50% Conversion Rate! 7 Steps to Create A Free E-Book Lead Magnet
Whether you are working in the B2B or B2C industry, lead magnets such as E-book, whitepaper or webinar are the go-to method of collecting contact information from visitors and generating leads in the process. MORE Digital had also published our own free E-book at the end of last year. In this article, we will share our thinking process, workflow, tools used, and outcome of the whole project.
Why we make an E-book?
Not long after we had launched our official blog, we have noticed that the conversion rate of our content is quite low. Despite setting up multiple widgets on our website to collect emails, our email list is still growing slowly. That’s when we have decided to try and create an E-book as a lead magnet to increase our conversion rate.
Paid or free?
In the beginning, we are wondering whether we should give out the E-book for free, or to publish the E-book on Amazon Kindle. After receiving feedback from Ivan So, we found out that the paid model of Amazon Kindle is not aligned with our ultimate goal of lead generation.
Although publishing the book on Amazon Kindle would earn us passive income, our top priority at that point of time is to grow our email list and to publish a paid book for collecting emails is probably a useless endeavor.
Content planning
It was clear from the statistics of our blog posts, that our audience loved to read content related to Instagram marketing. Additionally, our blog posts didn’t have a clear structure about Instagram marketing, and writing the E-book would a good way to sort out our content.
To keep things fresh, we have added some exclusive content inside the E-book, so that our reader base will still want to get a copy of the E-book.
Our investment
To make sure everyone who had downloaded the E-book will have a delightful surprise, we are creating the free E-book as if it was a paid one. Besides paying extra attention to the content of the E-book, we had also outsourced the design process to seasoned freelancers.
Of course, you don’t have to do it the way that we did it. You might not want to outsource the design process if the lead magnet is simple. Also, quality is of the utmost importance when we are talking about a lead magnet. It’s unnecessary to create a 60-page E-Book like us, if a 10-page workbook will do the job equally well. Focus on the value of the lead magnet, not its scale.
Distribution
Creating a distribution channel that is simple and straightforward is extremely important when we are trying to grow our email list with the lead magnet.
Since our website is created with WordPress, using plugins to make our landing page would be a great idea. For that, we had chosen MailMunch to do the job.
The Landing Page can be broken down into 2 parts. The first part includes the features and selling points of our E-book. The second part is a subscription form to collect email addresses from our visitors in exchange for the E-book.
Those who had submitted the form would be redirected to our Thank You page. The Thank You page was used to inform subscribers how long they should expect for the delivery of the E-book, and how should they contact us if the E-book is not delivered.
In the meantime, an email will be sent to subscribers to the email addresses that they had filled in. In the email, they will find the download link of our E-book.
By embedding the download link in the email instead of the Thank You page, we can safely assume that all email addresses submitted were valid, as users cannot get the E-book using fake email addresses.
In addition, we had labelled all subscribers who had downloaded our E-book on MailChimp for better segmentation. From the screenshot, you can see that users who had downloaded the E-book were labelled with “IGEbook”. This allows us to create personalized content for these subscribers in the future.
Promotion
It’s one thing to create a lead magnet; it’s another to create a lead magnet with tons of downloads.
Here are some free methods that we have used for promotion:
The E-book was also sent to users in our email list. They can get the copy right away as they had subscribed to our email list already.
As for paid advertisement, we had used Facebook and Instagram to promote our above post. And we have yet to try other advertisement channels.
Outcome (As of early-February)
Our E-book was published on December 23, 2019. All traffic was coming from organic sources until January 2, 2020. Here are some of the statistics:
From January 2, 2020 onwards, we had deployed paid advertisement campaigns. Here are some of the statistics as of February 6, 2020:
Although the conversion rate had dropped a bit, the conversion rate after we had paid advertisements is still extremely high. Also, the cost per acquisition is sufficiently low (HKD $2.65). That’s why we had decided to continue using paid advertisements to promote our lead magnet.
Right now, our advertisement campaigns were targeted at Hong Kong users. We might expand the scope of our campaigns to other Chinese-speaking regions, such as Taiwan and Malaysia in the future.
If you wanted to download this E-book (currently only available in Chinese), feel free to use this link here.
For those who wanted to create their own E-books to grow their user base, but don’t know how to pull it off, no worry, we are here to help!
MORE Digital is a digital marketing agency based in Hong Kong. Our portfolio is composed of clients from a wide range of industries, such as real estate, media, SMEs, and game producers. If you had any difficulties with digital marketing, feel free to chat with us here or send an email to info@moredigital.com.hk!
