114: Building a Lead Magnet Funnel

Building your audience and your list can be one of the biggest pain points in starting and growing your business. But what if you knew how to bring continuous new leads into your business every single month? On this episode, I'm walking you through what you need to build out a lead magnet funnel. Come join me.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Welcome back to the LauncherBox podcast. Today we're talking about building a lead magnet funnel. Now this entire quarter we've been focused on traffic and leads inside my membership LauncherBox, and during one of the training sessions I was showing them one of my lead magnet pages and then walking them through the funnel, and it led to more questions and more questions. So I thought it would be a great topic to talk about on the podcast today. Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you don't know what a lead magnet is, you don't know what a funnel is, I'm going to break it all down for you so that you can understand. All right, so a lead magnet is something that attracts someone to your website, to your business, to your offer. Okay. So it's something out there that gets someone's attention and they click on it and they're coming over to your website to check it out. A lot of times it's a freebie. A lot of times it could be a low-dollar offer. So we call that a lead magnet. We want to bring in new leads to our business with this offer that's going to attract people. And so you can do that in a lot, a lot of different ways. You can do that with like a free tutorial or a discount or a free gift or a checklist or a PDF or anything that you can think of can be your lead magnet, your freebie offer. A lead magnet can also be— I, I call them an SLO if they're a paid offer. So a self-liquidating offer. And that just means like it's a low-dollar offer. So that could be a $10 offer, that could be a $15 offer. It's just a low-dollar offer that you are attracting new leads into your business for. So you can do a freebie or you can do a paid. Okay. And so when we talk about a sales funnel, it, it's literally the picture of a funnel. Okay. So it's how someone comes into the top of our business. That's the biggest pool of people. That's the widest part of the funnel and how we bring them through our business with different offers. And at the end of the funnel, that's our backend offer, that's our recurring offer. So our subscription or membership, whatever that is. So we're just pulling them through a sales funnel with a lead magnet. And so that's what we're going to walk through today. Now, a few weeks ago on episode 112 of this podcast, I told you about how I built my second business from scratch to over $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue with 3 lead magnets, and they all had this sales funnel attached to them. So that's why I want to break this down. If you go back and listen to that, you're going to see how I came up with the lead magnets for my business and how I use them to drive traffic and ultimately created over $100,000 in recurring revenue to my business. With that traffic. All right. It's, it's important because a lot of times we start from scratch. A lot of you listening right now are starting from scratch, and that's the same way that I did when I started my second business. I had to start from scratch because it was a new audience. I had to get new social media. It was a whole new offer for a different type of person than my retail business. And so when you can put a lead magnet in front of people that could potentially be your audience, it just helps you grow quicker and faster. You're pulling them into your business with value. Okay, so I'm going to break it down for you so that you can listen and understand and figure out how you can create a lead magnet funnel for your own business and really help the growth, really stimulate the growth of your subscription box business. So let's, let's break it down. So the top of the funnel, that's the widest part of the funnel. That's the most people that you're going to have. This is the freebie, or it can be that low-dollar offer, like a $10 offer. Like I talked about in that episode, you can see that I use both a low-dollar offer and a freebie for my lead magnet for building that business. And so That is the offer. So whatever that is, that's your freebie or your low-dollar lead magnet, okay? And so you create this asset for yourself. Right now I have one for my subscription box business and it's just a free monogram. So that's my freebie, that's my lead magnet. If you love monograms, come over, I'm gonna give you a free monogram. You've gotta purchase something for me to put that on, but I'm gonna give it to you for free. So I'm attracting new leads to my business with a free monogram offer. Okay. And so the goal is that you're going to put ads out there in Facebook or Instagram or whatever platform you're using, going to cold and warm traffic to targeted interests that will bring people back. And this is going to be the largest part of your funnel. The goal here is to collect as many leads as we can. And we want to make sure our lead magnet is really niched down so that we're not wasting our money on getting unqualified leads. Okay, so I just told you, like, my free offer is a free monogram. Okay, my subscription box is called the Monogram Box. If they like monograms and they are attracted by this offer of a free monogram, they're probably gonna like my subscription box. And that's the goal. Someone that doesn't like monograms, they're not going to go opt in for a free monogram on something, okay? They don't like monograms. And, and there, there are weird people like that out here, but I'm just— I'm not judging, but I'm just saying, make your offer clear to your business. For my coaching business, for Launch Your Box, that first lead magnet that I used to grow the business when I had like zero followers was my subscription box blueprint ebook. And so it was very clear that it was for somebody that wanted to start a subscription box. That was my ideal customer. That's who I was trying to attract. Same with this free monogram offer. It's someone who likes monograms, someone who is interested and possibly could be a subscriber of my monogram box. Okay, so that's what I want you to think about. You're going to start this relationship with a free offer of value or a low-dollar offer of value, something that they want. Not all freebies are great lead magnets. Not all low-dollar offers are great lead magnets. And sometimes we have to test a few to figure out exactly what our, our people want or exactly what's going to convert into being a subscriber. So I want you to think of this as like just a big experiment, just a big test of what can I do that would attract my perfect person. Okay, you can see in that episode 112, I did 3 different lead magnets over a year. They all worked, and I use all of them still. So once you get a solid offer, you can still create new offers to attract even more people, and you can run them all at the same time if they're attracting qualified leads. And I run all 3 of mine all the time too, and I get a lot of qualified leads that way. Okay, so now what we— what they do when they come to our website, they're going to hit a landing page and that's going to have an opt-in. Okay. And an opt-in just means that they are opting in to something. They're going to give me their email address and, and I'm going to— they're, they're saying, yes, I'm opting in to receive emails from you. They want the freebie, so that's, that's what they're there for. But now they're on our email list and we can start to email them. This is the middle of the funnel. Okay, so when we talk through the middle of the funnel, I'm going to tell you what this looks like. They come to the landing page, they see your freebie, they give you their email list, and they submit. So the freebie is the top of the funnel. When they hit submit, That goes into a thank you page, upsell page. So it's a thank you and upsell page. Now you're putting another offer in front of them. This is the middle of the funnel. So they went from getting my freebie, they wanted it, it's going to be delivered to their email box. When they hit submit on that opt-in, it takes them to a second landing page and I'm presenting another offer to them. This one is a paid offer. It's one of the most, one of the most inexpensive offers that you have in your lineup. So think about what you can offer here. And they have an opportunity to just go ahead and click buy right there on the upsell page, okay? So, and there's a thank you, hey, your freebie is coming, go check your inbox, that's on there too. But I put the upsell on top of the thank you. I don't want them to see the thank you and not scroll down and see the upsell. I want the upsell to be the first thing that they see when they click submit to their freebie. All right, the goal here is for them to make their first purchase with you. If they can make a first purchase with you, get their item, feel great about their item, they're more likely to want to subscribe and give you their money every single month. So the goal is to get them to make a first purchase, even if that's a low-dollar intro offer. All right, this purchase is now made and they have more value from you. They have more information, another tutorial, uh, an item, whatever that is in the middle of the funnel for you. That's what they're getting here. For my free monogram funnel The next, the upsell would be something they can put the free monogram on. So it could be a bag, it could be a cup, it could be a pullover, it could be any of the things that I monogram in my shop. A one-time low-dollar offer. Here, use your free, use your free monogram on this particular item. Now I have revenue. Now I've generated a sale. Now they can use their freebie and they feel good about that. And they have an opportunity to get something from me and, and judge their experience on that. Was I quick? Did it ship fast? Did they receive it? Was it good quality? Did they love their monogram? That's their first impression of me when they get their first product. So I want to get that out super fast. I want to make sure it looks amazing because this is a potential first impression for them to becoming a monogram box subscriber. Okay, and so from this stage, it's about getting them to your main offer, and our main offer is recurring revenue product, and that can be our subscription or if we have a membership. So either way, we want to get them into an offer that we receive recurring revenue from, and the next part of this comes in the form of email automation. And that can be as easy or as complicated as you'd like it to be. Okay. So the simple way to set up the email flow, everyone that opts in to the freebie gets the same sequence, whether they bought the, the low-dollar offer on the upsell or not. That's the simple way. All roads lead to them becoming a subscriber. So that's the simple way to do this automation. Everybody gets the same email. Okay, a more detailed way to set up this automation would be to set up two different email sequences. You could create one sequence for people that got the freebie but didn't purchase the upsell, and you can set up another sequence for people that got the freebie and the upsell, and they can go through those different automations separately. And it's just a language change, like Hey, I saw you got our freebie. Would you like to buy something to put the freebie on? In my case, that's, would you like to buy the bag to put your free monogram on? Here's the bag. So this can go in two different ways, or you can just make it simple and send everybody through that same email automation. And for simplicity on this podcast, I'm going to walk you through a couple different sequences that you could do that you could send to everyone. Okay. But once you do this once, you're going to understand what this looks like a little bit better, and then you can do a more detailed way later. What I don't want you to do is to think that this is so complicated that it's going to take a lot of time to set up. And that's why I talked to you about a simple way. Okay? We can just get things set up and rolling. We can always come back and tweak it. We can always come back and make it better. But if we overthink every step of this process, we're never actually going to get anything going. And then we're going to look back in 3 months and be like, I never set up my lead magnet funnel. I never even built my landing page. I don't even have any new leads before I launch. And I don't want that for you. I want you to be able to just get it going and then we can update it and tweak it and make it better along the way. Okay. So for simplicity, Let's assume that we're going to send everybody the same email sequence and let's just send them 3 emails. That is the easiest way to do it. That's the best way to get this started. 3 emails, knock them out, get them set up, and you're locked and loaded and you can start generating traffic and generating new leads from this lead magnet. So let's talk through that. 3 emails. Email number 1, I'm going to tell you what to put in so you don't even have to overthink this. Email number 1, deliver the freebie and introduce your box. So all you have to do, grab a picture of your freebie that you've been using to post on social media or run ads, put that in the email, put a link where they can go download it. And then below that, I want you to introduce your subscription box to them. Hey, did you know about the Monogram Box? Let me tell you all about it. Right there, email number 1. Email number 2, I want you to remind them that the download is here. Remind them not to forget to download their freebie. And then I want you to share your why in the second email. I'm Sarah. This is why I started the Monogram Box. There needs to be a picture of me in that email so that I can build a connection with people, and they need to understand why We started our subscription box in the beginning, and that's really important. That's going to create that know, like, and trust factor that I always talk about. Email number 3, this one needs to be all about the box. So I want you to share some pictures of past boxes. I want you to share some social proof that you have from testimonials, reviews, comments on your pages. That's an email sequence. And that call to action on email number 3 is to Join the subscription. You can even put the link in all 3 of these emails. Deliver the freebie, introduce your box, call to action, join now. Email number 2, remind them to download the freebie. There's the link. Share your why. Join now. Email number 3, here's about the box. Join now. So all 3 of these could have the call to action to join your subscription. They don't have to. The last one could be the only one that has the call to action. but I, I put it in all of them. I want to take every opportunity. If they're going to open that email, I want to make sure that they see my offer and have an opportunity to join. So that's a simple 3-email sequence for everyone that opts into your lead magnet. Now, if you wanted to take it a little bit further, um, I've put together a little 5-email sequence that you can do. So just taking those 3 emails, we're going to spread them into 5 and get a little bit more in depth. So this one's super easy too. Let's talk through it just a minute. So email number 1 on the 5-email sequence is deliver the freebie and introduce your box. Same one we did in the 3-email sequence. Email number 2 would be to remind them to download the freebie and share an item in your shop. It could be from a past box. It could be similar to what comes in boxes. Put us— put a low-dollar offer in front of them before we put the box offer in front of them. Okay, that could be a t-shirt, that could be a bag, that could be whatever. That could be, hey, remind them that they need to use their freebie and here's something that they could put it on. I'm reminding them they could use their free monogram, here's something they could put it on. Okay, easy. If you didn't have, uh, something like that, you could totally offer them a past box. Want to try out The monogram box, I always have a few extra every single month. I could put it, I could put one in there until I sell out of it, and then I could swap it out for something else I have extra. Want to try out the monogram box for one month? Grab our, one of our spring boxes here, and you could put a link in there where they could get a one-time box. Make sure that that one-time box product price is higher than your subscription price. So they see the value of your subscription. Email number 3, here's where you want to introduce yourself and your why behind the box. Email number 4 is pictures of your past boxes, like a gallery and social proof. They want to see how customers feel, how your subscribers feel when they receive your boxes. We want to share a feeling in that email. And then email number 5 is just a roundup of all those emails and a call to action. Or you could add a bonus offer. Join now and get this freebie in your first box. You could put that right there too. Okay, don't overthink this too much. That's why I love like the 3-email sequence. It's simple. You don't have to overthink it. You can put it together. And then if you want to build on that sequence later, you can. These are two examples, okay? And so at any point in these email flows, whether it's the 3 or the 5 or whatever, if they subscribe to your box, then you want to stop the flow. So there needs to be a trigger that once they've signed up for a subscription, that the email flow ends. So that's just a split that you can do inside Klaviyo, um, so that if they purchase it stops this email flow. Okay, they will continue to be nurtured with your weekly email campaigns. If you're consistent with that, they're going to still receive emails from you. It's just going to be different content because now they're a subscriber, they're a box subscriber. Okay, so that's the funnel. It's literally the funnel. It's the lead magnet, it's the landing pages and the email sequence. That's the funnel. All we have to do, we're going to take people through that funnel from lead magnet to first purchase to becoming a subscriber. It's a very simple step. You can make it more detailed if you want to, but I don't want you to. I want you to make it simple for you to get going. I want you to make it simple for your leads to go through. Okay. And so I've created just a 5-piece lead magnet funnel asset checklist. These are the 5 pieces that you're going to have to put together when you start working on your lead magnet funnel. Okay. So number 1, create the lead magnet, make sure it's juicy, make sure it has value, make sure it's something people want. And that it is niched down to attract the right person. Number 1, create the lead magnet. Number 2, I want you to create some images for social media and ads. So, um, whatever that lead magnet is, we need to create some images so that we can share what the lead magnet is in our social posts and get people to come over to our website for it. Number 3, we're going to create 2 landing pages. On our website. One is our opt-in page and one is our thank you upsell page. Okay, create two landing pages. We just went through a training on this inside Launch Your Box as well, how to create simple landing pages. So there's more information in there. Number 4, you're going to create an embed form for the opt-in and you're going to do that in your email CRM. And we teach you how to do that with Klaviyo. That's our preferred platform inside LauncherBox, but you just need to create that little form that you can put on your landing page so that you can capture the, the leads from people opting in, and that will go onto an email list for you in your email CRM. And then number 5, you're going to write your emails and set up your flows, your automations. 1, create the lead magnet. 2, create the images. 3, create the landing pages. 4, create the opt-in form. And 5, write your emails and set up the automations. That's it. It's about having those 5 pieces. And once you build out one lead magnet sales funnel like this, you can just duplicate it and do it again for another one. And that's how you start to build your assets to grow your business. You heard me in episode 112 say I started with one lead magnet. It was my ebook, and I ran that for months and months, and it kept driving leads to my business. And that's how I got my first 100 members. And then I tried a freebie lead magnet funnel, and that was my cheat sheet. And I talked to you about that, and that got a lot more opt-ins because it was a freebie. Okay, and then Later on in that year, several months later, I did one more lead magnet funnel, which was my coaching week. And you heard how that drove members, recurring revenue every single month. So once you have a solid lead magnet funnel like this, it's then time to develop an ad strategy to get in front of your ideal customer more and more and more. But I don't want you spending money on ads if you don't have the complete funnel. We don't want to just put a lead magnet out there and let people opt in when we don't have a solid funnel. We're not— we're wasting our money doing that. We're going to convert more people. You're going to have conversions along the way through that funnel. And ultimately the goal is to convert as many as we can to being our customers. Are recurring customers. And so I want you to get your funnel set up and then start running ads, because that's how you optimize how many leads that you're getting and really how well you're going to convert them to membership. All right, I hope this helps. It— don't overcomplicate it, make it super simple, and you're going to be on your way to generating a ton of leads in your business month after month. If the idea of creating a subscription box is swirling around in your head, I encourage you to head over to launchyourboxwithsarah.com, get on our waitlist, and grab some of our free downloads to help you get started. That's launchyourboxwithsarah.com.