What Is a Lead Magnet and How To Create One: 10 Examples

Lead magnets help your prospective customers solve the problem that brought them to your business while helping you follow up with prospects and earn their business. At Visme, we love creating free resources to help our readers design amazing visual content like presentations, reports and—you guessed it—ebooks! There are very few Lead Magnets that will be as effective for SaaS businesses (and other software companies) than a free trial because people love to try before they buy. Although they are often delivered in PDF format, cheat sheets take a different approach than reports and guides. The most common Lead Magnet that you’ve probably seen is a free guide or report that’s delivered in PDF format. A checklist is a good lead magnet idea for niches or topics that have a lot of steps to be followed.

The best lead magnet is one your users find valuable, which can vary by industry, business model, and target audience. A lead magnet lead magnet is a free offer businesses offer in exchange for contact information from prospective leads. Lead magnets offer several benefits to businesses, including growing email lists and offering more information on customers. A lead magnet is a perk or incentive that businesses offer customers in exchange for their contact information.

Whether it’s eBooks, whitepapers, videos, or webinars, your content should deliver actionable value and fulfill your lead magnet’s promise. For B2B businesses, lead magnets work best as part of a broader strategy that combines audience targeting, outreach, and follow-up. GetResponse’s research separately found quizzes and assessments converting at 30% to 50%, dramatically ahead of static PDF-based lead magnet examples, which typically convert at 3% to 10%. Approaching your quiz from an adjacent angle, for example a pop-culture framing layered onto an industry topic, can make the format feel more playful without sacrificing the genuine insight behind the result. According to GetResponse’s research, assessments and quizzes convert at 30% to 50%, compared to just 3% to 10% for static PDFs covering similar content, making this one of the highest-leverage categories for lead magnet ideas on this entire list.

• A lead magnet is a free resource businesses create to compel visitors to submit their email in exchange for access.
• Ahrefs uses quiz-style lead magnets effectively, delivering an instant, personalized result in exchange for an email address, and the format works because the visitor feels they are getting something tailored specifically to them, not a generic resource handed identically to everyone else who opts in.
• Some types of lead magnets include ebooks, whitepapers, newsletters, free consultations, free trials, webinars, templates, checklists, courses, reports and quizzes.
• A compiled, gated collection of resources, articles, templates, or guides that a visitor can browse repeatedly functions as an ongoing value exchange rather than a single download, which gives this lead magnet idea a longer functional relationship with the lead than a one-time PDF.

Why should you create lead magnets?

In this article, learn about nine different types of lead magnets that real businesses use and how to create them yourself. Quizzes provide immediate, personalized results, which makes them one of the highest-engagement lead magnet formats. A lead magnet is a free resource that businesses offer in exchange for a visitor's email address. Now, take a look at this Lead Magnet that is specific (you know you’re about to learn the in’s and out’s of WordPress), but doesn’t deliver on “One Big Thing”…

#4 Treat “Money Pages” Carefully

Alternatively, offering a free month of access to a paid membership site functions as a lead magnet in its own right, letting visitors experience the full value of the community before committing financially. A toolkit bundles multiple related assets into a single package, a practice especially common in the design industry, where experienced designers package WordPress themes, icon sets, texture packs, and Photoshop actions into one downloadable bundle. A practical how-to guide remains one of the most universally applicable lead magnet ideas across nearly every industry, from a guide to a specific city or neighborhood for a real estate agent, to a how-to guide solving a recurring technical problem for a software company.

It Solves a Problem

Because transcription tools have become significantly faster and cheaper, this is one of the lowest-effort lead magnet ideas to produce relative to the value it delivers, especially for businesses that already invest heavily in video content. Users only need to provide their email address once, and they can access all the ebooks, reports, infographics, and other materials we publish on a regular basis. These make great blog posts on their own and repurposing them into PDFs can make great lead magnets. When you realize how slim your chances are of turning traffic into long-term followers you'll spend much more time and energy on your lead magnets and optimization. Some of the best lead magnets are just repurposed content from blog posts, videos, podcasts, webinars, etc.

Data-driven reports featuring original research are powerful lead magnets that position your brand as an authoritative industry expert. Although technically free, businesses typically offer lead magnets in exchange for valuable contact information. Gleam helps with that process and collects contest entries by asking entrants to take actions like following social media accounts or watching videos.