One advantage of doing business online is the ability to set up multiple sale funnels to offer opt-in freebies with valuable content, in exchange for the readers to join your mailing list, so you can build a relationship with them and offer further products and, or services—free and paid— to support them to get to their desired result(s).
Setting up highly targeted opt-in offers is a key element to your business success, after all, no customers means you won’t sell your products or services.
What Is A Highly Targeted Opt-In Offer?
An opt-in offer is essentially an ethical bribe that you give your audience to incentivize them to join your email list. The product or service used as the incentive is generally referred to as a lead magnet. To state the obvious, it’s assigned that title because, like a magnet, it attracts or draw your niche audience or leads to your offer, which often involves a mailing list opt-in.
You can do magical things with your leads after they’ve opted in, such as tag/add them to particular lists to receive specific, topical information designed to inform, educate, engage, and inspire in their area of interest, so they take recommended actions.
Before you get to that, however, you’ll need to establish what constitutes a lead magnet or incentive.
Lead Magnet Opt-in Incentives
When it comes to choosing incentives for your offer, there’s a wide range of options. Here’re a few that are widely used successfully to provide readers with information and solutions, that they’re seeking.
Along with growing customer base, most important is that they serve as product or service samples. You will soon know if what you’ve provided resonated with your new subscribers by way of whether they stay subscribed or they unsubscribe after accessing the information. Of course, they’re those who simply like to download anything that is free, and those who do so for other reasons. Nevertheless, lead magnets include, but are not limited to…
When selecting the format of the ‘solution’ or information you’ll provide in the opt-in offer, choose the format that best serves your purpose, yet solves the problem for your readers. Ensure it is helpful, appealing, and it effectively accomplishes the goals you’ve set for the offer.
Components To Creating Effective Lead Magnets
Many people love freebies. However, you can’t offer rubbish freebies and expect to get massive signups. While there’re people who sign up for anything because it’s free, as noted above, these freebie seekers are not your target market. Your target market has very specific characteristics and needs. It’s their qualities, situations, and pain points that you must highlight and address in your opt-in offers to make it effective.
In addition to incorporating what you know about your target market, there’re other strategies and essential elements, which will ensure that your lead magnet is doing its job. Here’re a few things to keep in mind as you create your lead magnet:
Quick Accessibility – Effective lead magnets must be designed to be consumed quickly—within a day or less. This allows the audience to implement the solution or apply the information as soon as possible. Quick delivery further helps to build trust with your new subscribers, and they’re likely to respond to your follow up email messages.
Coherence – Your offers must be clear and easy for the target audience to understand. Matching your audience and lead magnet with an experience level ensure that new subscribers don’t opt-in to an offer that is beyond their experience level or need. Use simple terms/concepts for new learners and advanced terms/concepts for advanced learners. Doing so cuts the frustration level and minimize your unsubscribe rate. Hence, identify who the offer is for and who it’s not for.
Rapid Results –The best lead magnets quickly provide relief from specific pain points related to a problem or question. Quick results further build your authority and expert status on the topic, which prompts your audience to buy your paid products and provide you with earned media.
Laser Targeted – Offers, solutions, and information must be laser targeted to the audience you want to sign up for your email list. So, use a profile persona created from your demographic research. Make certain your offers and lead magnets contain solutions and words that are specific to them. This also helps to keep freebie seekers and confusion to a minimum, as well as keep your list clean.
Funnel Vision – Whether you do it at the end of the lead magnet or in a follow up email, give your new subscribers a hint of what action they should take next. Just as a syllabus helps students to follow along, providing a glimpse of your sales funnel lineup guides subscribers to your suggested recommendations in an orderly fashion. In addition, you could make sales after an initial signup offer.
Brand Consistency – It’s important for your opt-in offers to be brand consistent. This means the visual branding and the quality of the items should be the same as your paid products. Keeping the topics, branding, and quality consistent throughout your entire business/sales funnel makes your audience feel safe, whether they sign up for a free offer or buy a product or service. They’ll know what to expect from you and can easily identify your items. This feeling of safety turns new subscribers into returning, loyal, and long-term customers.
Focused Relevant Content – It’s easy to lose focus as you create an opt-in offer. To help you make your offer effective, identify popular posts and topics on your site. Create an offer, for content that doesn’t already have an opt-in. The offer should be specifically related to the content and the target audience you want to attract.
Dedicated Opt-in Landing Pages – Your landing pages can be short or long, but each should focus on one topic, solution, and offer. Design the page to introduce the offer and its benefits. Include an opt-in form to collect name and email address so the offer can be delivered.
An effective lead magnet requires that it be something your audience needs, wants, and is simple for them to understand. It should also be highly targeted to your audience.
Creating a Compelling Opt-in Offer
The best way to approach creating a compelling opt-in offer is to assess where you currently stand and then choose the direction you want to take. Use your business goals, as well as your audience’s needs to help you create compelling offers. Your opt-ins should resonate with your audience and you should guide them to take specific calls to action.
Analyze Your Current Content
The first thing you should do is look at the content you already have. Check the analytics to ascertain which blog posts, for example, are popular. This content is the perfect place to add a related opt-in offer.
By adding the opt-in offer on those posts, you’ll attract and reach more people in a specific subset of your audience. This practice will allow you to see exactly what they need, want, and are interested in and they’re likely to sign up for your opt-in offer.
Target Audience Personas
If you don’t yet have enough content to analyze, create several different audience personas based on the various types of people you want to work with, or who need your products. A good place to start is with the different categories you have on your blog. Which audience persona is interested in each category? What are their pain points?
Solve Your Audience’s Problems
Each person who comes to your blog or website via a search has a reason for doing so. They’ve searched for something to solve a problem that they have. If you know where your audience hangs out online, you can survey them to find out which problems are most pressing, so you can choose which one to address.
Educate Your Audience
When you find out their pain points, you’ll know their problems. From there, you can choose what you want to educate them about. Providing education about problems and solutions sometimes requires that you agitate the problem, so that they want the cure. This isn’t about tricking them into buying, it means helping them to see that if they don’t take action then, the pain will persist, and your product/service will help them to nip it in the bud.
Audience Engagement
If you already have an email list, social media pages, social media groups, or other ways to communicate with your audience, engage with them. In the process, you can glean information to determine what type of lead magnet(s) to create. Ask them questions, survey/poll them, find out what they’re searching for, and then provide the solution.
Naming Your Opt-in
When you create your opt-in, it should be specific to the problem it solves and who is the target audience. This will make it easier to name and add specific benefits in your copy. For instance, ‘3 Key Strategies You Can Apply To Boost Sales’ is specific. It provides information about what’s inside, without any confusion. It’s also short and to the point.
Create Appealing Offers
It’s important that your offer catches the reader’s attention and provides exceptional value. So, offer a much-needed solution or group of solutions, which they are convinced will make their lives easier. Show realistic benefits they can expect and use words that motivates and compel them to opt-in.
And when they do, should be impressed with the high-quality free information that they can put into action. They’ll appreciate that you know what you’re talking about and will likely take the next step (your call to action) to make a purchase.
Remember that the content is supposed to move your audience forward from where they are now, to where they want to be. This will require research about your audience, products, services (and anything else you promote), so you’re better equipped to create the right opt-in offers.
Develop Multiple Entry Points
Now you know the various types of opt-ins you can create, and what makes a compelling opt-in offer, let’s take a look how to get more signups
Having multiple entry points in the funnel provides your audience with many opportunities to sign up for your email list. This means that you can segment your list even more in order to target their interests and pain points.
Let’s look at some places you can add an opt-in to get more signups:
Blog Posts — Giving your viewers an option before and after blog posts is a fabulous way to get their attention. Even putting the opt-in offer in both spots can increase signups.
Feature Box – This area ‘above the fold’ on your website is another great place for a site-wide, opt-in offer to draw attention to it and give viewers a reason to take up the offer.
Side Bar – This is another place for a site wide opt-in offer. Most of your viewers will be a little blind to offers here, so this type of offer should be more general to your overall audience just like the one in the feature box.
About Page – If a visitor to your site wants to learn more about you and sample the quality of your items, offering an opt-in will increase your sign-ups. Look at your analytics to get some idea about who visits your about page to get ideas. A good freebie for this page would be a resource list.
Custom Landing Pages – You should create a custom landing page for every freebie you create. It makes it easier to share. In addition, it helps your audience know what to do.
Footer – Someone who takes the time to scroll all the way down to your footer really wants information about you and your offers. A site wide freebie in the footer is a great place to get more sign-ups from interested candidates.
Contact Page – This is where people reach of for some form of help or to ask questions. Placing a lead magnet here can get you more signups.
Popup, Slide, or Pop-under – You can set these up now to be specific to the page your audience is visiting, which can help you make the opt-in more targeted than a site wide opt-in offer.
While it may seem like a lot of work, the more places you can show an opt-in offer the better your results will be. The great thing is that you can reuse some of the freebies, if they fit with the content on the page. You have barely 3 seconds to capture and hold your viewers’ attention, but with a good landing page and a relevant offer, you can keep their attention longer by getting them onto your list and marketing funnel.
Best Practices for Your landing Page
Let’s talk a bit about creating your landing pages. There’re a few best practices that you can use for any type of page, landing page, sales page, or opt-in offer. Some best practices make work effective, so more people grab your opt-in offer. Your opt-in landing page should:
Be dedicated to One Offer – Don’t confuse your audience by offering more than one opt-in offer per landing page. It doesn’t have to be long; in fact, when it comes to opt-ins, a short and simple page is better.
Dedicated to One Audience – When you set up special landing pages for each offer, you can also set up special landing pages for your audience members. For example, if he comes to your site from a specific place, having a specialized and dedicated landing page will make your offer convert at a higher rate.
Headlines – Ensure that you capture your target audiences’ attention by using words, phrases, descriptions, and hooks that speak to them or identify them, specifically. If they know the message pertains to them, they’re more likely to click through and read more.
Testimonials – Add testimonials from people who are in the same target market. Testimonials help others decided whether you’re to be trusted and whether there’s a viable solution to make life better or easier. Hint: Ask for testimonials in your follow up emails for every product, service, or freebie that you offer.
Video & Images – To be effective, images should be large, attractive, and stand out on your landing pages. An attractive cover image, an introductory video, clear and visible ‘download’ buttons improve conversions.
White Space – It’s also important to include white space. For freebies, making good use of bullets can help get your points across, without putting too much text on the landing page. In addition, each bullet stands out due to the white space around it.
Color – When choosing colors for landing pages, match it to your website and business branding so that no matter how visitors end up on your landing page they know it’s yours.
Invoke Scarcity – Even though you’re giving something away, let your audience knows that you won’t be giving it away forever. You want them to act now, rather than 6 months down the line.
Keep it Simple – Don’t ask for too much information. Normally, name and email address are enough. You can always send them a survey and follow up to get more information. In general, the more information you ask for, fewer people will sign up.
Emphasize Value – When you add copy, focus on the value. You want to attract. Tell them what’s in it for them, so their focus is on that and not the fact that they need to provide their email address.
Relevant Button Text – Get more creative than ‘download’ and ‘sign up.’ Instead, go longer and tell them what the results are of clicking the button.
Include Stats – When putting copy on the page, think about stats that will help your audience decide to convert.
Don’t underestimate the importance of your squeeze page even when promoting a free offer to get people to subscribe to your list. It’s still important to treat the opt-in as you would any product you suggest, because your audience will learn your standards by downloading your freebie.
Effective Follow Up Strategies
While your email follow-up series is separate from your opt-in, if you want to grow your list quickly, keeping subscribers is as important as getting them to subscribe. The way to ensure subscribers stick with you is to set up a follow-up series based on the opt-in they subscribed to.
• Thank you & Delivery – You’ll need to send subscribers to a thank you page immediately. Also send them a thank you email, reminding them how to download the product. Give good instructions so that they know how to get their item and what they can expect from it.
• Create a Series of Emails – General an email series designed to educate your audience and guide them to the next step in your sales funnel. Talk about their topic related problems and work up to providing paid solutions.
• Keep Emails Relevant – When creating the autoresponder messages, it’s important to think about how the person entered your list, what they downloaded, and what their pain points are so that you can stay pertinent.
• Add Trending Information – Once they’re on your list, you can also add trending information and one time offers into the mix of the autoresponder emails. A good practice is to promote something after every three or so educational and informative emails.
Following up is imperative, because its what’s going to keep subscribers on your list. You’ll have fewer unsubscribes if you’re providing interesting, relevant, and useful information on a regular basis.
Putting it all Together
Now it’s time to put everything together. Setting up highly targeted opt-in offers, with multiple points of entry to your mailing list, is the fastest way to grow your list. So…
Develop Content
You can use private label rights content, content you create, content you pay to have created, or a combination of any of the three. This helps to ensure that you fill your online real-estate with information that your audience needs.
Create Your Opt-in Offers
Look at the most popular content, based on analytics, and determine what type of content could make it more useful to your viewers. If you don’t have content of your own, look at what your competition is doing.
Create a Landing Page for Your Offer
Help your audience make the choice to download your opt-in offer by creating a dedicated landing page for each. This will make it easier to add your offers to other areas on your site, so your audience has many ways to obtain them and get on your email list.
Design Thank You / Download Pages
Don’t forget to make use of the thank you or download page. This is prime real estate. You can put an upsell on a freebie download page. However, make the directions on the thank you page prominent, so that they know exactly what to expect.
Develop an Autoresponder Series for Each Offer
Take the time to create 7 to 10 emails to thank your audience for subscribing to your list, remind them how to access the freebie, and educate them about their pain points and your solutions. This is the time to show your subscribers what to expect from you by giving them an example of your knowledge and integrity.
Match Offers with Relevant Content
Once you’ve created an offer, add it to the related content on your website. For example, if you have a blog about meal planning, you could provide a content upgrade (freebie offer) such as a free 3-day meal plan based on the reader’s goals.
Place Your Offers in Multiple Places
It’s important to have multiple points of entry for your audience to get on your email list. The more offers you can add in multiple places on your site, the faster your target market will find you and opt-in. While you can technically add offers in any areas you want, it’s best to use a ‘related topic’ strategy, so that the offer will be more meaningful and useful to people who land on that page/post. This makes it more likely that those interested in the topic will opt-in.
Make Your Offers Stand out
Wherever you place your offers, whether via anchor text, in between paragraphs of a blog post, under or over a blog post, in a pop-up, etc., make the offer stand out. Use color, bold text, graphics, outlines, and images.
Promote Your Content
The final key to getting more subscribers to your list is to ensure that you promote the content that you create. Share every new blog post. Share the content with the people already on your email list. Ask people to share for you, too.
Finally, it’s imperative that you do what you say you will do. When people sign up for your email list, they’re expecting to receive the information you promised. Let go of your fear of sending emails to your list because you have knowledge and information that they need and want. It’s the entire reason you started a business, right?
Need help setting up your highly targeted opt-in offers? My VIP Laser Coaching is your solution.
© Cherry-Ann Carew
Cherry-Ann Carew is an Online Business Coach, who supports emerging business owners simplify their start-up journey and helps existing businesses scale, so that they can earn uncapped income and live life on their terms.