Lead Magnets Explained: Definition, Basics & 17 Examples

Here’s everything you need to know to start creating effective lead magnets, together with seventeen inspiring examples.

Learn the most popular (and most effective) ways to capture leads.

This type of magnet involves creating and offering a tool or service to potential customers at no charge. 

Everyone expects to get something for free on the internet these days. And a lot of companies have been leveraging that expectation to get prospects closer to their brand.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it. If you want people to experience your product and you spend hefty sums to get them to visit your website, why “spoil” everything with any kind of friction?

To reduce friction, you can distribute samples of your product’s functionality as free tools. An example of such a scenario is our very own Ahrefs, the all-in-one SEO toolkit. We offer visitors to sign up for the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools if they’re not ready to get the full deal. 

Here, we’ve got examples from two competitors that provide book summary services. Blinkist lets you try its entire product for free for a limited time.

A cool takeaway from this example is how it surveys visitors before it lets them in. I mean, why wouldn't someone “invest” one minute or even less to fill the survey and get something for free?

An early access/waiting list is a type of lead magnet where you collect contact information in exchange for accessing your product before everyone else. 

This idea might be a good fit for you if:

In this example, we’ve got Chip, the savings app. It launched its product with this kind of lead magnet. From the look of the website now, it must have worked out nicely for the company.

Quiksilver, the clothing brand, offers free shipping and free returns when people sign up for a free account. And it’s probably a win-win. I’m sure that free shipping and returns cost the company less than distributing its goods through other shops. Smart.

WAWWA, another clothing brand, offers 15% off the first order just to get your email address. I guess that tells a lot about the power of having a prospect’s email address.

I love how it promises you a lot of spam. Everybody promises not to spam, but this brand does the opposite. WAWWA will probably send you product deals, which you expect and is what the brand “warned” you about. Nobody can complain about that.

This idea is about getting a prospect's contact information while signing them up for a product demo. People interested in a product enough to devote their time to a product demo usually don’t mind sharing more than just their name and email.

Self-service product trials can be ineffective when you’re dealing with a complex product. In those cases, a prospect is better off with some guidance rather than presented with a mosaic of buttons and dials. This is where guided product demos come in.

Depending on your target audience and market, you can also try other sales materials like comparisons, fact sheets, or third-party reports on your product.

Help Scout has figured out the best way for a newcomer to experience its product (and convert into a happy customer) is to simply learn what the product is all about in a 1:1 demo.

An interesting solution when it comes to demos is to have a chatbot prequalify the lead and schedule an appointment with them and your sales team. This example is from Metadata.io.  

Free consultation lead magnets gather contact information in exchange for some kind of service or for the ability to consult a subject matter expert at no cost. It’s an ideal solution for all kinds of agencies and service providers.

In this example, agency Single Grain offers a free, custom marketing plan. No better “foot in the door” for a marketing agency than this.

This type of lead magnet requires creating premium educational material to turn your visitors into leads.

Since you’re giving out a lot here, you can ask for more in return. What’s more, education never ends for people serious about their profession so a quality free course can get you a "foot in the door" to offer paid courses. 

Also, you don’t need to create a special course just for lead generation. You can use a part of your premium course or repurpose existing content.

A white paper is a comprehensive report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue or problem and presents the brand’s solution or viewpoint on it. It’s somewhere between a B2B sales pitch and an academic paper.

In this example, Ultimaker (a 3D printer manufacturer) gathers contact information from an audience interested in the real cost of owning a 3D printer. Naturally, one of its products is used as an example here.

I think it’s doing a good job because a) you read about its printer, but it doesn’t feel like product placement, and b) it’s true that other manufacturers don’t always communicate the full cost of owning a 3D printer.

Some problems are just too broad to tackle with one blog article. That’s where ebooks come in.

Ebooks are some of the most irresistible lead magnets because they offer free education on complex, professional topics that you’ll find hard to get anywhere else.

Reports are usually collated after hundreds of professionals are surveyed. These professionals are often, if not always, the issuer’s customers. Only then can the report be something truly new and unique. So this is not something every company can put together.  

But when you do manage to put something like this together, it speaks volumes about the scale of your operation.

An additional bonus of getting leads is that reports tend to naturally earn backlinks, which is one of the most important success factors in SEO.

This form of lead magnets doesn’t really need an introduction. You can find newsletter sign-up forms all over the web. 

Some of those newsletters are just that—a content digest regularly delivered to one’s inbox.

And some are a gateway to a lead nurturing program. It’s common to see companies pitching their products or special deals in between the regular news.

This type of lead magnet utilizes calculators designed to solve specific problems: ROI calculators, financial calculators, statistical significance calculators, and so on.

They are a brilliant way to lure in B2B prospects because a lot of decisions in business need to add up. But they can also work for B2C, e.g., mortgage calculators.

A “lead magnet” calculator can be directly related to your product, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be about something that your audience cares about. A good example is this customer support hiring calculator from Help Scout:

A checklist is a list of items or tasks that need to be completed, checked, or remembered. While a cheat sheet is a concise set of notes used for quick reference; all the essential information in one place.

Great if your prospects are involved in a lot of repetitive work professionally. They won’t have to look up the same small bits of information or remember all the details that can make or break a complex process.

No wonder developers love cheat sheets. Here’s an example collection of cheat sheets from Opensource.com. Each one is a lead magnet.

Here's another example. Creating a press release can be stressful. You need to work with different stakeholders, get everything absolutely right, and sound interesting to the press at the same time. A “press release checklist” lead magnet is hard to resist.

Here, we’ve got Webprofits’ swipe file of handpicked landing page examples from 73 high-growth companies.

To generate leads for your business you can also hold a contest, quiz, or giveaway. 

This type of lead magnet can get you high volumes of leads but it’s a bit tricky to handle.

Getting a lead from a lead magnet that promises a prize is the easy part. The hard part is to convert that lead later on because you can attract leads not interested in your product (if the prize is something different from your product).

One way is to try and get their attention while they wait for the winner’s announcement. Another way is to point them to your product through a drip campaign after the whole event.

Here’s an interesting example. It combines a quiz and a contest. First, the visitor completes a personality quiz to reveal their perfect home decor style. Next, they can enter the contest to win furniture in that exact style. You can read the full case study here.

Lead magnets are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can help you get visitors’ contact information. On the other, they can create friction for people who want to access something that could help you sell your products or services.

Are leads more important than getting high volumes of organic traffic and, potentially, more brand awareness? This is a decision you need to make on your own. One solution may be to try and get the best of both worlds by getting your lead magnets search engine optimized.

Want to learn more about lead generation? Check these out:

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