One of the most important things you can do to generate leads online is create a mailing list. This allows your visitors the ability to demonstrate their interest in your brand and products by subscribing. It actually takes them from being ‘cold leads’ and it turns them into ‘warm leads’. These are now people who have demonstrated their interest in your business and they are showing a willingness to receive additional correspondence from you.
But in order to create that type of leads, you need to be able to convince people to sign up in the first place. Why should someone willingly accept more junk in their inbox? This is where your ‘incentive’ comes in and it is an important tool to grasp if you want to maximize your success.
What is an Incentive?
An incentive is exactly what it sounds like – it is something you use to encourage people to sign up for your mailing list. One of the most common examples of an incentive is a free PDF report. This will contain some kind of extra insight not readily available through your website and some kind of additional information. It will encourage people to sign up for your mailing list in exchange for your freebie.
For this concept to work, the incentive of course needs to be unique and exciting enough that people will actually want to read it. Other popular incentives include ebooks, coupons and free samples.
How to Get Incentives Right
There is a problem with the way a lot of marketers use incentives though. That problem is they see incentives as a way to persuade people to subscribe who would otherwise not be interested in doing so. This is in fact a mistake – those are not warm leads, they are cold leads who just wanted freebies. This means they are not likely to want to buy from you and it means that they are not highly targeted. This actually undermines the value of your list!
Instead, your incentive should be seen as added encouragement to entice people to sign up who were otherwise on the fence. This means your incentive should not be too convincing. Perhaps make your incentive something that actually qualifies the leads? For example, if your incentive is a discount on your products, that suggests they are really interested in buying from you if they sign up! Likewise, why not make the mailing list itself the incentive? This won’t qualify the leads but it ensures that they’ll be looking out for your messages in their inbox!
Here is an example of just one of the incentives I use to build my personal mailing list. I hope you find value in my FREE report and if you would like to use it or something similar to start building your mailing list, let me know. I would be happy to help!
Thanks for reading!
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George Balek is a Full-Time Internet Marketer, Personal Development Enthusiast and Chicago Cubs Fan!