Ask any email marketing guru and they´ll tell you high-quality lead magnets are a vital part of growing a successful and sustainable email list. Lead magnets are so important which is why you need to avoid these lead magnet mistakes. Lead magnets can help with building trust with your audience, increasing exposure and awareness for your business, and helping you develop quality leads.

First, let’s talk about what is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a free resource or service that you give away in exchange for obtaining email addresses or contact information for future use.

Lead magnets can look like a free guide, an ebook, a customizable template, an actionable checklist to help them solve a pain point, etc. We’ll dive more into formatting your lead magnet later on, but you get the point.

Lead magnets are powerful because it is the first step in identifying a lead in your lead generation process. These leads will see your resource and raise their hand from a place of interest!

The power in these resources should not be underestimated, but I won’t say I’m shocked when I see so many people skip the foundational steps – which is why I see so many scenarios play out like this….

You have created your lead magnet, hit publish and you’re excited to finally start “email marketing” for your business and then…crickets.

No one joins your email list.  

If this has happened to you, don’t panic!

It happens to the best of us. Through my own business journey, I’ve had many lead magnet mistakes and failures (aka business lessons) and I want to share with you what I’ve learned.

Instead of staying on the struggle bus, let’s dive into looking at some common lead magnet mistakes you could be making with your lead magnet and actions you can take.

Here Are 3 Lead Magnet Mistakes to Avoid With Your Lead Magnet:

Mistake #1 – You skip doing market research

The number one reason lead magnets fail is because you didn’t put in enough time to validate the idea is actually wanted by your audience.

Understanding what your audience wants from you is not only relevant from the email marketing side but pretty much across your entire business: offer development, content development, etc.

So how do you actually validate a lead magnet idea? Try this…

1. Pop on Instagram or Facebook stories and host a “mini-training” for the topic that you’ve picked for your lead magnet.
2. Add some polls, knowledge Qs, and other engagement pieces…and WATCH how your audience responds.

Mistake #2 – You go BASIC with your format…

OOOH, yep those checklists and single-page PDFs are pretttty basic when it comes to lead magnets.

Let’s take a second to pour one out to all those downloaded PDFs and checklists you have sitting in your downloads folder and never looked at…

Creating a lead magnet that is going to be deleted as soon as they open it is NOT THE VIBE.

You need to understand HOW your ideal client consumes information. Take the time to know what format of information is valuable for them.

Remember, you’re building trust here.

Spend some time and really think about what format will deliver the BEST experience to your ICA.

Mistake #3 – You’re quite literally NOT talking about your lead magnet.

So you’ve created a lead magnet and you LOVE it, but your email list is not growing… My guess is your audience has NO clue you even have a lead magnet. You gotta talk about it.

So try this instead, every single content piece – deliver 2 CTAs: one soft and one hard.

Determine if your lead magnet is going to be your Hard CTA and then your offers are your soft CTA.

**ATTN** Everyone’s audiences are different. They respond and behave completely unique. So again, you have to test what works FOR YOU.

Here’s an example of a HARD CTA (lead magnet) + SOFT CTA (services):

“Email marketing is MORE than just a newsletter about your week or your month.

Do yourself a favor and go grab my Email Strategy Guide. See what the 3 steps for a high converting email list really are!

Or if you’re itching to get an expert in your email marketing, grab some time on my calendar, and let’s chat! Your email list is begging ya!

This strategy can be used in EVERY single content piece, IG story, etc.

You gotta talk about your free resources friends, it’s the only way your ICA is gonna know they exist!

To close this out, I want to invite you to grab my free resource – The Email Strategy Guide. This is where I’ll show you the 3 steps to take for a high-converting email list.

See what I did there…

No matter where you are in your email marketing journey, Gal can help guide the way with a variety of email marketing services.

Gal is a boutique email marketing agency that delivers email strategy, email campaign management, and email audits.

Check out Gal Marketing’s services today – ranging from one-off strategy intensives to full marketing takeovers.