How to Create a Lead Magnet for Your Volleyball Club

Let's start from the top. What is a lead magnet? A lead magnet is a marketing term for a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details (Investopedia).

How valuable are a leads contact details to you? As a volleyball club, the answer is very valuable. If a potential athlete starts with your club at the age of 12, that is 7 potential years worth of customer value (club dues, uniforms, camps, clinics, etc). You can do the back of the napkin math for your club.

Knowing this, we invest a large amount of our time into two topics:

1. Making sure our current customers are happy, we are serving their needs, and we are acting in their best interest.
2. Prospecting and qualifying new leads into our funnel.

One of the best ways to identify new leads is by offering a high value lead magnet for free in exchange for that potential leads permission to send them marketing emails. 

How do I know what to use as a lead magnet?

You have likely interacted with a number of lead magnets without even realizing it:

• Free subscription trials
• Samples (like at Costco pre-COVID)
• White papers
• Newsletters
• Checklists
• How-to Guides

The list goes on and on. One way you can think about creating a lead magnet is to answer the most commonly asked questions you get asked by new athletes and their families. Answer those questions, and package it up in a nice PDF format that can be easily delivered via an automatic email signup (more on that below).

Another volleyball specific lead magnet that you can test out is to offer a free (or almost free) clinic to potential new athletes to come and "try it out". This is a strategy used far and wide across the fitness industry with 7-day free trials, or workout passes for new customers.

Delivering your lead magnet after subscription

If you develop an electronic lead magnet (here is an example of what we use at Bay to Bay Boys Volleyball Club) then you can use your email service provider to set up an auto responder email sequence to deliver the lead magnet PDF instantly after a lead fills out their contact info.

We use Kajabi for our email service but we have also used ConvertKit with great success. Both have easy to use pre-built automatic email sequences for delivering your lead magnet.

What to do after you have gotten a new lead

From here, it is time to start moving your lead through your club volleyball funnel (deeper dive on that concept here). In short, you need to continue to provide the valuable insight into your club, the programming you offer, and how it can work for your new lead. You can do this through an auto-responder set of emails (here is a simple example).

The goal is to move your lead from a subscriber to a participant to a full time member of the club. Lead magnets are a great way to get potential athletes and their families into the top of your funnel, from there you can play around with ways to continue to move them further and further down towards your end goal of getting them to become full time members of the club.