Opt-In Offer Ideas to Grow Your Email List
One of the most valuable assets for your small business is your email list. It helps you connect with new potential clients and nurture those budding relationships into paying clients. I always encourage new small business owners to focus more of their energy on email marketing rather than social media marketing. Your email list is a form of “warm” marketing where the people on your list have already expressed interest in the services or digital products you offer. It requires much less time and energy to develop a relationship with people already familiar with you and your services than trying to connect with people who don’t know who you are or what you do.
An essential first step to grow your email list is to create an opt-in offer. While developing a valuable offer for your audience requires an upfront investment of time and energy, there is a long-term payoff for your efforts: your email list can grow while you sleep — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
What is an opt-in offer?
An opt-in offer is a freebie you give your audience in exchange for their email address. This type of offer is also sometimes referred to as a gated offer since the visitor can only gain access to the item or information by supplying their email address. The most important part of the offer is that it must be valuable to your target audience.
The main goal of an opt-in offer is to build a list of potential clients you can contact regularly with free content and promotions. This gives you a level of control that's not possible using any other medium.
As we touched on earlier, opt-in offers are an effective way to grow your email list, but which offer will work best for you? The best offer for your audience is one that solves a specific problem for them.
For example, this is my opt-in offer. When you click a download for FREE, it goes to the opt-in page.
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How do you grow your email list?
Opt-in offers help to position you as a thought leader in your industry and show that you are willing to share some of your knowledge with readers for free. Your freebie also gives your audience a little taste of what it would be like to work with you, so that before you even personally interact with your reader, your opt-in offer is already developing trust with that individual.
When you create your opt-in offer, remember that your offer should be one solution for one problem. The offer doesn’t need to be complicated; in fact, simple freebies work extremely well.
Following is a list of 15 opt-in offer ideas to help you grow your email list.
15 opt-in offer ideas
1. Create a video teaser for a video course or tutorial
If you created a video series to teach your audience how to do something, you can produce a mini video that provides the viewer with a quick overview of the series and a short PDF. If all goes well, the viewer will see the value of your course and will then purchase the full course or hire you because they now know what to expect.
2. Provide an audio transcript of your blog
If you write somewhat lengthy blog posts, consider creating a recording of you reading the post. Many listeners don’t have the time to read a post from start to finish, but they may enjoy listening to it while sitting in traffic on the ride home from work.
3. Provide Ebooks, PDF guides, or whitepapers
This is a great way to establish yourself as a subject matter expert and build trust with your site visitors. Create an ebook, guide, or whitepaper and promote it on your website and social media. Then create a landing page for it, where your audience can enter their email to access the opt-in offer.
4. Provide a checklist
People love checklists; it’s a great way to simplify and organize a process for your target market. An easy way to create a checklist is to use one of your blog posts where you outlined steps to take as part of a process.
5. Give your audience a quiz
Quizzes are highly interactive and fun. Give your readers a free quiz, but have them opt-in to get the results.
6. Provide a resource guide for your favorite apps, tools, books, etc.
When you’ve worked in an industry for a while, you get to know which tools are truly helpful and which are not. You can compile a list of your favorite tools along with how you use them and what you love the most about them. Your audience will appreciate the tips. It’s like you’re letting them in on your trade secrets.
7. Provide swipe files for your target audience
Swipe files are email samples, copy, or examples you keep on hand and use in specific situations (with a little tweaking). You’re providing your audience with samples that worked well for you.
8. Produce a webinar
You can either do a live webinar or use the recording of one you’ve done before. This is a great way to generate credibility with your audience. In a live webinar, you can have a question-and-answer session at the end, which can help build trust and engagement with your target audience.
9. Provide templates for your readers
Supplying your audience with tried-and-true templates (such as spreadsheets or Google Docs) that have worked for you, is a great way to generate interest. You’re making your audience’s life easier by having the bulk of the work already done for them. All they need to do is tweak and customize it to suit their purposes.
10. Offer a free challenge
The challenge is usually targeted toward a specific problem area (for example, weight loss, changing habits, exercise, etc). The visitor agrees to participate in a challenge for a set amount of time (10 days, 30 days, etc). The important thing to remember when creating a challenge is that the length of time needs to be short enough to keep people engaged, but long enough for them to start achieving results. And of course, once the challenge ends, your participants will be so excited about the results, that they’ll want to sign up for more.
11. Provide an infographic
Visual data can be processed faster which is a big time saver for your visitors.
12. Add a link to your email signature
A link in your signature can take people to a landing page where they can subscribe to your blog, newsletter, or any other freebie you’re offering.
13. Host offline events
You can host workshops, seminars, and conferences to reach a wider audience. People who have attended your events may be more willing to be contacted afterward.
14. Encourage subscribers to forward and share your emails
Whenever you send emails out to your subscribers, be sure to include social sharing buttons and a button to “email to a friend”. This makes it easy for your subscriber to share something of value with their friends.
15. Create a Facebook Group
This is a great way to interact with your audience and get to know them better. At first, some people may be hesitant about being on your email list. A Facebook Group would help to build trust slowly through consistent interactions. Eventually, they may decide to join and subscribe to your email list.
How do you add your opt-in form to your website?
Once you have a solid opt-in offer idea, you should add it to your website. There are several ways to add your opt-in offer to your website. One of my favorite ways is to use an email marketing service provider, such as ConvertKit. You can easily create a form in ConvertKit and embed it into your Squarespace website platform.
Conclusion
As I mentioned earlier, your email list is one of the most valuable assets for your small business. You can grow your email list by creating and promoting an opt-in offer. Your freebie will help to create a list of people who are already interested in you and your services. Your “warm” email list can be used to nurture and develop relationships with potential clients, and eventually, turn your leads into paying clients.
I hope this article was helpful and gave you plenty of ideas to grow your email list!
If you’d like a professional designer to help create an opt-in offer such as a report or case study ebook, please contact me for more information.
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