Leverage “Free Stuff” to Generate More Leads

The digital marketing concept itself is simple—drive relevant traffic to your site and convert those visitors into customers. However, executing this concept is a difficult challenge for most businesses. It’s much easier said than done.

Driving traffic to your website can be expensive and is only half the battle. Converting that Web traffic into customers is the other half and it is where you really see your efforts pay off. Wordstream, a digital marketing agency, recently did a research study that confirms the difficulty of converting traffic.

Wordstream conducted research across 1,000 advertising accounts and came to the following conclusion:

• 25% of the accounts were converting at 1% or less
• The average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%
• The top 25% performing accounts were converting at 5.31% or higher

With hefty marketing costs involved in driving traffic to your website, these conversion rates can really hurt your pockets, depending on your revenue per sale. In most cases, a website visitor can take two actions:

1. Purchases or
2. Leaves your website.

However, I’d like to discuss giving prospects a third option:

1. Joining your email list.

Why Join Your Email List?

Some prospects are just not ready to pull the trigger on a purchase. They may be interested, but perhaps they are still in the research or window shopping stage. Just because they’re not ready to give you their money now, it doesn’t mean they won’t be later. You need a way to keep nurturing them and occupy their mind-space for when they’re ready to buy. Just like dating, if they’re not ready to commit to marriage, date them for a while until they’re ready. Spend more time explaining why they should ‘marry you.’

How Do You Get Them to Join Your Email List?

Nobody likes getting spam emails, so why would they join your email list? This is where giving away something free comes into place. Give them something valuable that solves their problems and is easily accessible.

Some popular examples would be eBooks, guides, and video training courses. They get something of value while taking minimal risk. To quell their concerns that they will receive unwanted emails from you, speak to the value of being on your email list, such as receiving discounts on products and receiving helpful tips. Use value to outweigh their reservations.

Here are a couple of examples:

FloatTubeFishing.com – This niche online retailer generously offers an entire float tube fishing eBook for free in exchange for opting into their list. This is a strong offering to build a list, as it’s a 250-300-page eBook, not just a small PDF file. They bought the rights to resell/distribute this eBook, which was a hefty initial cost, but are now building an email list of hundreds of anglers they can remarket to.

Fishbowl – This inventory software company offers a free Excel inventory template to prospects who sign up. The spreadsheet fills their immediate inventory management needs while an email nurturing series exposes them to a more robust inventory management solution. If they associate your brand with easing their pain and solving their problems, they’ll likely become a customer when they’re ready to purchase.

Conclusion

As you can see, you can use the power of “free stuff” to get prospects one step closer to doing business with you. Reverse the risk pendulum and give them a taste of how you can solve their problems. The alternative of offering a “lead magnet” can help plug the leak of exiting traffic and give you the opportunity to follow up with them another time.

I encourage you to test this tactic for yourself and experiment with different things that will appeal to your target market and pique their interest. Leverage “free stuff” and then watch the leads start pouring in.