Traffic, leads and sales are the lifeblood of any successful membership site. If you’re unable to convert enough of your site’s visitors into leads, you might also be having a hard time getting enough people to sign up as paid members.
When you’re thinking about ways you could get people to join your membership site, you could think of the process just like relationship that progresses through different stages as someone gets to know you. Turning your traffic into leads is one of the key stages in moving that relationship forward to get them to eventually join as a paying member.
That’s why having a few lead magnets in place is important to be able to grow your membership site. It’s also a great opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and give people a taste of what they can expect to get from joining your paid membership program.
With this in mind, throughout this article, we’ll give you five different ideas you can use to create a lead magnet that you can use to promote your membership site.
Let’s begin.
Generating Qualified Leads for Your Membership Website
What’s a Lead Magnet and How Do You Come up With Your Idea for One?
In simple words, a lead magnet is something you offer to your website visitors in exchange for their email address. Some popular lead magnet offerings include downloadable resources, videos, reports, ebooks, or a worksheet.
You need to craft a lead magnet that delivers value to your target audience and have it be centered around the main topic that your membership site focuses on.
How do you come up with your idea for your lead magnet? Look into the needs and pain points of your target market. Once you have a clear understanding of how they can benefit from joining your membership site, create a lead magnet that addresses one of these big pain points or helps solve a specific problem for them.
While keeping that in mind as you read through this article, here’s five ideas you can use to easily create a lead magnet for your membership site….
#1: Create a Free Online Course That’s a Small Part of Your Existing Membership Site
To give your prospects a feel for what they can expect to get from joining your membership site, consider creating a free sample of it in the form of a free online course they can opt in to get. For example, take a small chunk of content or group of videos from your existing membership site and repackage it as a free online course for your lead magnet.
The benefits here are twofold: you’ll be able to demonstrate your ability and expertise and allow prospects to experience the value they’d get from being a member of your membership program. It helps to give away some piece of content that really does deliver a lot of value to the people that take the time to go through it. That way when they’re done, they’ll walk away thinking something along the lines of “…if the free content is this good, the paid membership content inside must be really worth joining as a paid member.”
Another way you could potentially go about it is to offer a free membership level or free trial. The benefit of this approach is that you can onboard prospects to your membership program and give them first-hand experience of what it’s like to be a member. With Memberium, you can create free or trial membership levels with an unlimited amount of users. You can do this in the same WordPress site with multiple membership levels inside of it.
We have an older membership site called Membership.Coach where we took this approach. Instead of creating all new content for the lead magnet, we just took the first two modules in the program and gave them away for free.
It took very little extra effort on our end and made a huge difference in getting more people over the long term to join. Another thing you can use this type of lead magnet for is for people who don’t buy your membership or abandon the order form, you can send them an invite to try out a part of it for free. You can check out the example we mentioned here to see for yourself how it works.
#3: Create an Ebook / PDF From Your Most Popular Content
One of the most popular ways digital marketers are able to generate qualified leads is by creating ebooks and downloadable resources (like PDFs). As a membership site owner, you can simply repurpose some of your existing content (ideally your most popular piece of content) to create an ebook for your site’s visitors.
For example, you could create an ebook from some of the most popular blog posts that you’ve published on your site. Your site’s most viewed articles packaged into a single, downloadable resource makes for an enticing lead magnet. When deciding what your ebook or PDF should focus on, look into the needs and pain points of your target market. Then have your ebook or worksheet address one of those pain points or problems that your target market has.
Another way to go about it is to expand on one of the more popular pieces of content that you have already. This could be a popular blog post or a lesson from your membership site or a popular video.
Pro tip: Add a specific call to action at the end of your ebook or PDF to encourage prospects to join your membership program or take some other action to ascend your funnel and take the next step.
Here’s an example of one of our own ebooks that does just that. We had talked about having your ebook solve a specific problem or pain point for your target audience. If you have a membership site, it’s really hard to constantly be creating new content every month. It’s even harder to consistently deliver enough value to your members so they’re willing to keep paying you every month.
Those are two of the main pain points our ebook tries to address. What problems or pain points could you address for your own target audience with your own ebook or worksheet?
#4: Host a Webinar
Webinars are a great way to attract leads to your membership site and give you a chance to talk directly with your prospects.
There’s a lot of different ways you can deliver value to people through a webinar. It’s also a great time to overcome objections that people have to join your membership site. Holding a Q&A session towards the end where you give attendees an opportunity to engage with you is also a great learning opportunity for you. You can use feedback you get from webinars to figure out what’s important to your target audience and improve your sales messaging.
In addition to this, it gives you a great opportunity to let people know about your membership program and how they can benefit from joining it. Here’s a short case study about how one membership site owner used webinars to grow their membership site in a really smart way.
#5: Create Quizzes or Surveys
Depending on the topic(s) you cover in your membership program, you might consider creating a quiz or survey to learn more about your site’s visitors and segment them in your CRM by their answers. By doing so, you’ll be able to uncover more about the needs, preferences, and pain points of your target market.
#6: Checklists / Content Upgrades
If you have a blog on your membership site, you can convert more leads simply by inserting content upgrades into your blog posts and articles.
One of the easiest ways to create a content upgrade is to offer more in-depth information that goes deeper into a topic you’re covering in your blog post. So, anyone who wants to get more valuable information on this topic can simply exchange their email address for the content.
Here are some content upgrades that you can use to capture more leads:
- Checklists
- Printables
- Downloadable resources (PDFs, templates, blueprints, and worksheets)
- Swipe files
- Transcripts
- Interviews with experts
- Infographics
For content upgrades to be effective, it’s important that they’re somehow relevant to the topic you’re discussing in your blog post. For other ideas of how to come up with a content upgrade, take one of your most popular blog post or video that you have and create a content upgrade lead magnet for it.
Here’s an example from the Fit Fathers Project, their blog post, “10 Principles of an Effective Weight Loss Diet for Men” has a content upgrade to download a free meal plan. Anyone who would be interested in this blog post, would also highly be interested in this lead magnet.
Pro tip: Make sure your content upgrade stands out in the blog post so readers don’t miss it!
To collect emails, you’ll need an email marketing platform that you can use to manage and reach out to leads automatically. We recommend Infusionsoft by Keap, Keap or ActiveCampaign. These marketing platforms will allow you create automated email sequences that will deliver your lead magnet automatically and then automatically nurture your prospects to try to get them to join your program.
Conclusion
By generating more qualified leads for your membership site, you’ll be able to ultimately get more paid members to join your site. Start with one lead magnet as a start. Then over time, come up with multiple lead generators that solve different problems and pain points for your target market.
We shared some actionable tips on how to get started and create a lead magnet, hopefully, you’re in a good position now to create your own.
What pain points or issues are important to your target market that you could address with your own lead magnet? What ideas do you have to create your lead magnets?
