Offering something of value for free is a very important step in marketing. It is a way of introducing yourself to prospective clients in a non-intrusive, friendly manner, and it is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to build a list of prospective clients and customers.
Offering something of value for free is a very important step in marketing. It is a way of introducing yourself to prospective clients in a non-intrusive, friendly manner. People are naturally more cautious and skeptical these days so you need to make it as easy as possible for them to get to know you at their pace - which will be different for each person.
As well, offering a free-giveaway is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to build a list of prospective clients and customers. In order to do this, you must ask for the person's name and email address. When people have indicated an interest in finding out more about you by asking for your "sampler", then you can offer it in exchange for their name and email address.
The easiest way to get prospect's contact information is to have an opt-in box on your website. If you look at my website you'll notice that I have my opt-in box in the top right corner of every web page.
When you use this in conjunction with an autoresponder/list management system such as Aweber, people's name and email addresses are captured automatically and put into a list so you can contact them further via email.
In this day and age of internet selling and buying, the majority of people are comfortable with giving you this information. Once you have this data you will now be able to continue to develop the relationship with these prospects and move them through the other steps in your marketing process.
If you don't have an opt-in box but you do have a website, the best thing to do is get one created and set up. It doesn't cost much as it's pretty easy to do and many Virtual Assistants can do it for you.
However, don't worry if you haven't got your website up and running yet, you can still collect names. You'll just have to do it manually and then input them into some kind of spreadsheet (Excel) or a database program like Microsoft Outlook or ACT.
There are many ways to use your free-giveaway and leverage it. But first you need to have a free product to entice people onto your list, and into a marketing relationship with you.
I encourage you to spend some time today thinking about what you already have of value and how you can repackage it into a valuable free-giveaway that your target group wants and needs.
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