As retailers across the U.S. brace themselves for the post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy, other marketers are doing something a little different: sitting back and getting customers by offering something free. How? By using LeadBox™ opt-in forms—on their websites, landing pages, blog posts, social media posts, and anywhere else they can drop a string of code. It’s a strategy that can look pretty smart from the middle of a gridlocked parking lot or the back of a mile-long checkout line, and the 10 marketers we’re showcasing today have made it especially effective. Their LeadBoxes® use such thoughtful and compelling copy, design, and imagery, it’s hard to turn their offers down. Especially since you can’t beat the price. Of course, your LeadBox™ can’t do all the work. It needs help from a well-designed page and an eye-catching call-to-action button. To make sure you have enough button options to make your LeadBox™ pop on any page, we’ve assembled a mega-pack of more than 350 free call-to-action buttons for you to download. You’ll find a panoply of different sizes, colors, and messages—even a few animated options. Click below to get them all: [cta-box] Now, let’s peer into a cornucopia of impressive LeadBoxes®.
1. A No Limits Life: Holiday Planner LeadBox™
What Stands Out: Adapting your marketing to suit the season doesn’t have to be a major production. This dazzling landing page and matching LeadBox™ get a lot of mileage from Christmassy colors, a countdown timer set to Christmas Day, and, of course, an animated background of falling snow. The LeadBox™ itself functions as a tutorial in easily matching your opt-in form to your landing page. Logo? Check. Button colors? Check. Even the typeface of the headline echoes that of the landing page’s headline. Together, all the elements create a classic Yuletide feel.
2. Food Tank: Live Stream LeadBox™
What Stands Out: This landing page and LeadBox™ effectively advertise a serious subject—a panel on the pitfalls of industrial food production—while keeping their design and copy light. Food Tank’s logo colors saturate the landing-page image, and the logo itself pops up in the LeadBox™ to add authority. In a policy context, you don’t want to get too cute with your copy. So the LeadBox™ keeps it clear and straightforward: “Enter your information below and you'll get access to the live stream” for the headline, a simple “Sign Up” for the button.
3. Rachel von Sturmer: Blog Bonus LeadBox™
What Stands Out: Rachel von Sturmer’s wine blog is a feast for the senses, and the LeadBox™ she uses to offer a free wine basics guide is just as attractive. From a sunny yellow trigger button, visitors proceed to a yellow “Get My Guide!” button inside the LeadBox™, a harmony that subtly encourages them to keep going and complete the opt-in process. Rachel’s blog is written in the first person, so it makes sense that the LeadBox™ is, too. Meanwhile, Rachel’s image appears inside the well-conceived download image. Although the text is too small to give anything away, visitors can immediately see that they’ll be getting a beautifully designed PDF with all the high-quality imagery and information they’d expect after reading the post.
4. Gallery of Shea: Free Guide LeadBox™
What Stands Out: Tara Shea demonstrates stunning creativity in the lead magnets she designs to promote her landscape design business. On this landing page for a guide to building gardens that welcome both birds and kids, a gorgeous background image and enthusiastic copy lay a path for an elegant LeadBox™. As you might expect given her profession, Tara’s LeadBox™ demonstrates a strong eye for design. Note how the green progress bar echoes the first line of the logo, while the peach button matches the logo’s flower. It’s an understated approach that doesn’t compete too much with the copy, which pulls out all the stops to inspire visitors to opt in: “YES! Send me my *FREE* Bird Gardening for Kids Guide so I can start attracting stunning birds to my yard TODAY!”
5. WP Curve: Sidebar LeadBox™
What Stands Out: A list of your favorite tools or resources is an evergreen crowd-pleaser for bloggers, and the bonus resource WP Curve offers on this top-15 post is a natural fit for this audience. Someone who visits your blog looking for meaty content like this is likely to respond well if you offer them more of the same in a lead magnet, so WP Curve adds a free download of “6 tools to scale your content marketing” in the sidebar. Because the sidebar is a fairly compressed space, WP Curve relies on the LeadBox™ to explain more. A bold headline replaces the default copy under the progress bar, leaving the main text area free to get into details. The fun animation of gears turning is an unexpected cherry on top.
6. Marsha Battee, The Bossy Nurse: Video Training LeadBox™
What Stands Out: On a page as crisp and clean as new hospital scrubs, “Bossy Nurse” Marsha Battee promotes a program designed to help fellow nurses start their own businesses. Breaking her video training into 3 parts suggests that it’s too value-packed to be watched in a single sitting, and her LeadBox™ also finds ways to communicate extra value. Before instructing visitors to enter their emails, Marsha invites them to “Escape nurse burnout, add 20 more hours to your week, start your own business and put more money in your pocket!” Her bright raspberry button refers to the videos directly, and below the button she throws in the fact that leads will also get her weekly updates. A photo of Marsha meeting viewers’ eyes casts a friendly glow over the whole form.
7. Natalie Sisson’s The Suitcase Entrepreneur: Product Page Exit LeadBox™
What Stands Out: Why give away something free on your product page? Natalie Sisson does it to capture leads who might have otherwise left without buying. An exit LeadBox™ tempts them into staying with the promise of a free starter kit, which Natalie makes nearly irresistible by calling out its value of $77. With an exit LeadBox™, you generally need to add more context to your offer since visitors haven’t asked to see it. To supplement a headline focused on readers’ goals, Natalie makes unique use of the image area. Rather than include just one icon, she’s created a series of four and accompanied them with a detailed look at the starter kit’s contents.
8. Tamiko Kelly: Home Page LeadBox™
What Stands Out: Child sleep expert Tamiko Kelly makes a play directly for the emotions of tired parents with her home page’s primary call to action: “Ready for your baby to sleep through the night? Click here.” Once they click, she greets them with a LeadBox™ packed with comfort and charm, from the headline—”I was hopin’ you’d click that!”—to the submit button (“Yep! I’m ready for some ZZZ’s”). Then there’s the design—nothing fancy, exactly, but there’s lots of power in the choice of colors and fonts. If you’d told me beforehand that a magenta, lavender, and yellow LeadBox™ could be not just attention-getting but quite elegant, I’d have raised an eyebrow, but it works perfectly here. Choices like Tamiko’s can come only from supreme confidence in one’s brand, and they pay off in creating a totally distinct look and feel.
9. Creelio: Free E-Book LeadBox™
What Stands Out: This content upgrade attached to a post from content-creation agency Creelio serves two audiences: people interested in the topic of the free e-book, and people interested in getting ideas to create e-books for their own companies. It’s an interesting approach well executed. Creelio uses a simple text link in the post to trigger the LeadBox™, but they ensure that readers will keep an eye out for it by adding a “Free E-book!” banner to their header image. The LeadBox™ itself sports a clean, professional design, marked by a book-cover image and a red button that both contrasts with the blue-gray cover and matches Creelio’s logo. The copy is concise and casual, with a strong sense of where to add an exclamation point for punch.
10. Femtrepreneur: Free Course LeadBox™
What Stands Out: Mariah Coz of Femtrepreneur takes a no-nonsense tone in her business advice, and this landing page communicates her utter resolve while remaining approachable. When visitors click the “Free 10-Day Course” button, they see a LeadBox™ that stands out from the home page without clashing. Mariah sticks to her home page’s citrusy color palette with a lemon-yellow button and accent text. Her image makes a simple message interesting by varying fonts and sizes, and her headline whips up a lot of urgency in just two lines, announcing, “Yes, I'm so READY to build a PROFITABLE blog the right way!” To make the calls to action on your landing pages or blog posts pop as powerfully as Mariah’s, be sure to download our mega-pack of 350+ free call-to-action buttons below: [cta-box]
