Hey! This is ‘future you’ calling with some tough love.

Future-you is ready to launch a course, or a new product which might be the next big thing, but future-you has also just discovered that you haven’t built yourself an email list.

You’ve been meaning to get around to launching that lead magnet (yes, the one sitting in some dusty corner of Canva) but it keeps getting pushed down your to-do list because, well, you’re too busy working in your business looking after clients and marketing doesn’t seem as urgent as all of the other stuff on your plate.

But now it IS urgent, because future-you is ready to level up with a great new offer that’s going to earn you some recurring revenue to get you off that feast-or-famine hamster wheel.

But, you don’t have a list, or if you do, it’s tiny and they never hear from you.

Building an email list is the foundation of every successful business I know, including mine. There is genuinely no other way to scale up.

One day you’re going to be ready to take the next amazing step on your business journey, but without a list, it simply won’t fly.

I know this because I WAS that person. I had a course all ready to launch and no list.

I had to wait a whole year to launch my course whilst I built my audience. And it sucked.

But when I did launch with 2,000 subscribers, I made $26,000 in a week. It’s still the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me and it was all down to my email list. 

Convinced? Good. Let’s dive into setting up your first lead magnet automation. 

First things first, if you’re wondering what a lead magnet is, it’s a free or low-cost offer which you give to people in exchange for their email address. If you want to dive into how to actually create one, then read this blog post first.

Choosing an email marketing provider 

The next thing you need to do is get yourself an email marketing provider, which includes the likes of ActiveCampaign (my weapon of choice), MailerLite (my next low cost fav) and Flodesk (pretty and with some great marketing components but not as full-featured as the others yet).

When choosing a provider, you’re looking for these essential features:

• A drag and drop email builder
• The ability to easily segment your audience using tags or segments
• Automations (sometimes called flows)
• Deep data integration with your website
• If you have an online store, you’ll also need deep data integration with your cart plugin or provider to capture key data from your customers
• Optional but nice to have – direct integration with Facebook/Meta

Creating a lead magnet delivery automation

So what’s a lead magnet delivery automation? Basically, it’s a fancy way of describing a process that collects someone’s email address and gives them access to your freebie without you needing to lift a finger.

There are several steps involved but they aren’t difficult and don’t require specialist technical knowledge. Sigh of relief, right?

Here’s an outline of the workflow, which you can also view visually in the diagram below. 

Lead Magnet by The Design Space

You can see that there are three parts to this process..

1. Setting up your email sign up form

2. Creating three website pages – Sign Up, Thank You & Delivery

3. Creating a simple automation in your email platform

Setting Up Your Sign Up Form 

I like to start with setting up my sign up form in my email marketing platform first. It means I’ll have it ready to drop into my sign up page (covered in the next stage) without interrupting my workflow. I like to start with setting up my sign up form in my email marketing platform first. It means I’ll have it ready to drop into my sign up page (covered in the next stage) without interrupting my workflow. 

The simplest way to create a form is to set one up in your email marketing platform and grab the embed code. Most have basic styling controls which will allow you to style the form to match your website (or at least achieve neutral styling that blends in).

The form is really simple. All you need is their name and email address.

Then you’ll need to set up your form to redirect to the thank-you page you’re going to build in the next step.

You can see from my ActiveCampaign form below, that I’m redirecting the form to a thank-you page in my website, subscribing the user to a list and also tagging them with the name of the lead magnet, so that I know what they are interested in.

Later on, when you build your simple email automation to deliver the lead magnet, you can use either the form submission or the tag to trigger the automation. Clever, right?

Setting Up Your Website Pages

You’re going to need 3 simple pages in your website which will work together with your email marketing platform. 

The Sign Up Page with embedded email form

This is a landing page where your visitors will enter their email address into a form.

All you need to do is drop the form embed code in a text or code module on your page.

It’s worth noting that many themes, like Divi and Elementor, have built-in form modules which you can connect to your email marketing platform with an API key.

You’ll need to make sure you clearly state that they are signing up for marketing emails or include a checkbox which forces them to opt into your marketing activities.

You’ll also want to summarise the features and benefits of your freebie, include an image of the freebie (if possible). A couple of testimonials can also help too. 

Here’s a typical sign-up page from one of our marketing-ready themes, Luna.

The Thank You page with a nice video message

You’re probably wondering why not just send your new subscribers straight to a download page instead to a thank you page. Why the extra step?

The first reason is psychological.

By redirecting subscribers to a thank you page, you had an added opportunity to break the ice and get your message across. That’s why I recommend including a friendly video message that lets them behind the scenes to meet the real you. Keep it informal and low key, film it on your phone and keep it under a minute. 

Top tip: film yourself at your desk or wherever you usually take Zoom calls. It will make them feel more relaxed about booking a video meeting with you.

The second reason for the thank you page is tracking.

We want to be able to track how many people actually hand over their email and then we want to track how many actually read or download it.

By redirecting subscribers to a thank you page, we can measure the number of successful subscribers. And by creating a separate page for the download, we can track how many people click through from the welcome email to view or download the lead magnet. Very cool!

Here’s a typical thank-you page from one of our templates. Short and sweet.

The Lead Magnet delivery page 

This brings us neatly to the page where you are going to give access to your freebie. 

You’ll be linking to this page from the welcome email triggered by your sign up form submission.

A quick side note. Lots of people ask me if they need to password protect this page. The answer is no – that just creates an extra barrier. Just make sure it’s not being indexed by Google so that it’s not displayed in your search results.

This page allows you to track how many people click through to it, but it also allows you to give your new subscriber two options for consuming your content. 

Many lead magnets are PDF files and they tend to be huge. Most people sign up for lead magnets on their phone.

No one, and I mean, no one wants to download a massive file on their phone but they do often want to read it straight away. 

Enter the delivery page. On my delivery pages, I give my subscribers the option to download the PDF or flip through an embedded version right there on the page. (I create my lead magnets with Canva which has a really cool embedding option.)

For the download option, simply upload it to your website media library, grab the link and add that to a button.

You can see one of my delivery pages right here.

Creating a simple email automation

All of the email platforms mentioned in this post offer automations.

An automation is a series of emails that get sent out, at timed intervals, without you having to do anything. Once the automation is triggered, you can sit back and relax as your email marketing platform does all the heavy lifting.

We already know that submitting your form (or subscribing to a certain list or adding a certain tag) is going to trigger your automation. 

At its most basic, the only thing your automation needs to contain is one single email with a link to your lead magnet delivery page as below.

Of course you can get fancy with it. You can add a follow-up nudge email if they don’t click on the link or you could ask them to click on a button to indicate which kind of content they would like to receive from you. 

Here’s a screenshot of our simple lead magnet delivery automation. 

You can see that we’ve chosen to add the subscriber to a list, tag them, notify us and then nudge them if they don’t click through to the lead magnet.

But of course, you don’t have to do ANY of that – I just wanted to show you what was possible. A single email is all you really need.

So that’s it. Your first lead magnet automation, broken down into simple steps. Of course the next steps are to create a series of follow-up emails to nurture your new subscribers to become customers but that’s a topic for another day. 

Setting up this vital part of your marketing funnel is easier and quicker than you think and if you have any problems at all, just jump into our Facebook community, The Design Space Lounge, and we’ll be happy to help you. 

Want to swipe our whole funnel from end-to-end? You can grab all of our fully copy-written email automations and strategy training when you join our membership, The Marketing Fix.

Sound good? Head over there now to check it out.