Creating a Lead Magnet

Lead magnets are all the rage these days with digital marketers. They offer an effective way to take the first step towards converting a visitor into a sale. If you aren’t familiar with the term, fortunately, the concept is extremely straight forward. 

"A lead magnet is something you offer for free in exchange for a visitors contact information (eg a lead). Most frequently a marketer will ask for a user’s email address and offer them a free pdf, white paper, or ebook."

The ultimate goal is that the free resource serves to demonstrate your expertise, insight, and value to the lead. The lead’s contact information is then used to try and further engage them and ultimately get them to make a purchase.

There are a number of high profile services dedicated specifically to enabling businesses to add lead magnet type functionality to their website. LearningCart, however, has that functionality already built right in!

The first step in building a lead magnet in LearningCart is to add a form. You can do this in the admin by going to Forms > Manage Forms > and clicking the “Add Form” button. You can use this page to configure the basics of your form. Our lead magnet will include a “Thank You Message.” This is the message the user will receive once they complete the form. You can use the HTML editor to add a welcome message here, as well as a link to download whatever free resource you are offering, like a PDF with useful information, a white paper, or "how-to" guide.

Once configured, you can add the form and associate whatever form fields you want to capture. For example, you may want to add a field for first name, last name, and email address that a user has to provide in order to submit the form and get their desired content.

Once your form is set up as desired, you can make it available to visitors on your site. You can either directly link to the form using the built-in link tool when editing a page (under Site Content > Edit Content in the Admin) or you can also embed a form directly in a page. To embed a form in an existing page, simply go to edit the page, click view source and then insert the following code wherever you would like the form to appear: [form id=X]

You can replace the X with the actual ID of the form you want to use. The form id can be found next to the form when you click Forms > Manage Forms.

Regardless of how you make your form available, you can retrieve the data submitted by going to Reports > Form Report. You may have also noticed previously when we configured our form, that we could specify an email notification list. Any email addresses you put in that field will automatically be emailed with the complete details of each submission.

Lead magnets provide a proven strategy to better sell your courses and training. We hope that by supporting them natively in LearningCart our customers have one more tool at their disposal to help them be successful.