A lead magnet is the offer you give someone in return for their email address. A discount, free shipping, a size guide, a quiz result. For most DTC brands it is how website visitors become subscribers, and it is often the first thing a customer ever sees from you.
Most setups work at the start and get messy later. You add a second offer, then a third, and before long you have got overlapping lists and people receiving the same welcome emails twice. This guide builds it properly the first time so it holds together as you grow.
Offer first, because it carries more weight than the rest combined. Then the form, the data, and the delivery flow.
Start with the offer
The offer decides how many people sign up. Timing, design and wording move the numbers at the edges. The offer moves them in the middle. Get it wrong and nothing else compensates.
Two types work for DTC:
Direct incentives. A first-order discount or free shipping. These convert fast, but they pull in deal-hunters, and a percentage-off code teaches people to hold out for a discount before they buy. A flat free-shipping offer often brings in better buyers than a percentage discount, because it appeals to people who were already going to purchase.
Source: Nobull
Value-led magnets. A size guide, a gift finder, a quiz, an ingredient guide. Fewer signups, but the people who do sign up have actual interest rather than a coupon habit. For brands with a higher price point or a longer buying decision, these tend to win over time.
Source: Eversio
Do not assume the discount is the answer. Test both where you can. A discount that doubles signups and halves your first-order margin is not a win, it just looks like one on the signup chart.
The “10-15% off your first order” figure is everywhere. Use it as a starting point, not a rule. The right number is whatever your margins can take. If you do not know where that line sits, model it out or ask someone who can.
Build the form for signups, not for data
Klaviyo has five form types: popup, flyout, embedded, banner, full-page. Popups and flyouts do most of the list-growth work. Embedded forms suit your footer or a dedicated landing page.
Two decisions drive most of the result:
Use a multi-step form. Splitting the form across two screens beats cramming it onto one. Open with the offer and the email field, then ask for anything else on a second screen. Multi-step forms usually convert better than single-step ones because each screen asks for less at once. If you are taking phone numbers for SMS alongside email, multi-step is required, and the SMS step needs the correct consent disclosure.
Delay the popup. Firing it the instant someone lands is the quickest way to get it dismissed. A short delay, or a trigger on scroll or second page view, lifts signups. Run an exit-intent popup as a backup to catch people leaving.
How much information should you actually collect?
This question comes up constantly. The answer is almost always: start small. Email address only.
Every extra field is friction, and friction hits list growth harder than people expect. Asking for name, phone and birthday on the first screen will cost you a real chunk of signups, usually more than those fields are worth to you.
Collect what you need to act on now, and add to it later:
- Email only to start. That is the field that grows the list.
- Phone number when you actually launch SMS, on its own step so it does not drag email capture down. Plenty of people give the email and skip the phone. That is fine.
- Everything else later, once you have a use for it. Birthdays, preferences and the rest can come through a later email, a preference centre, or a follow-up flow.
The rule is simple. Do not collect data you have no plan for. Every field needs a job. If you cannot say how you will use a piece of information, leave it off and pick it up later when there is a reason to.
Richer upfront data collection (preferences, quiz answers, segmentation inputs) has real value when it is done on purpose. But that comes after the basics are converting, not on your first form.
Organise your data from the start
This is the part most people get wrong, and it decides whether the setup survives growth.
Do not build a separate list for every lead magnet. It looks tidy and causes problems. Separate lists split your subscriber data, complicate suppression, and fall apart the moment one person signs up for two offers.
Use one main list. Tell the offers apart with a tag on the profile (a custom property) or a source value set by the form. Someone who signs up through the size guide form gets tagged size_guide. Everyone sits on the same list, labelled by how they arrived.
That gives you three things separate lists cannot:
- One clean list to work from
- The ability to send the right offer to the right person off the tag
- A setup you can extend easily, where a new offer is just a new form with a new tag
If this part feels fiddly, it is the one worth a second pair of eyes, because unpicking it later is far more work than setting it up right now.
Deliver it with one welcome flow
With the data sorted, delivery is simple.
Build one welcome flow triggered when someone joins the main list. Inside it, split on the tag to send the right offer in the first email. Size-guide signups get the guide, discount signups get the code. After that first email, everyone merges into the same shared welcome sequence.
This sidesteps two common messes: a separate flow per offer (which gets unwieldy fast) and multiple flows firing at once and sending duplicate emails.
A few rules:
- Deliver the magnet immediately. The first email has one job: hand over what you promised. One offer, one button, nothing else. Anything that delays the reward costs you trust and hurts engagement across the rest of the sequence.
- Put an expiry on discounts. A code with no deadline creates no urgency, and it gives your final reminder email something to say.
- Keep existing subscribers out of the welcome series. Add a filter so someone who already went through your welcome flow does not get pushed through again when they grab a second offer. The “same person, second freebie” case takes a bit more thought, and there are more advanced ways to handle it if it starts happening often.
Track the right number, then test in order
Signup count is the easy number to watch, and it is not the one that matters most. What matters is how much revenue each signup brings in over time. Add UTM tracking and the source tag so you can follow a form through to the revenue it drives. A form with fewer signups but higher revenue per person is the better form.
Once you can see that, test in order:
- Offer. Discount vs value-led, and the specific value. Biggest mover.
- Timing. Delay length, and what triggers the popup.
- Form structure. Multi-step vs single, field count.
- Copy and design. Headline, button, images. Worth doing, smallest lever of the four.
Worth knowing: comparing two popup versions tells you which popup wins, not whether the popup is capturing sales that would have happened anyway. Measuring that properly needs a holdout group, which is a more advanced step but useful once the basics are running.
The build order
Setting this up from scratch:
- Pick the offer and check it against your margins
- Set up one main list
- Build the form as multi-step, with a source tag and a short delay before it shows
- Build one welcome flow, triggered on list join, split by the tag
- Set the first email to deliver the offer immediately, with an expiry if it is a discount
- Add UTM tracking so you can see revenue per signup
- Launch, then test the offer first, timing second
Get the structure right once and every future offer is a quick job. Get it wrong and every new offer makes the whole thing harder to run. There are more advanced layers to add as you grow (sharper segmentation, paid media sync, holdout testing), but the setup above is the foundation the rest sits on.
Free lead magnet audit
If you want a second pair of eyes on your lead magnet setup, or you are not sure your forms and flows are earning their place, book a free 30-minute audit with us. Operator to operator. No pitch deck.
Or if you want to talk through strategy first: Book a strategy call
Jamie Watkins, Director at UndergroundEcom [LinkedIn] | [UndergroundEcom.com]
