Do you offer a way for people to become an email subscriber on your website? If you do, are you incentivising it by offering additional value?
If you answered no to either of those questions, you are losing potential leads which could one day become customers.
Why email subscribers?
Without email, you are relying on your readers remembering to come back to your website in the future. With the vast array of websites on the web, most people won’t come back. By encouraging readers to become email subscribers, you can start to build a relationship with them. They cease to become a random anonymous internet user and start to become a known member of your own audience.
Free consultation
If you run a service based business, you might consider offering a free consultation. This is a great way to attract leads, cultivate a relationship and after the consultation you can tailor an offer to them.
Pro tip: Your time is limited, so don’t offer an endless number of free consultations. You are more likely to convert if you set a limit per month because it creates urgency and scarcity in the readers mind.
Email newsletter
An email newsletter is a superb way to engage with people. By sending out valuable information on a regular basis, you build trust and have a wonderful platform to seek feedback. Over time, you can offer your products and services to a warmed up audience.
Pro tip: Don’t get people on your email newsletter list and then let them go cold by sending emails too infrequently. Send out your newsletter on a regular basis. Weekly is best, if not once every two weeks.
White-paper
To offer more immediate value, you could offer a free white-paper. Guides and white-papers are generally short PDFs. They tend to be longer than blog posts but not too long as to overwhelm your busy audience.
Pro tip: the term white-paper has become overused. Considering call it a “guide” instead.
Free email course
Instead of offering additional value in the form of a white-paper, you might drip feed that out over a series of emails. The advantage is that your audience gets used to seeing your name in their inbox so will be more receptive to future emails.
Pro tip: Encourage replies during the free email course. Asking a question like “what is the one thing you’d like to know more about” is a way to deepen the relationship with your readers. The feedback will help you refine the free course and provide you with ideas for future blog posts.
Content upgrades
If you have a blog already, you can offer additional value to your readers in the form of a content upgrade. A content upgrade is often in the form of a PDF and has a strong correlation to the article itself.
For example, if you have a cake making blog and have a recipe for a chocolate cake, the content upgrade could be a PDF of the recipe plus two or three variations of the recipe.
Pro tip: Creating content upgrades that are specific to each article is a time consuming task. Consider having a library of upgrades that cover the main topics of your blog. When posting an article, use the topic of the article to determine which pre-built content upgrade the reader will be offered. You can still create article specific content upgrades for really big pillar articles, or an article that already gets a lot of traffic.