Lead Magnet Marketing Plan for Nonprofits
6-Step Plan for Explosive Email List Growth Using Your Digital Assets
A lead magnet can be an eBook, a video, a special report, or any other digital asset that you can offer visitors to your site in exchange for their email.
Of all the possible lead magnets a nonprofit can produce, an eBook is the single best option to grow your nonprofit’s email list with a consistent stream of new subscribers. But it won’t accomplish anything if no one knows it exists. Once you’ve written your lead magnet, which will likely be a short eBook telling one of your best stories of impact, you need to market it.
To write a compelling eBook-style lead magnet, use this Ultimate Guide
This article will present a 6-step plan for marketing your nonprofit’s lead magnet.
1. Design the Ebook – Cover and Interior
You need to pay someone for this, a good graphic designer who won’t over-design it. You want a PDF eBook that is a quick read and that engages with some visuals. Visuals can be photos, graphics, and other items. Since it’s a story, I recommend not over-designing it. The more it feels like a slick publication, the harder it will be to achieve emotional connection. And that’s what you want most.
The goal of this eBook lead magnet is not to get donations, though you will ask for them at the end. But the main goal is to win a subscriber – someone who will stay on your email list and keep reading your content. That kind of person will be more likely to give and become a recurring or major donor.
Good interior design helps make that happen.
With regard to the cover, the most important piece is a legible title. You’re looking for a cover that looks something like the one for my Fundraising Event Planning Guide, which is one of the lead magnets for ProActive Content. See the sidebar to the right.
With that style of cover, it looks like a book, and the main title is readable even when the image is smaller like it will be in a social media post.
You can find many good designers from all over the world on Upwork.
2. Create a Landing Page on Your Website
Your eBook lead magnet needs a home, and that home needs a signup form where people who want your lead magnet will give you their email to get it. Here’s an example of a lead magnet eBook landing page from Dawson Place. This particular lead magnet story was written by ProActive Content. If you also want to see an example of our writing, join their email list and read the eBook. It’s a 20-minute read.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Now, that landing page is not quite as good as it could be. Its greatest flaw is that there’s no copy telling the visitor what the story is about. It doesn’t motivate the visitor to want the eBook. They are relying completely on the cover, the title, and one line of text.
What else could make this landing page better? Use this 16-point Landing Page Checklist, and see what they’re doing well and what could be better. One easy point of improvement is on their form. The ‘First Name’ field should be required. You always want at least a first name so when you send emails, you can address them by the person’s name, as opposed to “Hey friend.”
Why is a landing page so important?
Because you need to be able to link to it from anywhere. This includes anywhere on your own site, like blogs, your home page, and other pages you’ll create in the future. It also includes external posts like Google Ad Grants, social media posts and ads, and blog posts written for other sites. And, if anyone else gets your eBook and wants to link to your landing page (like we just did for Dawson Place), they can.
3. Write a Thank You Page
As long as your CRM allows this, you’ll want to send people who have just downloaded your eBook to a thank you page. Don’t just settle for the default text that normally appears after someone fills out your form.
A thank you page capitalizes on that special moment when a person has just done something they feel good about. Smart businesses use thank you pages to upsell people who have just bought something, and get them to buy something else.
As a nonprofit, you can use your thank you page to try a number of things:
- ‘Upsell’ them by asking for a small one-time donation – gets them on your donor list
- Ask them to share the eBook landing page with their friends
- Send them to another key page on your site, like your volunteer page, or events page
- Ask them to follow your nonprofit on social media
See 5 Thank You Page Essentials, with a great example from ASPCA
4. Write an Email Welcome Series Autoresponder
This is so critical. Just like the thank you page, a person who has just gotten your lead magnet feels good about it. They are motivated. They are interested. They are intrigued. We know this because they DID something. They took an action they didn’t have to take.
Your email welcome series should achieve several key goals:
- Engage and connect them with your nonprofit
- Expand on your mission and the impact they can have
- Remind them to read the eBook
- Share at least one good story of impact from your nonprofit
- Ask for a donation (but not in the first email)
5. Advertise the Lead Magnet
Once you have these other components in place – the landing page, thank you page, and email welcome series – you are ready to start marketing your nonprofit’s lead magnet.
Image by Muhammad Ribkhan from Pixabay
Advertise it on social media, as many channels as possible. Post about it for free. Tell your key supporters about it and ask them to post about it. Boost your posts. Pay for social ads if you have the budget for it. All of these should link directly to the landing page. NOT to your home page.
Advertise it over email. This is something you can share with your entire list – donors, subscribers, non-donors, people who have never done anything other than get your emails. And again – link all these emails to the landing page. Do not just send them the eBook simply because they are already on your email list. This is a way to gauge who is still active and engaged with your organization.
Advertise it on Google Ad Grants if you have an account, and on other online channels. See 4 insider secrets to getting more clicks in Ad Grants.
Advertise it in your print newsletters. This is a way to bridge the offline to online divide. You have print readers who never visit your website. You can get some of them there with your lead magnet.
6. Promote the Lead Magnet at Your Fundraising Events
Nothing is more powerful than a captive audience. At a fundraising event, you have one. Get someone up there who has read the eBook and have them speak about it for a couple minutes. And in that speech, they can also encourage everyone to not just get the eBook, but tell their friends about it by sending them to…. Yes! The landing page.
See why having an optimized landing page is so important?
Do all this, and you will grow your email list. Don’t do some or most of this, and you might still grow, but it will be a lot less than it could have been.
A lead magnet is a powerful tool – if you use it right. Marketing it is how you use it.
Need Help with Any Aspect of Your Nonprofit Lead Magnet?
ProActive Content has written complete lead magnet funnels for multiple nonprofits.
If you already have lead magnets, but don’t have a good landing page or an email welcome series, you can work with us to get those key elements created. Need help marketing it on your Ad Grants account? We can do that too.
If you have no lead magnet, we’d love to help you write one. Once you have it, it’s a permanent digital asset that you can use forever.
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