior among your clients, you can use these customer insights to curate content that they'll enjoy. 

Creating a positive experience is important for generating new leads and reaching your ideal customer base. Early and intermediate interactions with potential clients should be rewarding to your new audience, and should be triggered based on their behaviors.

Different, compelling content should be delivered to potential clients' email addresses depending on whether they've just subscribed to your content, viewed your content via an emailed link, placed an order, or abandoned a shopping cart.  

Interacting with leads using relevant and engaging content will help nurture them into conversions.

Point 2: Sell Through Audience Creation and Retargeting Advertising

Sometimes, audience creation and retargeting advertising is your best bet for lead conversion.  If you've created a successful lead magnet, you can create custom audiences that will respond most effectively to it. 

Create your custom audience by pulling qualified leads from your email address list and lookalikes of your email list. You can also use a strong lead magnet to retarget visitors to your effective landing page. Regardless, make sure the compelling content within your lead magnet is appropriate for the audience you create, based on where the client is in the customer journey.

Custom audience can drastically increase your conversion rate and can translate to a cost more than 40% lower per lead from using custom audiences. When you consider that your audience is already familiar with and beginning to trust your brand, that percentage could quickly increase. 

All you need is a content marketing strategy that incorporates your target market and some compelling content, turning traffic into leads. 

Point 3: Build a Client Base Directly With Inbound Leads

Creating organic content like social media posts and blog posts gives your new audience members more opportunity to interact with and get to know your brand. Creating quality content that appeals to your target audience can also eventually help you generate inbound organic traffic.

If your target audience is interacting with your business online, they're likely already interested in the consideration stage of buying. All you need to do is convince them to fill out an opt-in form and provide a good email address.

Providing a variety of established content for your audience to interact with creates higher conversion rates much more likely. Without content to engage your audience, you're relying solely on your product/service pages and other web pages. 

FAQ's

What is a good cost per conversion from a lead magnet?

Depending on your industry, size of your small business, and availability of custom audiences that convert at a high percentage, this answer can vary greatly. Let's take a look at cost per lead alone. The average cost per lead from a HubSpot report in 2017 showed at $198. But that number is useless, once you focus on industry. The industry average for non-profits, for example, was less than $50, while the industry average for IT was over $350.  And that's just cost per lead - not cost per conversion.Taking a look at email conversion rates is likely a good place to start. Barilliance shared data on email conversion rate over time, with a rate of 14.65% for 2021. This signifies that 14.65% of all email subscribers will make a purchase through their lifetime on your email list, given best practices and a large enough audience. Remember, email marketing takes time, and some emails will vastly outperform others in terms of driving conversions.

How can I boost my email conversion rate?

Creating an effective email sequence depends primarily on the level of empathy and user experience design you can bring to the creation process. For instance, if you're a flooring company sharing an e-book on fixing hardwood floors, it would not be very empathetic to then immediately promote your tiling services to those new customers. Instead, write a compelling subject line that leads into a dynamic and mobile friendly email ending in a CTA. 

If you do the little things right, and A/B test your emails, over time your email sequence will reward you by turning leads into customers. 

Conclusion

Getting to know your target audience can help you build a more effective lead magnet. Once you've created one, you can customize your audience and target potential clients based on trigger behaviors or previous interactions with your small business. Remember, the most effective lead magnet content is short form video or text, and needs to be relevant to your audience. If your current lead magnets aren't doing the job, it may be time for content upgrades and generation strategies.

Still have questions? Reach out to our team of digital marketers today for more info.