The magnet, the opt-in page, the delivery, the bridge and the first ask — built so the list you collect is made of people who could plausibly buy. Written to work with any email tool; where a tool decision genuinely changes the plan, it says so.
A lead magnet has one job that gets forgotten in the rush to collect addresses: it decides who is on the list. Anything free attracts somebody. Only a magnet that sits close to the offer attracts people who could plausibly buy it.
Call it the closer-to-the-offer rule. The magnet should solve the first step of the same problem your paid offer finishes solving, so that wanting the magnet is itself a qualification. Everything downstream — the opt-in page, the delivery, the sequence, the ask — is easier when the people arriving already have the problem the offer exists for, and none of it can be written well enough to rescue a list of people who do not.
Write the offer down. Write the magnet down. Then say this out loud: “somebody who wanted the magnet is the kind of person who eventually needs the offer.” If that sentence needs an explanation, a bridge or a hopeful maybe, the magnet is too far away. A person can love a piece of free content and still be nobody’s customer; when that happens at scale you have built a content audience and called it a funnel.
The reason this matters more than it sounds is that unqualified subscribers are not neutral. They depress open rates, which is the signal every mailbox provider uses to decide whether your next send reaches the people who do want it. They shape what you write, because you eventually write to the audience you can see. And in almost every tool they cost money, because marketing contacts are metered.
One more property worth insisting on: the magnet should be finishable. Something that takes an afternoon gets filed with good intentions. Something that takes ten minutes and produces a visible result — a filled sheet, a decision, a number — gets finished, and a person who finished it is a fundamentally different prospect from a person who downloaded it.
The opt-in page is the shortest page you own, and the one most often padded out with material that gives a reader something to disagree with. Its whole job is to make one trade obvious.
That last one is worth defending, because it looks like a conversion tax and behaves like a filter. Somebody who opts out at the disclosure was never going to read the bridge sequence; you have simply found out at the cheapest possible moment instead of the most expensive one.
The full structure of the page — what goes above the fold, what the form should look like, what belongs below it — is laid out in landing page anatomy, and the words themselves in landing page copywriting. Once it is live, change one thing at a time and start with the promise, because it is the only element that can move the number by a lot — simple A/B testing covers how to do that without fooling yourself.
Delivery is treated as plumbing, which is why so many funnels leak here. It is the only moment in the whole sequence where you have somebody’s complete attention and a promise you are about to keep.
Put the file on the confirmation page and send it by email. The page is instant and cannot be blocked by a mailbox provider; the email establishes the channel you are about to use for the next week and earns the first open. Doing only one of the two either strands people whose delivery went to spam or wastes the highest-intent open you will ever get.
Make the delivery email the plainest email you ever send: from a person, a subject line that matches the button they just clicked, the link in the first line, no design, no second offer. This is also the email that sets your reputation with the mailbox providers for everything that follows, which is the practical reason to keep it simple — email deliverability basics covers the rest.
Subject: [The exact thing they clicked the button for] Here it is: [link] One thing before you open it — [the single sentence that tells them where to start, or the mistake most people make on the first page]. I will send you [what arrives next] on [day], and then [cadence] after that. Reply to this email if it does not open, or if you get stuck. I read them. [Your name]
The one extra job is in the middle of that template: a single sentence telling them where to start. A magnet that gets used is worth several that get downloaded, and the difference between the two is frequently one line of instruction at the moment of highest intent.
The page after the form is the most wasted surface in most funnels. It should tell people what arrives next and when, so the next email is expected rather than interrupting, and it may make exactly one next-step offer if that offer is genuinely the next step for somebody who just took this one. Thank-you page ideas covers what belongs there and what does not.
The bridge is the part most funnels skip. They deliver, wait three days, then sell to somebody who has not yet found out whether the free thing worked — and then conclude the traffic was bad.
The bridge has one job: turn a download into a use. Somebody who used the magnet has first-hand evidence that you are useful, which is the only argument that has ever sold anything to a stranger. Somebody who filed it has a file. Every email below is built to move a person from the second group into the first, and the ask sits after that work rather than instead of it.
| When | What goes out | Job |
|---|---|---|
| T+0 · minutes | The delivery. The file on the confirmation page and in an email that arrives in seconds — plain, from a person, link in the first line. Nothing is sold here. | Deliver |
| Day 1 | The obstacle email. One question, no links, easy to answer in six words: what is the part of this that usually stops you. It is the only email in the sequence that asks for a reply, and the replies are worth more than the sequence. | Use it |
| Day 2 | The teaching email. The thing people get wrong the first time they use the magnet. Written so it is worth reading by somebody who never opens the file again. | Use it |
| Day 4 | The wider frame. What the magnet is a piece of — where it sits in the whole job, and what the finished version looks like. The offer is named here for the first time, without being asked for. | Bridge |
| Day 5 | The worked example. The approach running in practice, in enough detail that a reader could do it themselves. Ends with one line pointing at the thing that does it faster. | Bridge |
| Day 7 | The ask. One offer, one price, one reason it is for this person, and a plain statement of what happens if they say no. | Ask |
| Day 8 onward | The ordinary rhythm of your list. People who did not buy move into something worth reading rather than into silence or into a second sales sequence wearing a hat. | Long lane |
Two rules make the difference between that table and a sales sequence with a delay on it. First, every email has to be worth reading by somebody who will never buy — that constraint alone removes most of what makes bridge sequences unreadable. Second, the Day 1 question is asked for real: read the replies, keep them, and use the words people write back. They are your objection bank, your sales-page copy and, quite often, your next magnet.
Written-out versions of all five, with the subject lines and the reasoning behind each, live in the welcome email sequence guide. If you can branch on behaviour, the obvious first split is people who clicked the magnet link against people who did not — segmentation on a small list covers how far to take that before it becomes a maintenance job.
A first ask does not need to be clever. It needs to be specific enough to decide on and honest enough that a no costs the reader nothing.
Resist manufactured urgency on a first ask. A deadline that is not real is the fastest way to teach a list that your deadlines are not real, and you will want a working deadline later, on a launch that has one. Where the price itself is the open question, pricing digital products and your first digital product are the two guides that decide what you are asking for in the first place.
Then plan for the answer you will get most often. Most people who read a good first ask do not buy, and what happens to them next is a funnel of its own rather than an afterthought — the follow-up funnel guide is the sequence that runs after the no.
The Day 7 email does not have to point at a checkout. For a whole category of offers the right first ask is a registration, and the purchase happens later, in a room.
The dividing line is how much decision the offer requires. Some things can be decided on alone, from an email, in ninety seconds: a clear price, a short objection list, nothing that needs demonstrating. Others cannot — because the price is high enough that nobody commits without a conversation, because the thing has to be seen working before it is believable, or because the objection list is longer than a sales page can survive.
A defined deliverable, a price the reader can approve without asking anybody, and a short list of questions you can answer in the email itself. Sending this audience to a webinar adds a week and loses the people who were ready.
A larger commitment, a method that has to be watched to be believed, or an audience that has to see you think before they will hand over money. The room does the work the sales page cannot.
The second path has a quiet advantage: a registration is a smaller ask than a purchase, and it re-qualifies. Somebody who books an hour of their life for your topic is materially closer to buying than somebody who took a worksheet, and you find that out for the cost of an invitation. The webinar funnel guide covers the path from that seat to the sale, and how to host a webinar covers running the room itself.
Pointing the bridge at a registration means there has to be a session, on a date, that you will run whether eleven people or four hundred turn up. If that is not something you can sustain monthly, ask for the purchase and build the room later. A magnet funnel that ends at a webinar nobody runs is worse than one that ends at a modest offer somebody can buy today.
Downloads measure the promise on the opt-in page. They say nothing about who arrived, and a magnet can break every record on the way in while producing no customers on the way out.
Judge a magnet by cohort. Take everybody who subscribed through it in one month, hold that group still, and look at what they did over the following ninety days: how many used it, how many clicked the first ask, how many bought anything at all, and what the group produced in revenue. Then run the same read on the next magnet. Two cohorts is a comparison worth acting on; two download counts is a popularity contest.
| Metric | What it actually tells you | When it is low |
|---|---|---|
| Opt-in page conversion | Whether the promise matches what the visitor arrived wanting. | Rewrite the promise before you buy more traffic. A wider audience through a page that does not convert costs more and teaches less. |
| Delivery open rate | Deliverability, and whether the subject line matches the button they just clicked. | Check the from name, the subject and the sending domain first. This is the one email everybody intends to open, so a low number here is nearly always mechanical. |
| Magnet use — the reply, the click, the second visit | Whether the thing you gave away does anything. | The magnet is the problem, not the sequence. A sequence cannot recover from a download nobody opened. |
| First-ask click rate | Whether the bridge earned the ask. | Add the argument the bridge is missing. Adding urgency instead is the standard mistake and it converts the same people faster rather than more people. |
| Cohort purchase rate at ninety days | Whether the magnet qualifies anybody, which is the question the whole guide is about. | Change the magnet. Copy cannot make an unqualified subscriber into a buyer. |
| Revenue per subscriber acquired | What one subscriber from this magnet is worth to you. | It is not low or high — it is the number that decides what you can afford to pay for traffic, and you cannot set an acquisition budget without it. |
Say [400] people subscribed through the magnet last month. Ninety days later [6] of them have bought something at [$180]. The cohort produced [$1,080], which is [$2.70] per subscriber. Nothing in those brackets is a benchmark or a claim about anybody’s results — they are placeholders for your own numbers. The output is the point: it tells you what you can afford to spend to acquire one subscriber through this magnet, and until you have it, every conversation about advertising is guesswork with an invoice attached.
One caution on the cohort read: keep the window fixed. Ninety days for every magnet, every time. A magnet measured over six months will always beat one measured over thirty days, and the temptation to extend the window for the magnet you like is strong enough that it is worth writing the number down before you look.
Any form tool will tell you how many people subscribed. Answering “did this magnet produce customers” usually means matching a form export against an email export against a payments export, by hand, three months later. In Agorix the form response, the sequence behaviour and the checkout sit on one customer record — see how marketing works.
A funnel that is not producing customers has four possible faults and they are not equally likely. Work them in the order the visitor encounters them, because a fault early on makes every later number meaningless.
The instinct when a funnel disappoints is to rewrite the sequence, because the sequence is the part that feels like work. The fault is usually one step earlier than the place it shows up: a weak first-ask click rate is generally a bridge problem, a weak bridge is generally a magnet problem, and a magnet nobody uses is generally a choice problem from the very first section of this guide. Fix the earliest broken thing and re-measure before touching anything downstream.
If the whole path needs a wider look — traffic, page, sequence, offer and checkout together — the funnel diagnostics guide runs the full inspection, and customer journey mapping is where you find out whether this magnet belongs to the journey you actually sell.
Proximity to the offer. A good magnet solves the first step of the same problem your paid offer finishes solving, so that wanting the magnet is itself evidence of eventually needing the offer. Test it with one sentence: somebody who wanted this is the kind of person who eventually needs that. If the sentence needs an explanation, the magnet is too far away, and the list it builds will be full of people who cannot buy from you no matter how the follow-up is written.
Short enough to finish in one sitting. Completion is the point, not comprehensiveness — a person who finished your worksheet is a different prospect from a person who downloaded your ninety-page guide, because only one of them has any evidence that you are useful. If the material genuinely needs length, cut a first piece out of it that produces a result on its own and keep the rest for the paid path.
It is a real trade rather than a best practice. Double opt-in reduces the number of subscribers and raises the proportion who engage, which protects deliverability over the following months. Single opt-in collects more addresses, including more dead ones, and the dead ones cost you sender reputation on every send. Where your provider or your jurisdiction requires confirmation, do it, put the file on the confirmation page as well as in the email, and tell people on the opt-in page exactly what is about to happen.
A working default is five emails across about seven days: delivery, a question that asks what is getting in the way, a teaching email, the wider frame, a worked example, then the ask. The condition is not really a day count — the ask has earned its place once the reader has evidence the free thing worked, and no quantity of emails substitutes for that. The sequence itself is written out in the welcome email sequence guide.
Ask for a purchase when the offer can be decided on alone from an email: a clear price, a short objection list, nothing that needs demonstrating. Ask for a registration when the offer costs more than somebody will commit to without a conversation, needs to be seen working, or carries an objection list too long for a sales page. A registration is a smaller ask than a purchase and it re-qualifies the person who accepts it — the webinar funnel guide covers what happens after they take the seat.
Take one month of subscribers from a single magnet as a cohort and look at what that cohort did over the next ninety days: how many used the magnet, how many clicked the first ask, how many bought anything at all, and what the group produced in revenue. Then compare magnets cohort against cohort. Download counts measure the promise on the opt-in page and nothing whatsoever about what happens after it, which is why a magnet can break every record on the way in and produce no customers on the way out.
Opt-in pages, forms that write onto the customer record, the bridge sequence, audiences that update themselves as behaviour changes, and checkout — in one place, so “which magnet produced customers” is a report rather than an afternoon of matching exports.
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