Here’s How I’m Using Lead Magnets To Grow My SaaS Company

I’ve been using lead magnets a lot recently. In fact, most of you probably ended up on this newsletter list from a lead magnet (reminder, if you want to unsubscribe, just click link at bottom).

Lead magnets are a great way to provide value to people in exchange for their email. A lot of value for a little bit of an ask.

What’s a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a marketing tool that generates leads by offering a long-form resource in exchange for a prospect's contact information, usually just an email address. Lead magnets can take the form of ebooks, whitepapers, templates, and similar downloadable assets.

HubSpot has a great article that talks all about lead magnets - What’s a Lead Magnet? 20 Lead Magnet Ideas and Examples.

Why am I using lead magnets?

Right now we’re still heads down building the ShareWillow product.

I want to build our email list, talk to potential customers, and provide value to people that are interested in profit sharing.

Lead magnets are a great way to do this.

Here’s what I’m doing

First, I created a Google sheet of a profit sharing plan. I built a couple different scenarios and have a tab for each of them.

Then I created a PDF “guide” using canva to explain how the spreadsheet works.

The full guide is 7 pages. You can check out the flow by entering your email here (this won’t subscribe you anywhere else, I created this lead magnet in this newsletter so you won’t be added to main sharewillow email list.. i gotchuu)

This is valuable to someone that wants to create a profit sharing plan (our target customer!) because there’s not a lot of templates or examples out there that show actual profit sharing plan calculations, along with an editable spreadsheet. VALUE!

Okay so now I needed a way to get people to download my lead magnet. Alas, twitter!

I created some ads on twitter that linked to a super simple landing page.

Here’s the ads:

The only thing I’m really testing within the ads is the image.

In Ad #1 above, my hero text is “Get the top-rated profit sharing template” along with a picture of me and some graphic that shows the distribution of company profits.

Ad #2 has an image of the guide with hero text “Employees are 40% more productive with profit sharing”. This stat comes from a case study so it’s not bullshit (or at least not 100% bullshit).

Ad #2 is actually outperforming ad #1. Ad #2 has a 0.14% link click rate and $0.95 cost per click. Ad #1 has a 0.12% link click rate and $1.06 cost per click.

I’m sending all the clicks to the following landing page (link here):

When they submit their email, I’m automatically sending them an email (using beehiiv automations) with the link to the guide.

Here’s the email:

24 hours after they submit their email, I send a follow up email.

I created a new user in google workspace named “Allen Carter” and the email comes from Allen. I didn’t want to risk my primary email getting flagged for spam so I just created a new user and forward all replies to Allen to my inbox.

Here’s the follow up email from “Allen”:

The CTA on this email is a loom video. I didn’t want to include any links and I wanted to make the ask super lightweight. Asking for a demo or something right now feels premature.

We’re starting to get good responses to this:

I get pumped anytime someone responds to this email.

I mean if you submitted your email to the lead magnet, got the first email with the template, got the welcome email for the newsletter, and now replied to this email one day later, I HAVE to assume that you’re a qualified lead. Right? Right?!

Okay, here’s the results so far.

I’m keeping track of how we’re able to move these leads down funnel from lead to qualified lead to demo to paying customer. I’ll share another post with full funnel metrics.

We’ve recently sold 2 people a “plan design package” for $1k each. So we’ve already recouped $2k of the $6,206 spend. And that’s before any paying customer subscription revenue (which I think will be significant).

Bonus

Most people on this email list came in through either the VC Funds lead magnet or the Fundraising Process lead magnet. So I want to share how those campaigns are doing as well.

Here’s the results from those 2 lead magnet campaigns:

uh wut… ya the lead magnet for the list of VC funds is acquiring new subscribers for $2.20… which is crazy low.

My hunch is that these people aren’t very “good” subscribers and don’t care that much about my little newsletter updates. But we’ll see!

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