How to get more engagement with your freebies

When you create a memorable sign-up experience new subscribers remember you, engage with your content and get ready to work with you!

Freebies, opt-in incentives, content upgrades, we create them so that people are more likely to join our mailing lists. Bottom line, you offer something of value for free in exchange for their contact details. But are you getting engagement from the freebies that you create? Do your subscribers become clients?

Besides getting more subscribers on your list, freebies give people a taste of your expertise. The content and theme of your freebie can help position you as the problem solver of your customers’ pain point. They also give subscribers a taste of your brand and your unique way of working.

Building your mailing list is a great way to transform site visitors into potential leads but only if there is good engagement. Here are a few points to consider.

Optimise the sign-up process

Make the sign-up process easy

• Is it easy to find your freebie?
• Are you sharing it on social media?
• If so, how often?
• Is it positioned prominently on your site? Because if they can’t see it they can’t sign up for it.

Are you offering multiple freebies? It can get really confusing, not just for your site visitor, but for you, as a site owner if there are different sign-up offerings all over your site. It can also be hard for you to manage the delivery and follow up with multiple offerings.

(I had a client sign up with me last year because she couldn’t figure out why people weren’t engaging with here mailing list freebie. After a quick 5 minute check we saw that the sign up process was broken. Her facebook ad campaign had run for over 3 months leading to a dead page! Nightmare. She was running multiple campaigns and offering 4 different things all at once, but things got all muddled up and broken! We quickly simplified the whole system so that she had a system that actual engaged and nurtured subscribers.) 

Create a personalized experience

If you’ve created a freebie and you’re delivering it through MailChimp (or another email marketing platform) you have the opportunity to tailor that sign-up process. Sometimes when we’ve created a freebie, we’re keen to get it out there so the sign-up process can be a bit of an after-thought. If you just rush through that process, you may be missing the opportunity to offer a more branded, memorable experience for your subscribers. Your mission with the sign-up process is to be remembered.

If you have a freebie already on offer, pop over and test it. Just sign up for it yourself and notice the pages and emails that you see along the way.

Firstly, check that all the links lead to the right places.

Secondly, make sure that there is some personality in the sign-up process.

And lastly, make sure there is some kind of information or reminder in there to drag your confirmation email into the primary inbox. Sometimes the confirmation emails get filtered out as spam or promotions. While you have their full attention in the sign-up process, make sure they know they’ll miss out on future, emails if they don’t take action on this now. 

The actual content of your freebie

The freebie should be something of value for free, but it doesn’t have to be an entire course or a massive ebook. A freebie, by definition, should be a “quick win”– something that your subscriber can read or do right away. When it’s quick they are more likely to engage with it immediately, rather than putting it on the to-do list.

We want them to engage with your content so that they look out for your future emails. They’ll do this if they know you’re offering good stuff.

Following up

If they have joined your list, they’re interested in what you have to offer. They want to hear from you. So don’t leave it too long to get back in touch. People are more inclined to open your emails when they come soon after their sign up.

You can easily add an automated follow up in your email marketing service (available in MailChimp for paid accounts or for free with MailerLite). This means they hear from you a day later, 2 days, a week later while you’re still fresh in their minds. They haven’t forgotten about you.

Sometimes when you have a mailing list and you email people once a month, new subscribers may have to wait up to 30 days to hear from you if they subscribed just after your last mailout. SO that’s far too long and they may have forgotten about you in that time.

The key to email marketing is engagement. That’s the whole point of creating those freebies. Get people to join your list. Get them to see your future emails. Help them to recognise your brand by tailoring the experience. If you follow all these steps you’re on your way to getting a lead generation process set up on autopilot!

Hit me up for help if you need it 🙂