From Netflix to Hubspot, in this article, we cover ingenious lead gen ideas and side projects that brought companies thousands of leads.

Today, there’s no better way to get qualified leads and improve your email marketing, than a creative and engaging lead generation tactic. Yes, your product or service will attract customers if it is really helpful and wanted. Yes, a blog post might improve your visitor numbers and enrich your email lists. Yes, social media is still extremely popular.

But, how do you get one’s email address? Through lead generation, of course.

Although there are plenty of easy-to-use lead generation tools and ways to get to your target audience, the best way to excel in any marketing effort is to be creative, engaging and even groundbreaking.

In this article, we’ll go through some of the most unique and best-performing lead magnets that greatly improved the conversion rates of these companies and pulled huge numbers of website visitors.

Netflix: Give the people a bite, and they’ll come for the whole cake

The marketing execs at Netflix sure knew what they were doing when they thought about giving interested customers a one-month free trial of the service. According to Statista, Netflix had 207.64 million paid subscribers worldwide as of the first quarter of 2021. Out of them, as much as 52% of people started their Netflix subscription after a free month trial.

Why? Well, although skeptical whether it was worth the money at first, it’s safe to presume they were convinced by the vast library of films and shows on the platform got to them. At the same time, people often forget to cancel their subscriptions after 30 days. And they turn into paying customers immediately after the trial runs out.

It is a lead generation strategy as old as time. You can even see it on open markets. If you’re anything like me, you try some of the fruits, then buy three kilos. Netflix knew how to get to the skeptics and the forgetful and now has an amazingly large customer base.

Hubspot: Giving a solution to many marketers

So many marketers around the world know that they can’t do a single thing without first creating an ideal buyer persona. And for many of them, fitting every demographic information, facts, assumptions and expectations into a fictional character is pretty hard. Sometimes, you don’t know where to start from, or how to visualize that.

That is why Hubspot, a platform that is extremely popular for all things marketing, created a marketing software of sorts that helps you build an ideal persona with a dozen clicks: Make My Persona.

As far as landing pages go, this one is extremely well designed, easy to use, and immediately shows up at the top of the search results when you search for ‘how to build an ideal buyer persona’. So, we can assume it pulled a great number of people towards leaving their email, which is an obligatory step if you want to be able to download your creations.

Neil Patel: The king of comprehensive guides

If you work in marketing or SaaS, there is no chance you have never visited Neil Patel’s website. The reason for this is that he knows how to produce content, and there is no one better at SEO than him.

Apart from the fact that there are five different side projects and tools that marketers use on the daily basis, and easy to understand and quick to answer the search intent blog posts, Patel also has very long and in-depth guides on important topics, such as this one: How to Rank a Blog in Google’s Top 10 Search Results.

Neil Patel’s blog does many things well, but the thing that really stands out is his smart and straightforward call to action buttons.

A question like ‘Do you want more traffic?’ really speaks to a person in search of knowledge and expertise on how to grow their business. Whether it is subscriptions on the blogs or calls with representatives of his company for a consultation, or directly hiring them for services, it is definitely clear to see that this great blog is also a great lead magnet.

SEMRush webinars: Share the expertise to gain leads and respectability

If your company has experts in something, you should flaunt them. Share knowledge and improve the community, while at the same time gathering qualified leads you can use for your future email marketing campaigns.

This is a strategy greatly used by SEMRush, which has some of the best webinars for freelancers, PR and marketing agencies and professionals from all sorts of fields of marketing.

From SEO to content marketing, SEMRush has webinars for all levels of experience and creative fields, often featuring guest speakers from niche industries and opinion leaders.

If your company has a core team that can teach potential clients something, a good old webinar is a lead magnet to try.

Calorie calculator for fitness instructor websites: It only works if it’s personalized

I’ve seen this more than once, and it probably always works.

People often get hooked on typical weight loss bait, like counting calories or diets. But, everybody is aware of the fact that a personalized meal and exercise plan is the only thing that works. So, fitness trainers and gyms produce a sneak-peek of what a customer will get by training with them, through giving them advice, short-term plans, or, in this case, a ‘cheat sheet’ with a calorie count.

But, for a full plan you either need to pay, subscribe, or in the cheapest variant, leave your email to be able to download a personalized plan. That sounds like a good deal!

Hubspot’s Webinar Planning Kit: Too useful to ignore

In this meta-lead magnet, Hubspot is once again offering marketers something that is always welcome and comes in handy: a kit for planning and organizing your webinars.

Consisting of a guidebook, marketing and sales alignment strategies, template for planning the webinar and an interactive checklist, this useful package is without a doubt something that attracts thousands of qualified leads for these marketing experts.

Freelancing plan and pricing course

For many freelancers and newbies on the market, naming a price and managing to get your worth is a very big problem.

That is why this short course on starting or growing a freelancing business led by Brennan Dunn is even featured on Forbes.

This nine-lesson course swears to help freelancers double their profits, by teaching them how to ask the right questions, present themselves well and evaluate the price of a job.

The Home Decade Quiz: Fun and informative

Who doesn’t love quizzes? I know I do!

A website called Improve Net, which matches customers to contractors in their area who are capable of doing a project they require, created this fun quiz that helps people learn which style and era of interior design match their taste and personality.

A quiz is a very easy to produce, engaging and usually catchy lead magnet. The only problem is that leads acquired through it are not necessarily always important leads, since some people might simply do them for fun.

Ebooks and guides: repurposed useful content

Ebooks and inspiration guides are a very good opportunity to gather leads, nurture the relationship with existing customers, and repurpose your content.

If your business has a formidable and well-structured blog, you can produce long-form ebooks, comprehensive guides and compilations to help educate customers on certain topics, or attract new customers with an easily downloadable ebook and well-designed landing page or forms.

Here at ManyPixels, we produce many industry and design-related ebooks, which are full of visual examples and information on why design works (or doesn’t), which are proving to be a successful and hopefully, a useful reward for the readers.

Unbounce’s 20% off first month + free trial

Unbounce is one of the most famous landing page builders out there, and they have very favorable prices. But to make sure that their customers know what they are paying for, they offer a 14-day trial and a 20% discount for a three-month or year-long subscription that is only gifted if you are referred by a friend.

It is a win-win and helps build a network of users, which is why it works way better than a simple discount.