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. 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.
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 endeavour.
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 be 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.
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.
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.
Outcome : 50% Conversion Rate!
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.
Rem Chiu - co-founder of MORE Digital
Rem Chiu has over 10 years experience in Digital Marketing. Rem and her team are specializes in helping brands to maximize exposure, building awareness, reaching potential customers and increasing revenues via digital marketing solutions. They have created over 160+ articles and 40+ videos on digital marketing knowledge, through content marketing they have accumulated more than 1 million website visits in 3 years time. Their existing clients include Property developer, Shopping Malls and Global brands.
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