By Michele Scism
The Results Lady

Day 2: Create a Freebie to Encourage Prospects to Join Your List

The second thing you’ll need to create is some sort of extra incentive for people to join your list.

Naturally, the newsletter itself should be a big draw (and thus you should focus on the benefits of receiving the newsletter). However, ideally you should offer some sort of bonus – a freebie – to make signing up for your list a “no brainer.”

What sort of freebie might you offer?  The answer rests with your target market:

What do THEY want?

• What sort of problem do they have that you can solve?
• What sort of information are they desperate to get their hands on?

You see, just because you’re offering a freebie doesn’t mean the value of the product should be low.

Instead, you should be offering high quality content – something you could sell for at least $50. That way people will say, “look at what she’s offering for free – just imagine what her paid products must be like!”

Here a few suggestions for freebies you can deliver immediately when someone joins your list:

• A free ebook or report.
• A free multi-day ecourse.
• Valuable software.
  
• An audio interview or other audio product.
  
• A valuable video.
  
• Tools like calculators or spreadsheets.
• Useful products like blog themes, screen savers, and similar.
  
• A free teleseminar.
  
• Free access to a “private membership site.”
  
• A free 10 or 15 minute consultation (be careful with offering services, unless you have a good paid upsell in place).

You may also consider requesting a physical mailing address alongside the email address. In order to easily get a physical address, your freebie may be something like a CD or DVD shipped in the mail.

Insider Tip: One of the best ways to create a more responsive list is by knowing as much as you can about your list members. If you know, specifically, what each of your subscribers prefer, then you can easily segment your list and send out highly targeted offers.

One way to segment your list is to make a short checklist as part of the newsletter sign up. Simply ask your subscribers to check their interests from a list.

Example: Let’s suppose you run a travel site. Your instructions might say, “What type of vacations interest you most? Please select all that apply from the following list:”

• Beach vacations
• Mountain vacations
• Ski vacations
• Luxury vacations
• European vacations
• US vacations
• Asian vacations
• Volunteer vacations
• Green vacations
• Cruise vacations

…and so on.

Now you have the ability to write highly targeted emails. For example, if you’re offering a discount vacation package on a choice of ski vacations or cruise vacations, you can use your segmented list to speak directly to your ski fans and your cruise fans.

You send one email to ski fans offering them a discounted ski vacation and you send another email to the cruise fans offering them a discounted cruise. Then you send a general offer to the rest of your list.

End result?

Higher conversion rates!

Test it for yourself and see how segmenting your list can boost your profits.