Do you ever feel like social media platforms are a bit limited? Sure, you can grow a massive audience on YouTube or TikTok, but then they’re just sort of…stuck there. Try to get them to follow you to another platform — or even check out a website or other channel you own — and you probably only have a little bit of success. That’s because you have to make it worth their while.
That’s where a lead magnet comes in.
Read on to learn more about what lead magnets are, and some of the best tools on the market for building them and growing your email list.
Click here to start building your email list with The Leap today, for free.What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet can be a whole lot of things, but they all have two things in common: they’re a free resource, and your audience wants them enough to give away their email addresses.
Think of any freebie you’ve gotten from a company, whether that’s a shaker cup with its logo on it or a free copy of an ebook. They’re designed to get you to visit their store, spend money on their website, or even just give away your email address for future marketing. Common examples of lead magnets for content creators include:
- Free courses
- Ebooks
- Exclusive videos
- Templates
- Guides
How lead magnets fit into your content strategy
Lead magnets are just as valuable for creators as they are for businesses — especially if you treat content creation as a business. With a strong lead magnet, you can do a few things:
- Build an email list that you can contact outside of platforms you don’t control.
- Give your audience a taste of your paid digital products.
- Gauge interest in a future product or service.
- Keep some of your followers if you end up leaving a social media platform.
What you need to create and use a lead magnet
Lead magnets aren’t super complicated to make, but you’ll need a few tools to do the job. That’s because making and sharing a lead magnet involves a few steps:
- Making the lead magnet itself.
- Hosting the lead magnet somewhere it can be downloaded or accessed.
- Creating a form where your audience can give you their email address.
- Sending an email to confirm their address and share the lead magnet with them.
A lead magnet creation tool
Depending on the lead magnet, this can be as simple as a word processor (think Google Docs) or as complex as a visual design tool like Canva. This is something you should keep in mind when trying to figure out what lead magnet you’ll want to make.
An email list builder
Compiling email addresses from your audience doesn’t have to be complicated. An email list builder helps you collect emails via a simple sign-up form, so you can grow and manage your email list effortlessly.
An email marketing platform
Does sending out hundreds of emails one by one sound tedious to you? Then you’ll need an email marketing platform that can automate this process as well as other email marketing tasks. It’ll come in especially useful if you want to stay in touch with the people on your email list.
Create your lead magnets in minutes using The Leap!
12 best lead magnet tools for growing your email list
At a glance: the best lead magnet tools
Lead magnet tool |
Best for |
Creator entrepreneurs who want it all (for free!) |
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Subject matter experts who want to use a lead magnet to sell other premium learning experiences. |
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Managing everything in your creator business but building your lead magnets. |
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Handling the emailing, form-building, and contact management like the pros. |
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Creating aesthetically pleasing lead magnets, even with limited design skills. |
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Those who want a free design tool that’s a bit more robust. |
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Creators who want a website builder to manage everything around their lead magnets. |
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Lead generation and email marketing optimization. |
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Building templates as lead magnets. |
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Creators who want an email marketing tool built for them. |
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Creators who want a best-in-class email marketing tool. |
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Creators who want a free tool to ideate and create their lead magnets. |
1. The Leap
Looking for a single tool that can handle every aspect of getting a lead magnet to your audience? Want to build, publish, and deliver your lead magnet all from one place? Then look no further than The Leap.
The Leap is a free link in bio store that comes with an AI-powered product builder and email marketing automation features. That makes it one of the best lead magnet tools on this list, because you only need a single account to build your lead magnet, grow your email list, and get it out to your audience.
No matter how experienced you are, The Leap can get you from square one to a finished lead magnet in minutes. The Leap’s AI-powered product builder will guide you through coming up with your original idea, putting your lead magnet together, and even getting emails out to your audience. The best part? With The Leap’s link-in-bio storefront functionality, you can slip a link to your lead magnet into a list of all the links your audience cares about with no extra work.
Key features
- AI-powered digital product builder creates lead magnets for you in a snap.
- Mobile-friendly.
- Online storefront and link-in-bio tool.
- Built-in email capture and marketing features.
Pricing
You can use The Leap completely free — sign up today!
Create your lead magnets in minutes using The Leap!
2. Thinkific
Thinkific is an online platform that helps subject matter experts turn their knowledge into cash by creating and selling digital downloads, online courses, coaching sessions, webinars, and communities. It boasts a product builder, email automation, analytics, and selling tools. That means you can it all — from creating your lead magnet to emailing it automatically to your leads — with a single platform.
Key features
- Online course and digital product builder.
- Email automation.
- Deep analytics.
- Membership platform.
Pricing
Thinkific offers three pricing plans:
- Basic, at $49/month, will allow you to build up to five digital downloads (or lead magnets), with other features for building courses and connecting with your community.
- Start, at $99/month, supports unlimited digital downloads, and it will also allow you to grow into paid memberships, private courses, and more.
- Grow, at $199/month, supports everything the other plans do, plus advanced course-building features.
You can also sign up for Thinkific Plus, which will give you enhanced support, integrations with tools like HubSpot, and other features that might be relevant for you if you’re scaling your learning business.
3. Beacons
Beacons is an almost all-in-one platform for content creators. It won’t let you build your lead magnet, but it’ll let you do just about everything else. Beacons has a website builder, for making the landing pages and sign-up forms you’ll need to capture emails. It has email marketing tools, for actually getting that lead magnet out to your audience. But it’ll also help you handle tons of other aspects of your content creation career, from tracking the performance of your content to managing your audience.
So while you’ll still need a separate tool to actually build your lead magnet, Beacons can take care of the rest.
Key features
- Website builder.
- Email collection.
- Email marketing.
- Online storefront.
Pricing
Beacons offers four pricing plans:
- The Free plan will let you build an online page to distribute your lead magnet, though you’ll be limited to sending 50 emails and can’t have a custom domain.
- The Creator Pro plan will give you access to a custom domain, remove Beacons branding, and allow for up to 500 email sends.
- The Store Pro plan gives you unlimited email sends.
- The Business Pro plan won’t give you much more on the lead magnet side, but it will guarantee you priority customer success.
4. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most popular digital marketing tools out there, allowing marketers to manage content on their websites, build automated email workflows, collect emails, and a whole lot more. As a lead magnet tool, you won’t build the actual freebie you’re giving your audience, but you can handle every other aspect of it like the pros.
It might be a bit too feature-heavy for most creators — and the learning curve might be a bit steep — but it’s one of the most powerful tools on this list.
Key features
- AI-powered marketing features.
- Email marketing.
- Website and form builder.
- Live chat tools.
Pricing
The features you’ll need for your lead magnet are part of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, which is split into these three plans:
- The Free plan has all the tools you need, though you’ll be limited to 2,000 emails per month and a stripped-back form builder.
- The Starter plan starts at $20 a month per user for 1,000 contacts, supports up to 5,000 emails per month, and gives you additional form-building features.
- The Professional plan starts at $890 a month for up to three users for 1,000, supports up to 10K emails, and is packed with a ton of other features.
5. Canva
While there are a ton of tools for marketing and sending out your lead magnet out there, Canva is one of your best options for building it. A design tool for people who aren’t designers, Canva’s pre-built templates won’t just allow you to build your lead magnet a lot faster; they’re great for getting inspiration, too.
Canva’s drag-and-drop builder is easy to use, but you can still make some really eye-catching designs with it.
Key features
- Dozens of premade templates.
- Simple drag-and-drop editor.
- Built-in collaboration.
- AI tools.
Pricing
Canva offers three pricing plans:
- The Free plan should allow most creators to get pretty far with their lead magnets. You’ll get access to millions of stock photos and templates, but you’ll be limited in just how much you can modify them to match your own branding.
- The Canva Pro plan is $15 for a single user, and supports more stock photos and templates. You’ll get more customization options out of this plan, and you can even save your custom lead magnets as new templates.
- The Canva Teams plan is $10 per person for teams of at least three people. This is the best plan for you if you need to regularly work with a team to build lead magnets.
6. VistaCreate
VistaCreate is another example of a design tool made for non-designers. It’s got tons of templates, a simple drag-and-drop editor, and a massive library of creative assets and design elements you can use to make your designs really yours. Perfect for building your lead magnet.
If you’ve got a strong personal brand — with specific colors and designs — you can even upload your brand kit so everything you design fits with what you’ve already got.
Key features
- Drag-and-drop designer.
- Over 70M creative assets.
- Animation and video editor.
Pricing
VistaCreate offers two plans:
- The free Starter plan includes over 100K templates, 1M design assets, tons of free fonts, and more.
- The Pro plan will set you back $6.50 a month and unlock premium templates, a background remover, and a lot more design assets.
7. Squarespace
Squarespace is one of the most popular website builders out there, allowing creators with no web development experience to launch a functional website in minutes. But did you know it can also be a key part of building and sending out a lead magnet?
You could, for example, build out a page in Squarespace to store your lead magnet — whether that’s the page itself or downloadable content within that page. Squarespace also allows you to build forms, manage your audience, and send out marketing emails.
Key features
- Drag-and-drop website builder.
- Form builder.
- Email marketing.
Pricing
Squarespace has four plans, which each support what you need to host and send a lead magnet:
- The Personal plan is $25 a month.
- The Business plan is $36 a month.
- The Commerce plan is $40 a month.
- The Commerce Advanced plan is $72 a month.
To actually send emails to your audience though, you’ll also need the extra email marketing feature. The cost for that begins at $10 a month and scales up to $96, depending on how many emails you need to send each month.
8. OptinMonster
The process from building your lead magnet to getting it to your audience is full of steps that can be optimized. Turn more of your audience into visitors to a landing page, turn more of those visitors into subscribers, and get more valuable feedback about your lead magnets. OptinMonster is a marketing tool built for optimization. It’ll help you lock in when building forms, creating landing pages around them, and grow your email list.
Key features
- Form builder and optimizer.
- Countdown timers.
- Lightbox popups.
- Hundreds of prebuilt templates.
Pricing
OptinMonster has four plans:
- The Basic plan is $7 a month, can support up to 2,500 page views, and gives you access to the platform’s drag-and-drop builder.
- The Plus plan is $17 a month, lets you use the tool on up to two websites, get four times the page views, and even offers advanced marketing integrations.
- The Pro plan is $25 a month, supports 25K page views, and has tons of features for optimizing your lead magnet.
- The Growth plan is $37 a month, supports 100K page views, and has features aimed at creators who are all about growing at all costs.
9. Notion
Notion is an all-in-one collaboration workspace that lets creators do just about anything, from creating mood boards to building databases that let them run every aspect of their creator business. But did you know it can be a huge part of your lead magnet strategy too?
Not only are Notion templates a great option for lead magnets, but you can use Notion to build landing pages to host your lead magnet, and even make the form you need to capture your leads’ email addresses.
Key features
- Simple builder for making just about anything.
- Built-in web hosting.
- Automated forms.
Pricing
Notion’s free plan is pretty robust, offering a collaborative workspace for up to 10 guests. This won’t support hosting pages for your lead magnet, though. For that, you’ll need one of these paid plans:
- Plus, at $12 per user per month.
- Business, at $18 per user per month.
- Enterprise, which offers custom pricing, meaning you’ll need to get in touch with Notion’s sales team.
10. Kit
With Kit, content creators can handle all sorts of marketing tasks, from email marketing to building landing pages. When it comes to lead magnets, you can use Kit for just about everything except building the lead magnet itself.
Key features
- Email marketing.
- Link in bio tool.
- Landing page builder.
Pricing
Kit’s free pricing plan lets you build landing pages and forms for as many lead magnets as you need. You can also build a list of up to 10K subscribers. If you need more subscribers than that, you’ll need one of these two paid plans:
- The Creator plan starts at $9 a month for up to 300 subscribers, scaling up to $1,916 a month for 400,000 subscribers and up.
- The Creator Pro plan starts at $25 a month for up to 300 subscribers, scaling up to $2166 a month for 400,000 subscribers and up.
11. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools on the market, and for good reason. People use it for everything from running their newsletter to selling digital products and, yes, getting lead magnets in the hands of their audience.
With Mailchimp, you’ll be able to build the forms you need to get email addresses from your audience, send out the email with your freebie in it, and do any further marketing.
Key features
- Email automation (paid plans only).
- AI assistant helps write and design emails.
- CRM with audience analytics.
- Advanced email performance analytics.
- Audience segmentation.
Pricing
Mailchimp has a free plan, though it’s limited to a maximum of 500 contacts and 1,000 email sends a day. If you need more than that, you’ll have to get one of these plans:
- Essentials, starting at $13 a month for 500 contacts and 5,000 email sends.
- Standard, starting at $20 a month for 500 contacts and 6,000 email sends.
- Premium, starting at $350 a month for 10K contacts and 15K email sends.
Note that if you need more contacts (or email sends), you can scale up each plan to support more. You’ll just have to pay more, too.
12. Attract.io
To round out this list, here’s a tool dedicated to building lead magnets. Attract.io is a free tool that’ll help you narrow down what you should make for your lead magnet, build it from a premade template, and even generate the link you’ll need to share it. That means if you pair this tool with one of the email marketing platforms on this list, you’ll have a full toolbox to handle lead magnets from start to finish.
Key features
- Tons of templates and free images.
- Free hosting for your lead magnet.
- Lead magnet ideas to get you started.
Pricing
Attract.io is completely free.
Capture leads effortlessly with The Leap!
Lead magnets are a great tool to turn followers on your social channels into an owned email list that you can use for promoting your paid product offering. While most tools handle either the actual building of your lead magnet or the marketing you’ll do around it, The Leap can do it all — and it’s completely free! Sign up for your free Leap account to start building your email list, today.
Create your lead magnets in minutes using The Leap!
Lead magnet tools FAQ
What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is a freebie that you share with your audience, usually in exchange for their email address. You give them something they find valuable and you get a direct channel of communication with them in exchange.
What are some ideas for lead magnets?
Common ideas for lead magnets perfectly suited to creators include:
- Free courses
- Ebooks
- Exclusive videos
- Templates
- Guides
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