You will be able to judge whether a lead magnet idea is specific and useful enough that a stranger would swap an email address for it.
Scroll to the footer of almost any small business website and you will find a box that says "Subscribe to our newsletter", sitting there with almost no signups. The trouble is the offer. People rarely want more email in general, but they will happily trade an address for an answer to the problem they have today.
That swap is the idea behind a lead magnet. In module 1 you sorted out who you can email and wrote the consent line for your form. This module gives people a reason to fill the form in.
A lead magnet is something useful you give away in exchange for an email address. It can be a checklist, a template, a short guide, a calculator, a sample, or a short course delivered by email over a few days. The form is less important than the deal: the visitor gets something they want now, and you get permission to stay in touch.
Priya, who runs the maths tuition centre in Tampines, used to have a "Join our mailing list" box on her site. It collected a handful of addresses a year. She replaced it with a one-page checklist called "The P5 maths heuristics, with one worked example each", offered to parents who want to help at home. Parents searching for help with exactly that topic found the page and signed up in far greater numbers than the old box ever managed, because the checklist offered something they could use at tonight's homework session instead of a vague promise of more email.
The lead magnets that work best are small. They solve one specific problem the buyer has right now, rather than covering everything you know about your subject.
Compare two ideas for Mei Ling, the home baker in Punggol. "The complete guide to celebration cakes" sounds generous, but it is vague, it would take her weeks to write, and nobody is sure what they will get. "How far ahead to order a custom cake for every kind of party, on one page" is narrow. A parent planning a birthday in six weeks knows at once whether they need it, and they can use it in two minutes.
Narrow beats broad for three reasons. People can tell instantly whether it applies to them. They can use it quickly, so they feel the value before they forget who sent it. And it is small enough that you can actually finish making it, which you will do in lesson 2.4.
A lead magnet attracts whoever wants the thing it offers. If the thing has nothing to do with your business, you build a list of people who will never buy from you.
A tuition centre could give away a free printable family timetable. Lots of people would want it, but plenty of them have no children in upper primary and would never pay for tuition. The heuristics checklist attracts a narrower group: parents of P5 and P6 children who are already working on maths at home. Those are the parents who might book a trial class later.
A good test is to finish this sentence: "Someone who found this useful would probably also want..." If the end of the sentence is the thing you sell, the lead magnet points the right way. Mei Ling's ordering guide leads straight to "a custom cake for that party". A generic recipe ebook would attract home bakers, who are the people least likely to order a cake from her.
For shops, the most common lead magnet is a discount: ten percent off your first order for signing up. It works, because a discount is useful right now to anyone about to buy.
The catch is what it teaches people. Subscribers who joined for a discount learn that your emails are where discounts come from. Many will wait for the next one before buying again, and some will sign up with a second address to get the code twice. If every email you send is an offer, your list becomes a coupon channel, and full-price sales get harder.
A discount can still be the right choice for a shop with frequent repeat purchases. Use it knowingly, and plan for the welcome emails in module 4 to give people a reason to stay that is not another code.
Most people's first lead magnet idea is too broad or too far from what they sell. The fix is to write several ideas and compare them.
Score each idea from 1 to 5 on usefulness to the buyer this week, on how quickly they can put it to use once it arrives, and on how closely it leads to what you sell. Mei Ling's example scores looked like this: the complete cake guide got 3, 1 and 4, a total of 8. The ordering timeline got 4, 5 and 5, a total of 14. A recipe ebook got 3, 3 and 1, a total of 7. The ordering timeline won clearly, and it was also the quickest to make.
The scores are rough judgements, and that is fine. Their job is to make you compare ideas instead of falling for the first one. In the activity below you will write five ideas for your own business, score each one on usefulness, speed to use and link to what you sell, and pick the one you will build in lesson 2.4.
List five lead magnet ideas for your business, score each from 1 to 5 on usefulness, speed to use and link to what you sell, and pick the top one.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).