The freebie is a popular way to entice a new subscriber to offer up their information so that you can have them on your email list. The important thing about a freebie is that it should be useful, valuable and of the same quality as the things you sell to your audience.
If it’s a lesser value, they may not realise it and they will think this is an example of the type of work that you do and not buy your products or use your services. If you are serious about getting more clients, your freebie needs to be the perfect example of what your audience and prospective clients’ expect. However, don’t make your free gift something that you have to produce separately for each genre; that would be too difficult and be very time consuming. You want it to be generic and only cost you to produce it one time.
EBooks – This is by far the most popular freebie it’s a great gift to give away, especially if you use one you normally sell, it will have a perceived value to the visitor. If it’s something you normally sell on your website or elsewhere, then the visitor feels a lot of incentive to get the item free.
Coupons – People like getting discount coupons, so if you can offer your visitors a coupon code for signing up for your email list that is a great freebie to offer. Don’t discount your work too much though, because that devalues what you do and can make you look desperate.
Reports – A report is just a short eBook that is more focused on solving one problem, instead of an overall “how to” like a book would be. If you’re in a business which promotes vegetarianism, you could for instance offer a free larder check sheet, conversion or substitution chart for your readers to use.
Check-lists – An awesome freebie to give your audience are check-lists to use that you’ve tried and put together especially for them. There are some fantastic examples of check-lists here at Sample Templates, with the added bonus of a FREE download.
Videos – Offering a video lesson or videos of a live event as a freebie is a great way to re-purpose videos that you’ve made. Just load them up to deliver to the people who sign up for your list.
Getting people to opt in and subscribe to your list is an important part of making your on-line business, or the on-line marketing of your offline business successfully. Potential sales are still in the email list, no matter what other channels exist for marketing your business.
So once you get your audience on your list how do you keep them there? I’ll be writing more about that next week.
