It's most certainly not a new concept to build your email list using freebies. But, I really want to emphasize that this has to be one of the biggest goals of your business – you have to increase your list size if you're going to boost your business.
You want people to be able to enter into a campaign where they frequently take advantage of your high-quality products, both free and paid. To get them to join that email list in the first place, you're really going to get them excited about the free product you’re offering.
Email lists overwhelm people, so this is another area where you need to stand out. Hopefully, you belong to your competitors’ lists by now since they’re a point of research. What are your competitors giving away in order to entice people to join their list? How many squeeze pages and opt in forms do they seem to have set up? Evaluating these things can help you figure out what you want to do as you improve your own list size.
Of course, the main goal is to really draw people's attention to what you're doing. This means getting people to download and talk about what you're giving away for free without you having to try very hard to get them to do it.
You can do a similar free product launch just as you would do for a paid product launch – completely shocking people that what you’re giving away is free. You can really build it up and get people ready to pull out their wallet to pay a solid sum of money, only to offer it for free for a simple email sign-up on launch day. You can even arrange it so that affiliates get tagged for these sign-ups, using a program such as Nanacast.com.
There's some a creative ways to go about this. Again, I don't want to stifle your creative process, rather I want to get the wheels turning on how you can build your email list using freebies that are different from anything else out there. If you have different enough products, offered completely for free, your list size will inevitably grow like crazy.
What You'll Give Away
You have to figure out what you're going to give away. It has to be great! Eventually, you'll have a whole stable of really great free products to give away. For now, settle on one in particular that you think will make a big splash.
If you want your campaign to work quickly, consider trends and specific needs you've noticed lately. If you want a more evergreen freebie to give away, consider topics that come up time and time again.
Really do some research and digging, beyond where your competitors may have researched. You want to come up with an all-inclusive free product people can download so your list can grow and you gain their trust.
You can create a video series, a full ecourse, an ebook, or a combination of all of the above. You can give away software or other tools that will make their life easier.
Whatever you do, try to set up your giveaways so that even the presentation is different from anything people have seen before. Simply saying, "download my free ebook" is not going to be very effective because there are a million messages out there like that.
You need to really sell the benefits of your freebie just as you would with a paid product. There is a lot of competition out there and a lot of free products out there. Create a sales page that people can't refuse – so much so that they’d pull out their credit card to buy right away. They should really feel like they got away with something when they see the value of what you’ve given them, free.
When they see that all they have to do is enter their email address, they’ll definitely be on board. Then, once they see the content, they’ll be so excited that they spread news of it everywhere. Really getting people excited and solving their problems is the way you get things to go viral on the Internet.
Take some time right now to brainstorm what you might give away that will accomplish these goals. Don't be boring and remember that your passion is to help as many people as possible. What could you create or give away for free that will help to accomplish what you set out to do?
Building Trust
A huge part of the reason marketers and companies give things away for free is to build trust in the marketplace. It can be really hard to know who to turn to online. There are so many options that it's overwhelming. You’ll be a beacon of light in all the confusion. You want people to trust you so much that they read every email you send out, download everything you give them for free, and go on to purchase products from you or even coaching from you. When people ask for trustworthy marketers or companies in your niche, you want your name to be mentioned first.
Consider how Amazon.com does this. They are well known for offering exceptional customer service. People are willing to pay more for certain products because of the trust they have in Amazon. They know that many other online stores have difficult return policies and take forever to ship products in the first place. Amazon has immediate customer service and extremely fast shipping, especially for their Prime members. Zappos is another example of this, incidentally now owned by Amazon as well.
T-Mobile has started launching campaigns where they will pay for people’s early termination fees if they switch from another carrier. They've also stopped charging people for data overages, thus building trust and getting customers to switch to them even though they've been a fledgling mobile network. Sometimes, it takes breaking away from the status quo and doing things you know will really wow the audience to get their attention.
If you really care about people and have their best interests at heart, you will be more easily able to brainstorm ways you can stand out and build their trust. The customer service focused business really cares about people – even people who’ve yet to spend money.
Some customers are very quick to warm up and others will take longer. Some of those that took a little longer to warm-up will become lifelong customers and evangelists of yours. Prove yourself over time and you can grow your business exponentially and really set yourself apart from other businesses who are really only out for themselves.
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