Build your lead magnet and signup form

You will create a working lead magnet and a live signup form connected to an email tool such as Mailchimp, Brevo, Kit or MailerLite.

Plenty of people plan a lead magnet for months. They outline a forty-page guide, research email tools, read comparison articles, and never publish anything. Meanwhile visitors keep arriving at their site and leaving without a trace. This exercise is about getting a working version live, even a small one, and then improving it once real people are using it.

By the end you will have a lead magnet, a signup form inside an email tool, and proof that the whole path works. You will use the idea you picked in lesson 2.1, the form you sketched in lesson 2.2, and the opt-in choice you made in lesson 2.3. Plan for about forty minutes of work, plus whatever time you need to write the lead magnet itself.

Step 1: Make the lead magnet small enough to finish

Your first lead magnet should be something you can finish in a weekend. A one-page checklist or a simple template is enough. Mei Ling's ordering guide is a single page: a table of party types down the side, with how far ahead to order and what details she needs from the customer for each. She made it in a free design tool in an afternoon and saved it as a PDF.

Write it the way you would explain it to one customer across the counter. Put your business name and website at the bottom, so anyone it gets forwarded to knows where it came from. Read it once on your phone, since that is where most people will open it.

Resist the urge to add more. A finished one-page checklist that people use is worth far more than a half-written guide. You can make a better version later, once you know which subscribers it attracts.

Step 2: Open an account and build the form

Choose one email tool and open a free or starter account. Mailchimp, Brevo, Kit and MailerLite are common choices for small businesses, and the course does not recommend one over another. Most offer a free or starter plan, so check the current limits on each tool's own pricing page against the size of your list. What you need from the tool for this course is a signup form, automated emails, and domain authentication, which module 3 covers.

Inside the tool, create a form. Most tools offer an embedded form for a page, a pop-up, and a hosted landing page with its own link. Start with whichever matches the two pages you chose in lesson 2.2. Add the fields you decided on, the headline, the button text, and your consent line beside the button. Then set the opt-in method to single or double, as you decided.

Put the form on your site. Most tools give you a snippet of code to paste into your website builder, or a plugin for common builders. If you have no website yet, the tool's hosted landing page works as a stand-in, and you can share its link.

Step 3: Tag where people came from

Set the form so every person who signs up through it is added to a specific list, group or tag. Name it after the source, for example "lead magnet: party ordering guide" or "form: blog footer". Different tools use different words for this, but they all offer some way to mark it.

This takes two minutes now and saves a lot of guessing later. When you have two forms and a landing page running, you will want to know which one brings in subscribers who actually buy. It also gives you a ready-made trigger for the welcome sequence in module 4, and it is the first tag in the naming scheme you will build in lesson 6.2.

Next, connect delivery. Upload the lead magnet to the tool's file storage or your website, and add its link to the automated email that goes out after signup. With double opt-in, that means the email people receive after they confirm. With single opt-in, it can be a first welcome email that sends straight away, with the link on the thank-you page as well. Write the thank-you page text you drafted in lesson 2.3 into the tool's settings.

Step 4: Test the whole path as a subscriber

Now sign up with a personal email address, not the one you use to run the tool. Go through every step a new subscriber would. Fill in the form on your live site. Look at the thank-you page. Open the confirmation email if you use double opt-in, and click the link. Open the delivery email and download the lead magnet.

Take a screenshot at each stage. Then check the subscriber record inside your tool: is the new contact there, with the right tag and the signup date?

Priya's first test showed two problems. Her confirmation email landed in the promotions tab under the tool's default sender name, which parents would not recognise, so she changed it to "Priya at the centre". And the download link pointed to a file she had renamed, so it was broken. Both took minutes to fix, and both would have cost her subscribers if a real parent had found them first.

What done looks like

You have a published form on at least one page, a lead magnet that arrives on its own, subscribers tagged by source, and a set of screenshots showing the form, the thank-you page, any confirmation email and the delivered file. Run your own test now, and keep those screenshots, because the activity below asks you to hand in each step a new subscriber sees.

Publish one signup form with a delivered lead magnet, sign up with your own address, and screenshot each step a new subscriber sees.

Course

• Email marketing and automation