Anyone who has spent time building an online following will understand just how difficult it is to get people to like your profile. Sometimes, even getting them to do anything other than scroll through your post is a challenge.
However, the problem isn’t always your content, it’s where it’s posted. Social networks are incredibly uniform and adhere to strict design layouts which can make it difficult to stand out. Getting your potential customers onto your mailing list will allow you to take more control and generate more clicks, sales or views for your content.
With the invention of television in the mid-1900s, consumers were bombarded with daily advertisements. Each one promised more outrageous results to maintain high profits until eventually the market fell through and nobody believed the advertiser’s claims anymore. This concept is first noted in Eugene Schwartz’s book Breakthrough Advertising and pinpoints the end of a market’s life cycle.
Moving forward to the present day, and consumers have only become savvier with the invention of the internet. People know when they’re being sold to and they don’t like it, so skipping ads has become an automatic response when watching YouTube videos or browsing through a web article.
Why Are We Telling You This?
You can’t sell to someone who doesn’t trust you, and the easiest way to gain that trust is by giving them something that adds value to their lives. In Jordan Belfort’s now-famous book, The Wolf of Wall Street, he talks about offering new clients low-risk, blue-chip stock offers that were guaranteed to make them a return. Calling this a benchmark for future business, Jordan would quickly gain his client’s trust before pitching them on more risky stock investments.
Whilst we don’t recommend that you follow in Jordan’s footsteps, his sales technique for gaining client trust and closing new business deals is still used today by perfectly legitimate businesses.
Why Use A Mailing List?
Now that you have an understanding of why to use free value, you might be wondering why a mailing list is important. You may be aware that in October 2021, Facebook and its subsidiaries went down for six hours. Businesses that relied on Facebook’s services reported losses in the millions with broken ad campaigns, delayed product launches and user migration to Facebook’s competitors.
While the chance of Facebook and other social networking sites being permanently taken down is unlikely, the world no longer sleeps and business runs 24 hours a day; so having a direct line of communication between you and your customer base is essential. Not only can you maintain that connection provided your customers have internet access but you can also customise their experience via offers and other content.
What makes emails truly unique is that 99% of people in the UK check their inboxes daily. This gives email marketers the advantage, as they don’t need to worry about ad or click spend whilst promoting their products.
What Is Free Value?
The old saying that nothing is free applies here. Free value doesn’t require a financial transaction between you and a potential customer but in this case, it requires an email address. The only factor that matters here is how smooth the process is for a user to download your free value item (and of course the quality of the content).
Value is largely subjective and depends on your potential customers’ needs and desires. Typically, customers value something that will improve their lives in some way by revealing hidden knowledge, techniques or time hacks. It’s also important to remember that your free content functions as an advertisement for your paid content, so ensuring you have consistent quality on all products is essential.
Another factor to keep in mind is your title choice. In our recent blog post about creating bullets, we discussed in detail how to use headers as a marketing tool rather than a simple title. For example, instead of using the title: Facebook Marketing Strategies, we could instead use: A Five-Step Guide to Making Your First $1000 Through Facebook Advertising.
Don’t Wait for People To Unsubscribe
Once you have someone’s email address it’s time to deliver on your promise and send them your offering. Creating an automated email sequence for a new signup is the easiest way to ensure your users get their download quickly. From this point on, you can start to send customer’s weekly promotions and value add emails – the end game being that they become paying customers for your main product or service.
In Conclusion
As the world moves further into the digital age and we become more reliant on social networks to communicate and sell to one another, it’s more important than ever to have your own lines of communication between your business and customers. As we’ve already seen, Facebook and its competitors are not bulletproof, but perhaps, more importantly, the uniform layout of social sites combined with an ever-growing list of rules has also made it more difficult for advertisers to stand out from the crowd.
As we’ve already mentioned, the reason you’re offering a free product is to gain your potential customer’s trust, and they have to find you before you can begin to build a relationship with them.
So how do you get your free product in front of a wider audience? More importantly, how do you get as many users as possible to sign up to your mailing list? Our recent blog post reveals the hidden secrets used by professional writers to generate millions of dollars in profit for companies over the internet with advertisements.
You can read just how to write catchy social media adverts here.
