Lead Nurturing: How to Engage and Nurture Readers of Your Lead Magnets

Lead nurturing is so tricky, isn’t it?

After all, it’s relatively easy to get someone onto the email list. But how do you engage them, and ensure that they move deeper into your sales funnel?

That’s exactly what I’m going to help you with today.

I’ll show you what types of calls to action to create within your lead magnets to nurture your leads and move them deeper into your funnel.

Intrigued? Let’s take it from the top then.

The Biggest Misconception Regarding Lead Magnets Is…

…that they sell.

Some companies believe someone who reads their eBook or checklist will rush to hire them or buy their products.

If only…

(And sure, it does happen for some people. But let’s face it, the majority of us need to nurture our leads until they’ become sales-ready.)

However, if the purpose of your lead magnet isn’t to sell, then, what is it?

First, eBooks or content upgrades help you get someone on your list. By offering exclusive, relevant advice, you can entice a person to sign up, and begin to build a business relationship with you.

And then, you can use the same lead magnets to move those people to the next step of your sales funnel.

I’ve talked a lot about converting visitors into the email list here on Beacon (for example, here, here, and here.)

So, in this post, I want to show you how to use lead magnets to move someone further on the path to purchase.

But first, before you start building calls to action (CTAs) to include in the lead magnet, you need to identify all steps in the sales process.

Because you see:

Your lead magnet CTA should correspond with the goal you want leads to complete, and suggest the next action you want them to take after reading the eBook.

Typically, there are three main goals lead magnets could help you achieve:

1. Build your authority. You could use an eBook, whitepaper or any other publication to establish yourself as a thought-leader in your industry.
2. Brand awareness. You may also want to position your product as the best solution for a specific problem and entice leads to learning more about it.
3. Prequalify leads. Your lead magnet could also help establish which leads are ready to talk to your sales. But, to be honest, this goal works only for companies with relatively short sales cycle.

Naturally, you could aim to achieve more than one of those goals.

Nonetheless, to do that, you need to know what calls to action work best for each of them.

So, here they are.

Goal # 1: Building Authority

Call to Action to Use: Create a personal bio page with links to your website, as well as your contact details, and a call to action enticing a person to get in touch.

You know:

When you’re aiming to position yourself as an expert or industry authority, then pushing your audience to learn more about your product will have no effect.

In fact, it might actually deter from seeing you as an authority.

And so, you should focus on showcasing your knowledge, and share more of your insights.

Here are a couple of ways to do it:

A.) Create a bio page that highlights your achievements, and convinces someone that they should listen to your advice.

Here’s how my friend, Calin Yablonski from Inbound Interactive does it in his eBook:

Notice that instead of promoting his business, Calin invites readers to reach out to him personally, in case if they have any questions regarding the information he shared in the eBook.

B.) Point readers to other resources

True:

Some eBooks have more than a single author. Hell, many companies create them to position the business, rather than an individual, as the leader in their space.

And obviously, in such situation, there might be no one to put on the author page.

So the alternative is to include a page promoting another lead magnet, one that offers a reader more information about their problem, and also, pre-qualifies them as someone deeper in the buying cycle.

C.) Ask Your Audience to Share and Promote the eBook

Finally, if you’re not comfortable with promoting yourself, and you don’t have any other materials to suggest to your readers, then you could entice others to comment and share your lead magnet.

Here’s how Velocity Partners do it in one of their eBooks:

Goal # 2: Raising Product or Brand Awareness

Call to Action to Use: Create a product overview page allowing a person to find out more about your solution, and take them to your home page.

I’m sure you’ve noticed it too:

Often, readers grab lead magnets without any consideration about the company that produced them.

They land on a blog post promising to solve their immediate pain, notice an engaging call to action, and snatch the eBook or checklist without thinking.

And there is nothing wrong with such behavior, of course. In fact, the more of your readers act on impulse, the greater the chance for your list to grow faster.

But I’m sure you’ll agree – it’s hardly ideal when you’re using content to increase the awareness of your brand.

In this case, you want as many people to learn about your product.

And luckily, there’s a way to do that from within your lead magnet.

How? By creating a product overview call to action that entices readers to go to your homepage.

Here, let me show you an example:

The company behind this eBook understands what pain points their product helps to overcome. And they use the last page of their eBook to entice any readers who experience that problem to check out their solution.

Goal #3: Prequalifying Leads

Call to Action to Use: Suggest another lead magnet that only someone at the deeper stage of the buying cycle would be interested in.

I’m sure you know this already:

Most leads aren’t ready to talk to sales. In fact, the whole goal of lead nurturing is to slowly move them deeper into the sales funnel, until they’re sales-ready.

But here’s the catch – how do you know that someone’s at the stage where you could engage with them, and try to initiate the sale?

As it turns out, the solution is actually quite simple.

You just need to present your leads with another lead magnet, be it an eBook, webinar invitation or offer of free consultation, that would interest only sales-ready leads. And so, by downloading it, a person would pre-qualify themselves as ready to talk business.

For example, GMS Live Expert invite their leads to a webinar:

Impact agency, on the other hand, offers a free assessment:

With these calls to action, both companies aim to identify anyone on their list who has begun to consider hiring theirs or similar solutions and engage them on a sales-ready level.