Internet Marketing:
Free Reports or Products:
Free reports are one of the best ways to exchange valuable information that you have for a prospects contact information. When dealing with internet marketing, creating a product to give away is a critical first step.
Just like an E-book, you can use a single page or multi page report as your Free Report/Lead Magnet. Lead Magnets can be any number of things, but must be valuable to the person that requests it. The higher the value the more your prospect will desire it, and be willing to provide their email or other contact information to get it.
Your free report can be a simple list of steps that your prospect can take to increase profits, lose more weight, cook a better meal, or save money. Whatever your product or service is, I am sure you can write a simple report that list the top 3 to 5 tips that can help them.
A simple report based on the Top 5 good or bad things can be seen as a valuable piece of information that your prospect is willing to give you their contact information.
Different types of Free information
Free information comes in a variety of formats now. Any of which can be used as your Free Product or Lead magnet. Here are a few ideas
- 1 to 10-page White paper
- E-book from a few pages to over 100
- Videos you can make your own video or use one from a supplier of your products or services
- PDF reports
- Audio recordings
- Podcasts
- Magazine Articles
- Sample Newsletter
- Transcript of Audio recordings
- Resource lists
- Samples of an actual product
- Case studies of any problems being solved. Along with testimonials from real cases. A very powerful Lead Magnet/Free product
Any of these ideas can work well. The “secret ingredient” is value. Make your Lead Magnet/Free report a must have. Build it up anyway you can and make it a “must” have item.
Creating a good Lead Magnet is a great way to practice your copyrighting skills. If this is not your skill set you can hire this service out. Check out the resource section for some great recommendations.
The goal of your report is to get their contact information
Once you have their contact information you can have a per-designed set of e-mails, postcards, letters or even phone calls to follow up on the initial contact.
There are systems that can do this for you automatically called an Autoresponder. It simply means a software service that allows you to create a series of messages that can be timed to be delivered to your prospects or client over a long or short period of time.
The Autoresponder has become a critical tool to all Internet marketers. It is not the only way to follow up but it is an easy way to do it and one of the cheapest ways to do it.
You can have a series of postcards or letters that go out over a certain time frame to help sell your main product or service. Direct mail is still the leading way to contact your customers. You need to have their full address and name to do this so you need to have a valuable Lead Magnet to get customers to give you all that information.
Offering a real product or a hard copy of a book or report can be a good incentive to ask for their full address and contact information. The latest trick is to offer the sample or the book and request a small shipping fee. Shipping fees can be anywhere from $6.95 to $14.95. In some cases the cost of the free sample will be covered by this cost.
Using the Free plus shipping strategy also proves a very important point about your prospect. They are pulling out their wallet and spending their money. A critical step in your relationship with your new customer. Once they pay for something you now have a real paying customer. Your a winner already.
The last but one of the most successful method is still have a phone call with your prospect. It allows the client to ask questions and it allows your staff to use techniques that you trained them on to sell the prospect sooner and create a new client faster.
Once you have a new paying client you can continue to try to upsell them using an autoresponder or direct mail. Keep sending them lots of valuable information. Introduce your core products or services to these new customers.
Create a high quality and valuable Lead Magnet.
The higher the value the better your chance of making this prospect into a client. They will see the value you offer now, and expect that to carry on into the future.
Once you have them using their money, they are a true client and now you want to roll out your full marketing plan to them. Using your autoresponder or direct mail program to build your new relationship.
You do have a FULL marketing plan, right?
If you can’t answer Yes to this, then you need to focus on making sure that you have a great Lead Magnet to get the initial contact information. You then follow up with an initial break even offer using your direct mail program or autoresponder.
You will lead them down the path to your core products or services. These are your main profit centers. All your marketing efforts should your customers lead down this path.
Sales funnels can be built to perform these tasks
Sales funnels are a fancy name for a series of offers that attempt to sell different products and services to your customer. Once your customer requests your free lead magnet/free report the sales full begins. You can then use a number of techniques to up-sell your prospects into different offers.
Sales funnels are very effective sales tools and are built to help sell all your products and services. Learning how to use them is a very important goal. Check our Resource section for some great training on sales funnels.
Your lead magnet or free samples lure them in. Then hook them with your low-cost service or product sample. Once that is done, reel them in with your full service or product offers using sales funnels.
Your free report or sample can lead to a very valuable client so don’t be cheap. Give away great value in exchange for a great future client.