If you’re wondering what to do after you create a lead magnet, you’re in the right place.
Maybe you spent hours writing and designing it yourself. Maybe you bought a ready-made template and customized it for your business. Or maybe you wisely handed the whole thing to someone else.
Either way, it’s done. Now what? What to do after you create a lead magnet?
Creating your lead magnet is step one. If you want it to do more than sit in your Google Drive looking pretty, you need a plan for what happens next.
People need to find it. They need a reason to hand over their email address to get it. Next it needs to arrive in their inbox. Then you need to stay in touch long enough for some of those new subscribers to eventually become paying clients.
The basic path looks like this:
PROMOTE → OPT IN → DELIVER → NURTURE → OFFER
Simple enough, right?
Until you realize that somewhere inside those five little words are landing pages, forms, emails, automations, links, tech, testing, promotion, and a bunch of other things you probably weren’t thinking about when you decided, Hey, I should make a freebie.
That’s why I created the Lead Magnet Launch Blueprint.
It gives you the full Freebie-to-Client Funnel Map, a launch checklist, a Tech Check to make sure everything works before you start sending people through it, and 25 ways to promote your lead magnet once it’s ready.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE LEAD MAGNET LAUNCH BLUEPRINT
What Does a Lead Magnet Funnel Need?
A lead magnet funnel doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need a few pieces to get someone from Ooh, I want that to getting your freebie and, ideally, becoming a client somewhere down the road.
Here’s what you need:
A Landing Page + Opt-In Form
This is where you “sell” the freebie.
Your landing page should make it clear who the lead magnet is for, what they’ll get, and why it’s worth handing over their email address to get it.
Then you need an opt-in form connected to your email service provider so you can collect those new subscribers.
A Thank-You Page
Once someone signs up, don’t leave them staring at a boring Thanks, here’s your download!
Give them a little pat on the back. They just took action to solve a problem, learn something new, or make something easier. Remind them that was a smart move and get them excited to use what they just signed up for.
Then confirm that everything worked, tell them where to find what they requested, and give them any instructions they need for what happens next.
Depending on the lead magnet, you can also give them immediate access right there on the page.
A Delivery Email
Your delivery email does exactly what the name suggests: delivers the thing you promised.
Give them the link, remind them why they wanted it, and encourage them to open, watch, read, attend, or use it.
A Nurture Sequence
This is a piece of the puzzle that a lot of business owners don’t even realize they need.
Someone downloaded your freebie. You delivered it. Mission accomplished, right?
Not quite.
What happens next is your nurture sequence, a short series of emails that keeps the conversation going after someone gets your lead magnet.
You can share more useful information, help them get more from what they downloaded, introduce them to your business, and show them how you can help with the bigger problem that brought them to you in the first place.
Without that follow-up email marketing sequence, you’ve collected an email address, delivered the goods…and then left your brand-new subscriber wandering off into the wilderness.
An Offer or Call to Action
At some point, you need to give subscribers somewhere to go next.
That might be booking an appointment, scheduling a call, buying a product, joining a program, registering for something else, or taking whatever next step makes sense for your business (and for them).
Otherwise, you’ve built a lovely system for collecting email addresses without giving those people a way to become clients.
A Plan to Promote It
And finally, people have to know your lead magnet exists.
One Instagram post and a link buried somewhere on your website probably aren’t going to cut it.
A good lead magnet can keep working for you for months or even years, so think beyond launch day. Your website, blog posts, Google Business Profile, email signature, YouTube videos, social media, referral partners, presentations, and even printed materials can all send new people into the same funnel.
Once you’ve got these pieces in place, your lead magnet can finally get to work bringing new people into your business and moving them toward becoming clients.
How Can Health, Wellness & Beauty Businesses Use Lead Magnets to Get Clients?
A good lead magnet gives someone a small taste of the help you provide before they’re ready to book an appointment or spend money with you.
The trick is making sure the free resource attracts people who might actually need your paid offers.
For example, a dietitian who offers nutrition counseling for women taking GLP-1 medications might create a guide to getting enough protein when their appetite is low. Someone searching for that information is dealing with the exact problem the dietitian helps solve.
A functional or integrative health practitioner might offer a webinar about understanding common thyroid lab results, then give attendees the option to learn more about their thyroid services.
An esthetician who specializes in acne could offer a guide to the most common mistakes people make when treating adult acne at home. That guide isn’t attracting people who enjoy skincare. It’s attracting people actively looking for help with a specific problem the esthetician treats every day.
The same idea works for any specialty or niche:
- Sports dietitian → pre- and post-workout fueling guide
- Diabetes nutritionist → blood sugar-friendly meal planning checklist
- Pelvic-floor therapist or health practitioner → bladder health workshop
- Med spa → beginner’s guide to cosmetic injectables
- Esthetician → hyperpigmentation guide
- Massage therapist → desk worker’s guide to neck and shoulder tension
A lead magnet is only valuable to your business if the people downloading it are people you want to work with.
If you sell acne treatments, 75 local people struggling with acne are worth a whole lot more to your business than 2,000 people who wanted your recipe for homemade lip balm, especially when half of them live 2,000 miles away and couldn’t book an appointment with you if they wanted to.
Choose a problem your ideal client already wants help with, give them something genuinely useful, and make sure there’s a natural next step from the free help to the service you sell.
How Do You Set Up and Test Your Lead Magnet Funnel?
Once you’ve figured out what to do after you create a lead magnet, it’s time to make sure all those pieces work together.
The basic 5-step tech flow usually looks something like this:
- Opt-in form
- Email service provider
- Delivery email
- Nurture sequence
- Offer
Someone fills out your form, their information gets added to your email platform, and the correct automation kicks in. They get the lead magnet you promised, receive your follow-up emails, and eventually have an opportunity to take the next step with your business.
At least, that’s what is supposed to happen.
Before you start promoting your lead magnet, go through the entire funnel yourself exactly as a new subscriber would.
Fill out the form. Check that you landed on the right confirmation page. Make sure the delivery email shows up and the link works. Check that any tags, lists, or segments are applied correctly and that your nurture sequence starts when it should.
Then keep going.
Open every email. Click every link. Check the pages on your phone. Make sure your booking links and offers go where they’re supposed to go.
Technology has a funny habit of working beautifully right up until it doesn’t, and you don’t want a new subscriber to be the person who discovers the problem.
The Lead Magnet Launch Blueprint includes a complete Tech Check you can work through before you launch, including the easy-to-miss details that can cause trouble later.
[GET THE FREE BLUEPRINT + TECH CHECK]
Why Isn’t Anyone Signing Up for Your Lead Magnet?
You created a lead magnet you know would be helpful to your ideal clients. You put it out there, waited for the sign-ups to roll in and…crickets.
Before you decide nobody wants it, take a look at what else could be going on.
First, are enough people seeing it? If you’ve shared your lead magnet a handful of times on social media and added a link to your website, you may have a promotion problem. People can’t sign up for something they don’t know exists.
Next, look at who is seeing it. If you run a local wellness practice or spa in Chicago and your TikTok audience is mostly in California, plenty of people may love your content without ever having a reason to join your list or book an appointment.
Then take a hard look at the lead magnet itself. Does the topic solve a problem your ideal client cares enough about to hand over their email address? Does the title make the benefit obvious?
Your landing page matters, too. A great lead magnet can get lousy results if the page doesn’t give people a compelling reason to sign up.
Don’t rule out the tech. If people are clicking over to the page but sign-ups are suspiciously low, test the form yourself. Make sure it works on both desktop and mobile and that nothing is getting in the way of submitting it.
This is where a little patience comes in handy.
Marketing involves testing. You put something out there, pay attention to what happens, make changes, and try again. A disappointing first round of results doesn’t tell you which part needs work.
Give yourself enough information to figure out what’s happening before you toss a perfectly good lead magnet in the trash.
Why Aren’t Your Subscribers Becoming Clients?
Let’s say people ARE signing up for your lead magnet.
Your email list is growing. Your open rates look good. People may even reply to tell you how helpful your freebie was.
But nobody is booking.
This is where we need to look beyond the number of subscribers and ask what happens after they join your list.
I’ve spent more than 25 years in sales and marketing, including 12+ years as a marketing director before I founded Delegate & Accelerate in 2014. One thing that experience has taught me is that getting someone’s attention and getting someone to buy are two different jobs.
Your lead magnet gets their attention and gives them a reason to enter your world. What you do afterward gives them a reason to stay and, eventually, spend money with you.
Start with your nurture emails. Are you continuing to help with the problem that brought them to you? Are you showing them that you understand what they’re dealing with and letting them see how your paid services can help?
Then look at the offer you’re making. If someone downloaded your guide to managing digestive symptoms and your follow-up emails suddenly start pushing a completely unrelated service, that’s going to be a tough sell. The next step should make sense based on why they came to you in the first place.
Make sure there actually is a next step.
Don’t assume people will read six helpful emails, hunt around your website, find your services, and figure out how to hire you all by themselves. If you want them to book an appointment, tell them. Give them the link. Make it easy.
Growing your list doesn’t mean much if those subscribers never become clients.
Pay attention to what happens after someone joins your list. Which emails are they opening? What are they clicking? Are they visiting your service pages? Are they booking?
If people are signing up but going no further, work your way through the follow-up and find where you’re losing them. Your nurture sequence, your offer, your CTA, or the jump you’re asking them to make may need some work.
The money is in what those subscribers do next.
How to Promote Your Lead Magnet and Get More Sign-Ups
Once your lead magnet is live and you’ve tested everything, you need to get people to it.
Posting about it twice on Instagram before moving on to something else isn’t much of a promotion plan.
Start with the places you already have people’s attention.
Add your lead magnet to relevant pages on your website and mention it in blog posts where it makes sense. Put it in your email signature. If you already have an email list, tell them about it too. They may not be new subscribers, but that doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from what you created.
Social media gives you plenty of opportunities to promote the same lead magnet more than once. Talk about the problem it solves, share a tip from it, answer a related question, make a Reel or video about the topic, and point people toward the full resource.
Then think beyond social media.
If people are finding you through Google, add your lead magnet to relevant SEO content and your Google Business Profile. If you make YouTube videos, put it in your descriptions and mention it when the topic fits.
And don’t forget about the real world, especially if you run a local practice or spa. Referral partners, workshops, presentations, networking events, printed materials, and QR codes can all put your lead magnet in front of people who may never come across your latest Instagram post.
You already did the work to create it. Keep putting it in front of new people.
If you’re running out of ideas, I’ve included 25 Ways to Promote Your Freebie in the free Lead Magnet Launch Blueprint.
[GET THE BLUEPRINT + 25 PROMOTION IDEAS]
By this point, you may be looking at everything that goes into a working lead magnet funnel and thinking, Okay, I know what I need to do. Now I have to find the time to actually do it.
Which brings us to the next question….
Should You DIY Your Lead Magnet Funnel or Hire Someone?
You can absolutely build your lead magnet funnel yourself.
If you have the time, don’t mind learning the tech, and maybe even enjoy this kind of thing like I do, have at it. The Lead Magnet Launch Blueprint will help you keep track of what needs to be done and work through it one piece at a time.
But knowing how to do something and wanting to spend your Tuesday afternoon doing it are two different things.
If your lead magnet has been sitting finished for three months because you haven’t built the landing page, your nurture emails are still half-written, or you keep putting off figuring out why your form and email platform won’t talk to each other, it may be time to hand some of it over to a Virtual Assistant (VA) or team like ours.
That’s exactly the kind of work we do at Delegate & Accelerate.
We build landing pages, funnels, forms, email sequences, automations and integrations. We write the copy, handle the tech, test the pieces, and get the thing launched.
You decide what you want to keep on your plate and what you’d be perfectly happy never touching again.
Put Your Lead Magnet to Work
By now, you can probably see that creating your lead magnet was the beginning, not the finish line.
It needs to get launched. People need to see it. The tech needs to work. Your new subscribers need to hear from you again. And you need to pay attention to what happens so you can keep improving it.
Build it. Launch it. Promote it. Test it. Improve it.
You don’t have to tackle everything in one afternoon, either. Work through it one piece at a time and keep moving.
If you’re doing it yourself, grab the free Lead Magnet Launch Blueprint. It gives you the Funnel Map, launch checklist, full Tech Check, and 25 promotion ideas so you always know what to work on next.
[DOWNLOAD THE FREE LEAD MAGNET LAUNCH BLUEPRINT]
And if you’ve read this whole article thinking, Rita, I would rather chew glass than build all of this myself, that’s fine too.
Tell me what you need to get launched, and we’ll talk about what the Delegate & Accelerate team can take off your plate.