I’ve been paying a lot of attention to TRAFFIC recently, and with paid traffic comes an obsession for conversions…
If you’re just trying to build a site that attracts a lot of free traffic, or that allows you to post links from social media, time is your biggest cost. (Time is actually the most expensive thing you can spend, but that’s another topic for another day.)
On the other hand, if you’re paying a few pennies or even a few dollars to get a visitor to your website, you have another very important idea in mind…
ROI.
When you’re putting money on the line, you want to make it back. Fast.
Not only that, when you have traffic, you have another advantage…
Control.
You can decide how many people will go to your site, what page they will land on, and track what happens when they get there. And as long as you’re willing to spend money… It’s all completely within your control.
So it’s easy to test one version of a page against another, and see what works better. In fact, it’s easy to run a LOT of tests, experiment with different ideas, and start to get a picture of “best practices” that are bigger than “A versus B.”
This is why I like paying attention to traffic people when it comes to figuring out creative strategy…
They have a better discipline for figuring out what works. They have the need to generate ROI. Plus granular control over it. They figure out small details that matter.
As a copywriter, I can get lazy. If I’m writing a major promotion that will take two months or more to complete and that has a complex set of factors that lead to its success, I can miss the trees for the forest. Yes, big ideas and so on are important. But sometimes it’s very little hinges that swing very big doors.
Which leads me to…
The best type of lead magnet for boosting opt-in rates!
I get no credit for this. It comes from a traffic guy: Justin Brooke of IMScalable.
Justin has worked with some major, major marketers on the traffic side. Finding qualified buyers, and getting them to visit the marketers’ sites.
And… Not only visit, but convert. Convert to leads. Convert to buyers. Take action.
Along the way, he did a bunch of testing of what kinds of Lead Magnets seem to consistently increase opt-in rates.
That is, the FREE thing you offer to site visitors in exchange for their name and email address, and permission to email them in the future.
By far the most common free offering is some kind of information. An email course, free reports, free videos, and so on. (That’s what you got when you signed up for Breakthrough Marketing Secrets.)
And a good free report better than nothing at all, BUT…
Information has a downside. It requires work to implement. It puts the pressure on the prospect to do something with it.
The far less-common but more effective lead magnet is a TOOL.
A tool is something that makes work easier.
Let me ask you this question: would you rather have more work to do, or something that makes your current work easier? That’s an easy question to answer.
And that’s why a tool is a more effective lead magnet than information.
What kinds of tools work?
Well, Justin made a very important point. The automatic assumption is software. And if you have some kind of software tool that you can give away free, great.
However, it doesn’t have to be software.
Yesterday, for example, my post about The #1 Best Selling Story included a template of the story itself. And here’s a little “backstage” view of how that worked — that email gave me one of the best open rates within the first hour of sending that I’ve seen in a long time. I think that’s in part because Selling Stories are a hot topic. But also, because a TEMPLATE has higher perceived value than another essay.
A template or checklist makes a great tool. Even if it comes with information on how to use it.
Justin gives away a spreadsheet of traffic resources he personally uses, and that would be valuable to his best prospects.
Other options: A list of best WordPress plugins. A calculator. A toolbar. A screensaver.
The key is to get creative. Who is your target audience? What is the ideal result they most want? What tool can you give that will put them on the path to the result they want?
Justin has done the testing. So in some regards, I defer to him for the results. But he says that across clients, industries, and markets, when he tests a tool as a lead magnet versus information, the tool boosts opt-ins.
Sounds like a breakthrough to me.
Oh and if you want to read Justin’s original post and watch his video on this, it’s here: What is the Best Type of Lead Magnet To Use?
A note about this summer…
My schedule is shifting a bit this summer. I’m going to be spending a little more time during the week with the kids, while they are out of school.
I still plan to publish Breakthrough Marketing Secrets daily throughout the summer, but you can expect that the issues will occasionally be a bit shorter.
Yes, today’s quick tip still turned into 900+ words… So I’ll have to work on doing “short.” But if you’re used to longer essays and realize they’ve suddenly shortened, that’s why. Time to stop before I hit 1,000 words!
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
