Want to Collect More Email Addresses? You Need a Killer Lead Magnet

Using email marketing to collect email addresses

Your website is your own small piece of real estate on this large piece of land called the internet. Most people think that with amazing copy and a product or service to sell, they can dominate the web and make a positive ROI. However, this relies on visitors arriving on your website, falling in love with you, and committing to purchase what you’re offering. This can be a big ask, and it’s rare to gain a visitor’s trust so quickly (making it harder to actually sell). So, while a great product and user-optimised copy are crucial, your business also needs something else. It needs an engine. This engine is email marketing. We’re delving into how to collect email addresses by creating a killer lead magnet that sends visitors to their inboxes in droves.

Email marketing allows you to build trust with users and provide them with value. We don’t like buying from faceless entities, so you should be using your email marketing strategy to showcase the face behind your brand; to showcase your personality. With an email list, you can target people in specific stages of your funnel and personalise your content accordingly, and you can promote “exclusive” events and sales to drive more conversions. But before you think about the “what”, you need to think about the “how”. Before you even think about selling your products, you need to think about selling your email subscription. One way to do this is by creating a lead magnet.


Creating a Lead Magnet

When you run an email marketing campaign, you have to put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. If you arrive on a website and a business that 30 seconds ago you hadn’t heard of starts asking for your information, you’d likely be tempted to run a mile. The truth is, we don’t want to give our valuable contact information away for nothing, especially if we’re concerned we’re going to get spammed for days on end with emails begging for our custom, and providing little else. So, what can you do?

Offer Something Valuable

Of course, you’d much rather a visitor arrive on your site and buy straight away. But unfortunately, sales don’t always work like that. Your email marketing campaign isn’t directly making you money, so it might be tempting to offer something small and inconsequential just for the purpose of having something to give away. But do you know what this results in? People signing up for your newsletter, and quickly unsubscribing, or not even bothering at all.

The truth is, your email opt-in is just as much a transaction as someone selecting a product and navigating through your checkout. The only substitute is that instead of money, visitors are paying you in a different currency, their email address.

So what does this mean? You need to consider your opt-in as a standalone product, something that’s so good, it’s something people would happily pay for.

Offering a Free Template

Offering a free template is a great way of collecting more email addresses if you’re a B2B business. People love a behind the scenes look at the way others run their businesses, so if there’s a particular tool you use or a template you’ve put together that gets you proven results, this is a great way to go.

If you’re short on time, there are benefits to offering a free template. Because this is something you’re already using, all you need to do is copy your document, clear it of any personal information (be that your own or your clients), and add some helpful notes on how your subscribers should use the template.

Hubspot has its own dedicated resources section which offers templates for almost everything a digital marketer could wish for. Notice how they also provide a free workbook for users to work through? Hubspot is clearly providing value, and significantly increasing its chances of securing a conversion because it has so much on offer. While not everyone who visits their site will necessarily want to download infographic templates, those visitors may be interested in crafting a social media marketing plan or putting together a buyer persona. Offering a choice gives Hubspot multiple opportunities to collect email addresses (because of course, users need to enter their details to claim their free content).

Using a lead magnet to collect email addresses

If you have multiple lead magnets, the key is to drive traffic to a dedicated page where they can see what you have on offer, or use behaviour analysis technology to identify what pages users are visiting. Then, you can offer these visitors an opt-in that resonates with them.

Let’s take a look at another example. Liminal Pages is a fiction editing service by professional editor Sophie Playle.

Sophie’s lead magnet is a project, profit and efficiency tracking resource for individuals who run their own editorial businesses.

An email opt-in to collect email addresses in exchange for a template

Now, it’s worth mentioning, that in the past, Liminal Pages’ lead magnet was a resource for writers — after all, this is Sophie’s target audience. Recently, however, her focus has shifted to offering courses to people who want to learn the tricks of the trade and set up their own fiction editing businesses. This change in tack shows that Sophie knows her audience.

What we can learn from this, is that it’s always important to keep your audience and goals in mind, and provide users with something that is not only going to provide them with value but will make you money in the long-term. Sophie’s courses are highly popular (her last course sold out in less than an hour!), and by creating a lead magnet that relates specifically to that segmented audience, she can more effectively gauge the level of interest in this new service she’s providing. This also gives her a growing list of people ready to buy whenever she launches a new course.

Offering a Free Ebook

Creating an ebook and using it to collect email addresses is time-consuming, but well worth the effort. An email marketing campaign is all about building trust with your users, and what better way to do that than by showcasing your authority and providing something that shows your subscribers you know exactly what you’re talking about?

You can take this one step further by making the advice in your ebook actionable, so that people can follow clearly defined steps that will have a positive impact on themselves or their businesses, whether that’s improving their workflow, increasing their productivity, or learning something new. This then gives you a reason to genuinely follow up with your subscribers — instead of just getting in touch to promote your product or service, take a vested interest in how your ebook’s helped them. Not only will it help build that relationship, but it’ll give you invaluable feedback on how to improve your lead magnet for future incarnations.

If you don’t have time to create an ebook from scratch, consider compiling an ebook from some of your most popular and informative blog posts. While you may need to rewrite some of the content to cater to your specific audience or make it fit the general theme of the entire book, as well as write an introduction and conclusion, you’ll save considerable time because the majority of your content is already written.

Running a Free Course

We’ve saved the best for last. While running a course is without a doubt the most time-consuming option — arguably even more so than writing a book, you’ll be rewarded with much higher levels of engagement and be able to build more trust. Yes, you want to collect email addresses, but a one-time download gives you just that. But a course lets you get that and so much more — it gets you a relationship.

There may be naysayers who claim that email marketing is dead, but that’s far from the case. If anything, email is growing and will continue to do so. Email is still the most personal form of communication because done correctly, it can seem like you’re speaking directly to a single person (even when your whole process is automated).

We buy from people we like and trust, and it’s a lot easier to achieve that when someone’s landing in our inbox every day for a week, two weeks, or even a month, and consistently providing value. While it might seem like a pretty one-sided relationship (after all, you’re helping your subscribers and giving them something that you’ve poured your all into for free), an email course allows you to showcase your abilities, and this is the precursor to them knowing you’re capable of helping them (in a paid capacity).

Consider what questions your clients and customers ask you over and over again and brainstorm what would answer them. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what would make you hand over your email address in an instant. Then, create it!


Packaging Your Lead Magnet

Now you have your lead magnet, you need to package it in the right way. Think of it this way. You have two identical products sitting next to each other on a shelf. They both work identically, they are both marked up at the same price, but the first one is in a broken box and looks like it’s been thrown onto the floor and ran over by a stampede. The second product’s box is in perfect condition, with a fancy ribbon wrapped around the centre. My bet is that you’d opt for the second one, am I right? That’s the packaging.

When it comes to online transactions, whether your goal is to collect email addresses, sell out your course, or sell a product, your packaging is your website. It’s your copy: the words you use to convince prospective customers and clients that they must have what you’re offering them.

Let’s look at an example. Go on 90% of websites with a popup email opt-in, and this is what you’ll see:

A standard email marketing form to collect email addresses

Look familiar?

The trouble with this is “get free goodies”, is very vague.

How about this?

“Enter your email to get access to your free e-book on picking the right workflow for your business.”

This is better: at least we have some idea of what it is we’re getting. But we can go one better than that:

SMART WORKFLOW: Enter your email to unlock the secrets to a workflow that streamlines your productivity, saving you time AND money.”

Notice how that’s more engaging? By giving it a title, we’ve created a mini product. We have the curiosity factor (people will want to know what secrets they’re missing out on), and there’s a key benefit that people can measure. This is so important. Yes, businesses want to choose the right workflow for their business, but you have to translate that into something that they can actively measure, something that’s important to them. In this case, the idea that the right workflow can save them time and money is the clinching factor.

Consider what your lead magnet is, and how you can package it to appeal to users so that ultimately, your product is not the one left on the shelf.


Want to Grow Your List Quickly?

We’d always recommend you devise a lead magnet and start working on it immediately. However, sometimes you need to collect email addresses quickly. It might be that you have a product launch coming up, and want to reach as many people as possible. Or it might be that you need to make a certain number of sales to keep your investors happy. Thankfully, there is a simple trick that can significantly increase email signups.

Contests and Giveaways

Everyone loves it when they get something for free: it’s the concept our lead magnet is built on. But if you don’t have time to create one right now, then running a contest or giveaway is a great way of increasing engagement. Asking for a visitor’s email address is a given since you’ll need it to let them know if they’ve won! Your giveaway can be of anything, a product if you’re an eCommerce store, a free month’s subscription if you sell software, or a month’s free consultancy if you’re a marketing business.

Alternatively, offering a simple discount code for new buyers to get 10% off their first order (when they register an account), can work incredibly well. Check out this example from Electric Tobacconist:

A bar advertising an offer for new email subscribers


What to Do After Your Opt-In Is Live

Your opt-in is live, and you’ve started to collect email addresses, but what else can you do to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign?

Use a Popup Builder

Popups can be extremely effective when used in the right way. Go overkill with popups, and they’ll do nothing but irritate users (check out this really bad example by Marketing Week!) But, a well-executed popup, such as an exit popup offering users your lead magnet as they’re about to leave, can work wonders for your conversion rate.

Check out this behaviour-triggered popup on Ash Ambirge’s The Middle Finger Project:

Ash Ambirge popup for collecting email addresses

This popup triggers after visitors have spent a predetermined amount of time on site. This promotes Ash’s latest course, a free email series over the course of 25 days. By using a timer trigger, she ensures she’s not displaying this popup to everyone (which could have a significant impact on bounce rate). Instead, the popup only displays to those that have stuck around on her website for longer, who are viewing her course pages, reading her blog posts, and are genuinely invested in her brand.

Pro tip: use a motion popup! A motion popup is exactly as it sounds: a popup with some sort of movement that catches your visitors’ attention. With so many badly executed popups on the web, we’ve almost become popup-blind. We automatically filter them out if we assume they aren’t going to provide us with any value. Whether you use a lightbox popup or a simple slide in from the side, having your popup jump into the page catches the eye. Just make sure your copy is compelling enough to prevent users from bouncing!

Keep up the Engagement

Well done, you’ve successfully grown your email list! But that doesn’t mean you should give up now. Once you’ve collected email addresses, you need to do something with them. If you don’t find a way to keep users engaged, and instead go ghost on them — or worse, spam them with “buy me, buy me” emails or things they won’t find useful — you’ll quickly find your unsubscribe rate rise.

Provide discount codes and exclusive offers: A well-timed discount code to your subscriber’s email address carries with it a degree of exclusivity. For best results, this should be something you’re not actively promoting on your site. Instead, offer a 10% discount off a subscriber’s next order, or use your email marketing campaign to promote onsite offers.

Free webinars/tips: If you’re a service-based business, webinars are a great method of lead generation, but they can also convert users who are already in your funnel. Sometimes, all it takes is a push in the right direction. Use your email marketing campaign to promote your events and remind users to claim their spot. By using this mild scarcity technique, you’ll encourage subscribers to get involved. Running webinars need not be time-consuming for your business: you can simply pre-record your video and let your videos do the talking to convert your customers into sales.

Check out this email promotion of a live webinar by CoSchedule:

An email marketing campaign promoting a webinar

By keeping the sentences short, and providing key benefits in the form of bullet points, the email serves the purpose of giving subscribers everything they need to make a decision, without overloading them with information.

An alternative to promoting webinars is to send out a weekly newsletter with a helpful tip for users to improve their productivity, processes, or business as a whole.

Segment Your Email Subscribers

If you use an email marketing automation or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, such as Infusionsoft, you should be taking advantage of the ability to segment your email subscribers into different groups. While you could send the same email to all of your subscribers, by collecting email addresses and assigning them different “tags”, you can specifically target users, increasing the chance that you’ll secure a conversion.

If like Hubspot, you have several different lead magnets, or you choose to hide certain content behind an email gate, then you can send specific emails to those who show an interest in particular topics, products or services. You could even use this to create multiple email campaigns based on the stage of your sales funnel they’re in. This way, if you don’t want to push the “hard sell” on those who have only just signed up for your lead magnet, you can test softer conversions, such as encouraging them to refer a friend to enter a giveaway or follow you on social media.

Pro tip: use email segmentation in combination with a behaviour analysis tool (such as Bouncezap!) to identify where your subscriber’s interests lie. You can then use this data to send them relevant blog posts and promotions you’ll know they’ll love!

The ultimate thing to remember when it comes to collecting email addresses and creating a lead magnet is this: it has to be relevant. While we all love a gif or a cute picture (and they can certainly work well to build a bond and showcase the human aspect of your brand), if you’re not providing value, you won’t hold a subscriber’s attention. If email marketing is the engine behind your business, you are the one that has to keep the machine oiled and running.

 

Are you running an email marketing campaign? Bouncezap integrates with all major CRM and marketing automation software. Try Bouncezap for free today and see how you can collect more email addresses!