92: How to Create a Lead Magnet for Cold Email

A 4-step guide, results & examples

Picture of the Week: the sky, at night.

Read on jed.substack.com

Read time: 5min

Welcome back to The Practical Prospecting Newsletter! Today I’m sharing the drastic impact lead magnets can have on cold email campaigns + how to create your own.

Agenda:

• The Impact of Lead Magnets

• How to Create a Lead Magnet (w/ a video walkthrough)

• Packaging the Lead Magnet & Follow-Up

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Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Hubspot! They’re giving away 30 practical follow-up email templates.

Speaking from experience – emails can take up too much of the workday.

So HubSpot eliminated the guesswork from just about every follow-up scenario you can think of — like cold outbound, reaching out after interviews, networking events, sales meetings, and more.

Grab the templates for yourself here:

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The Impact of Lead Magnets

I regularly speak with some of the best cold emailers in the game. I exchange ideas, receive feedback, and review their campaigns for inspiration.

I also run about 10+ client campaigns myself.

Across all of this, there’s one trend I see the most in successful campaigns: lead magnets.

By lead magnet, I mean packaging your company’s domain expertise into a value-add resource and using that as the call to action of your cold emails.

It works because it follows a fundamental rule of copywriting: make it as easy as possible for the prospect to say yes. 

And a resource is much easier to say yes to than a meeting (especially if it helps solve a real problem).

Lead magnets are a timeless strategy in B2C marketing for warming up potential leads. We’ve all downloaded a lead magnet at one time or another. Maybe you even downloaded the one from Hubspot above :)

In fact, they’ve been the #1 source of growth for this newsletter.

So it’s no wonder this strategy works in B2B cold email.

We all know cold email is harder than ever right now. Our buyers are bombarded and their trust in strangers is at an all-time low.

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to earning trust.

But your best shot at doing so right now (and standing out from everyone else) is to not even ask for their time. Instead, provide them with something genuinely helpful (i.e. a lead magnet).

Here are some recent examples of lead magnets I’ve seen work well (not mentioning the company names for privacy):

• Content Agency: Their lead magnet is a free outline of how the prospect could repurpose their content on other channels.

• Managed Service Provider: Their lead magnet is a detailed report of overlooked cybersecurity gaps and how to fix them.

• Staffing Agency: Their lead magnet is a list of highly vetted candidate profiles based on the company’s job description.

• Community Software Platform: Their lead magnet is a personalized video sharing tips on how the prospect could further monetize their brand via an online community.

Ultimately, if your reply rates aren’t where you want them to be, I highly recommend replacing your CTA with a lead magnet.

I’ve literally never seen them not improve reply rates.

At this point, I don’t even work with clients who aren’t open to the idea of including one in their emails.

Here’s how to create your own…

Side note: The only downside to including a lead magnet CTA in your email is you need an air-tight follow-up process to convert those replies into opportunities. But it’s easier than it seems (more on that later).

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How to Create a Lead Magnet

Watch this video to hear me explain the process in more depth:

Download the exercise spreadsheet here.

Step 1: Make a list of your prospect’s desires

A great lead magnet starts with knowing what your customers truly want.

Make a list of every end goal that your prospects hope to achieve when buying your product or service.

Let’s use the company Zapier as an example. If you aren’t familiar with Zapier, it’s a tool that lets you connect two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks without coding or relying on developers to build the integration.

For Zapier, their prospect’s desires are:

• Automate repetitive tasks

• Integrate disparate systems

• Improve team productivity

• Scale operations w/o increasing headcount

Step 2: List every obstacle in their way of achieving those desires

Zapier Example:

• Manual data entry

• No native integration between tools

• Difficulty scaling operations efficiently

• Too many tools/processes & don't know where to start

Step 3: List every way you can help them achieve those goals (i.e. lead magnet ideas)

Zapier Example:

• Send a list of all the common manual and repetitive tasks for that persona and how they can automate each one.

• Find the company’s tech stack and send a list of use cases for how to be more productive via automation with each one

• Give free access to Zapier for a limited number of automation (which they already do)

• Offer a free consultation call to set up these integrations for them so they can try it out for a month

• Send a list of free productivity tools and Chrome extensions that their team can use

Step 4: Rank them in terms of scalability & value

Not all lead magnets are created equal.

The ultimate lead magnet would be giving your product or service away for free and doing all the onboarding and set-up for them.

But of course, that isn’t scalable :)

So you need to rank each potential lead magnet in terms of which one has the highest scalability while also providing enough value (as shown in the video above). Then, go build it.

Side Note: Sometimes low scalability / high-value lead magnets are actually scalable. For example, let’s say your lead magnet idea is to send a personalized video on your prospect can improve [insert process]. Instead of pre-recording those videos and sending them to everyone, try asking them “Would you like me to send the video?”. That way, you don’t have to record it until they respond.

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Packaging the Lead Magnet & Follow-Up

As you’ve seen from the examples above, lead magnets can come in many forms.

For example:

• A video

• A free trial

• A consultation

• A simple Google Doc

• A branded marketing resource

• A resource from another company

• A digital sales room (here’s an example of mine)

The list goes on…

Don’t worry about the delivery of your lead magnet or how it looks. Instead, focus on providing real value in a scalable way (as shown in the exercise video).

Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, if you use lead magnets you’re going to get a lot more replies — the money is in the follow-up.

If you’re sending lead magnets via hyperlinks, be sure to enable click tracking so you can email/call/LinkedIn message the people who clicked the link.

If you’re sending a lead magnet that requires them to respond to receive it, make sure you give them a reason to take a call after sending it to them. My go-to usually looks like this: “I have some more ideas on how we can help you with [insert process] based on similar customers we’ve worked with. Would you be open to a casual conversation to learn more?”

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This process for creating lead magnets follows Alex Hormozi’s model of creating irresistible offers. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend taking his free course.

Thanks for reading,

Jed