Building Your List with Incentives
TweetWe have already talked about the importance of an email list, so by now I hope that you at least have a sign-up form on your site or some other way to generate leads. Now the question turns to "what is the best way to encourage visitors to subscribe to your list?" Something that has worked very well for me in the past with my sites is offering a free incentive. Basically you give the visitor something of value in exchange for their email address. By giving the reader something in exchange for their information you are going to see a higher conversion rate of visitors who end up subscribing. This gives them an additional reason to sign-up other than just to receive your special offers or latest updates.
The question then becomes "what can I offer?" If you have a membership site then maybe it's some kind of a free trial or if you own an ecommerce/affiliate site then you could offer an ebook of the industry or product, detailing your knowledge and informing the user of answers to questions they may have. Blogs and information sites can create an ebook that lists the "best of" their site so users don't have to scroll through the archives to see what your best posts are.
The real key to making this work is to give the reader something that will see as having value. The incentive needs to be related to your site or it isn't going to convert. However, if you give them something of value that is closely tied in to what your site is about it will not only increase the likelihood that they will sign up for your newsletter, but it will also move you up faster in terms of trusting the offers that you send them. This will only increase the amount of money that you can make off of the list that you build.