Lead gen templates: the five I'd actually use

What a lead gen template is actually for

Lead generation is a chain. Someone gets a reason to raise their hand, you capture it, you make first contact, you keep track of who's where, and you follow up before they cool off. A template is useful at each link and useless as a whole.

That's why I'm sceptical of the all-in-one pack. It gives you a lead gen template for every step in the same visual style and none of them fitted to your offer. You end up editing all five anyway, which is the exact work you bought the pack to avoid.

The test I use: if I couldn't fill it in within an hour, it isn't a template, it's a project.

Template one: the lead magnet

This is the thing that gives a stranger a reason to give you their email address. If you only get one right, get this one right.

I wrote the full structure up in the lead magnet template, a seven block, one page skeleton that works for a checklist, a pricing sheet or a swipe file. I won't repeat it here. The short version is that the promise goes at the top in the reader's words, the substance takes up at least half the page, and there's one next action.

If you're still deciding what the asset should be, the options live in lead magnet ideas, and the rest of the pile is filed under lead magnets.

Template two: the landing page

The page that sits in front of the magnet needs five things: a headline that repeats the promise, two or three lines on what's inside, a form with as few fields as you can get away with, one piece of proof, and nothing else. No navigation, no second offer.

Most landing page templates are built around the hero image, which is the least important element on the page. Pick one that gives you a short form and room for a sentence or two of proof, and delete everything else it comes with. I dug into why these pages quietly fail in the lead magnet landing page post.

Template three: the first email

There are two first emails, and mixing them up is the common mistake.

The first is the delivery email, which sends the asset to someone who asked for it. It should be short, give them the link in the opening lines, and say what to do with it. The second is the cold first touch, which goes to someone who hasn't asked for anything.

For the delivery one, the lead magnet delivery email covers the wording. For the cold one, the template I'd start from is the one in a sales prospecting template you can run this week.

My honest view on cold email templates: use them for the skeleton and nothing more. Subject line, one line of relevance, one line of value, one question. The moment a template's sentences land in a prospect's inbox word for word, they get recognised, because they've landed in a few hundred other inboxes too.

Template four: the tracker

This one's unglamorous and it's the one that decides whether you're still doing lead generation in six weeks.

It's a spreadsheet. Company, contact, next action, next action date, last touch, source, notes. The column that matters is next action date. A tracker without it is a graveyard of contacts, and I've built that graveyard more than once, back when I ran growth at a data company and kept "just a few" leads in my head.

Don't hunt for a fancy one. The prospect tracker template is a ten minute build, and a CRM can take over once the spreadsheet starts to creak.

Template five: the follow-up

Most leads you lose, you lose here, and it's the template people skip because it feels pushy.

What you want is a short sequence written in advance, so that follow-up doesn't depend on how you feel on the day. Three or four touches, each one adding something new (a relevant example, a question, a useful link) rather than "just checking in", plus a stop rule so you know when to quit. The lead follow up system walks through how I set that up.

Where lead gen templates stop being useful

Templates solve the blank page problem. They don't solve the "nobody replied" problem, and it's worth being clear on the difference.

Say your lead magnet works and your follow-up goes out on schedule. At some point you send a person a proposal, a report or a deck, and from that moment you have no idea what's happening. Did they open it? Did they get past page two? The tracker tells you what you sent and when. It says nothing about what the reader did with it.

That's the gap I built LiveDocument for. You attach a recorded walkthrough to a PDF or an image, send one link, and see page level engagement afterwards, so the document arrives with your face and voice on it rather than sitting silent in an inbox. It won't write your emails, host your landing page or replace your CRM, and it isn't a template either. It covers the stretch between "sent" and "understood" and not much else.

If you're sending lead generation offers to clients rather than gathering leads, that's a different document, and I covered how to write it in the lead generation proposal post.

Build, buy or copy

My rule of thumb, for what it's worth:

• Copy the structure, always. The lead magnet skeleton, the landing page elements and the tracker columns are well understood and you gain nothing by reinventing them.
• Write the words yourself. The headline, the promise and the emails are where your offer lives. A template can't know what your buyers say out loud.
• Pay only for the thing you'll use weekly. For me that was a decent form and email tool, not a template pack.

Common questions

Start with the tracker

If you only do one thing this week, open a spreadsheet and build the tracker. It takes ten minutes, and it makes every other template easier to use because you'll know who each one is for.

I'm building LiveDocument because I was tired of sending things into the void. If that's a feeling you know, it's at livedocument.com.