Using Lead Magnets to Incentivize Your Ideal Customer

A business owner’s most important asset today is their customer email list. A healthy email list will help ensure healthy profits.

Using lead magnets to incentivize your ideal customer to sign up for your list is a classic and effective way to grow your list. The value exchange is considered fair and reasonable to the customer. The list provides demographic data and an audience to whom you’ll market your solutions.

You give them something that has instant value and solves a problem for them. They give you their email address, and other information such as the size of their business, their name, or other data. You can then qualify the potential customer.

After that, use their information to communicate with them about more of your recommended solutions. Learn why using lead magnets is so effective in building your ideal customer base.

Why Lead Magnets are so Effective

The reason lead magnets are so effective at list building is extensive. Human nature makes it apparent how much we love getting free stuff. Offering lead magnets helps educate an audience in a way that feels more natural than other types of selling.

In many ways, when you develop a lead magnet, you’re giving away some of your expertise. Hopefully, they will value what you offer. The customer is giving away their valued email address in the hope of learning something new. This will advance their trust of your expertise.

Lead magnets work because you’re giving them something that is so high quality that they normally would have been willing to pay for it. Plus, lead magnets accomplish much more than you think.

  • Lead Magnets are Targeted to a Specific Market – For a lead magnet to be effective, it needs to be laser-targeted to a very specific audience. This will only attract the people you really want on your list. By creating a truly “niched-down” freebie, you can trace your buyer’s journey through the sales funnel to find out where they are missing information and need more to help guide their choices.
  • Lead Magnets Establish Your Expertise – When you design your lead magnet with your ideal customer in mind, you can use it to establish your expertise by giving them such useful information that they cannot question it. Even if they research the facts, they’re going to come away knowing you are really the expert about the topic and someone they can really follow.
  • Lead Magnets Build Trust and Authority – The fact that the ethical “bribe” is so well made, solves their problem so perfectly, and is branded for your business, will help to spread trust and showcase your niche authority. Always double-check the facts you share with your audience to ensure that not only is the information accurate, it’s also updated and current.
  • Lead Magnets Build Your List Quickly – Anytime you want to build your list, focus on finding more points of entry into the list. If the only point of entry right now is if you make a sale, obviously that’s going to be slower. If you have multiple points of entry with multiple lead magnets designed to attract different members of your ideal customer audience throughout their buying journey, you’re going to be that much more successful with fast list building.
  • Lead Magnets Help You Learn More About Your Customers – The exciting thing about creating lead magnets is that it requires you to do some study into your audience and your competition. When you learn more about your customers, you are always going to do better in your business. The act of getting your customers to download the freebie and then potentially buy something that you suggest, is going to help you get to know them even more – especially if you watch your metrics and study the data generated by your actions.
  • Lead Magnets Segment Your Audience Better – When your ideal customer downloads the freebie, they’re segmented based on the item they downloaded. Then further down the line, when they do more actions and more clicking through your email messages, they’ll get segmented even more. The more segmented they are, the more individual the messaging will appear to them, and the more likely they are to convert.
  • Lead Magnets Offer a Higher Return – Investment in freebies offers an extraordinarily high rate of return. The main reason is that email marketing works. Even today, with social media marketing, the average ROI through email marketing is $42 for every $1 spent.

Lead magnets are something you cannot ignore. Statistics show that an effective lead magnet helps you target your audience, build trust and authority, and learn more about them. This leads to better and more focused marketing.

You might also enjoy reading:

Your Burning List Building Questions Answered

Using Lead Magnets to Incentivize Your Ideal Customer