If you’ve been on the internet visiting blogs or just about any website nowadays, you’ve probably been hit by the pop-up window asking you to opt-in to someone’s list. The fact is that email remains one of the most powerful marketing tools on the internet and getting people on that list is art itself.
The trick is to give the potential opt-in something useful in a trade for their email. I hate the term, but many people call this the opt-in teaser.
Creating an excellent opt-in incentive can make all the difference in the number of people choosing to be on your list and also your engagement with people on your list. I’ve been around the internet marketing space since 2009, and a lot has changed since I created my first opt-in incentive. Back then, depending on the niche, the ‘special report’ was the industry standard. This was usually a ten to fifteen-page PDF report on a topic specific to the website content you were looking for. As time moves on and the audience becomes more resilient to the spammy opt-in offers of the past, blogs and marketers have had to up their game and start getting creative with their incentives to create the best list possible.
By the best list, I not only mean the largest but more importantly, the most engaged. So, I have five tips that I believe are the most critical aspects of creating your opt-in incentive.
Email opt-in incentive tip #1; Know what your competition is offering.
Every year, every month, every day, the hurdle for people’s attention gets raised. To be able to offer our community, and be able to build a community, the best, we need to know what our competition is offering their community. Get to know your competition and sign up for their lists. Read them and study them for how they approach building their community.
You don’t have to agree with all their ideas. You are opting in to find out what they are offering and how are they talking to their tribe. The language they use is as important as the content of their offering. Are they very authoritative, even boarding on condescending? Or, are they taking a more empathetic tone?
Are they offering a downloadable PDF eBook or white paper? Is it a simple text document or is it a beautifully designed full-color book? Are they taking a particular angle with their content which is different than yours? Maybe, if you and your competition’s content is similar, could you change your angle to better match the mindset of the community. Could you niche down your content in a different direction and own a more specific piece of the crowd?
Look at and figure out what your competition is doing and make yours better.
Email opt-in incentive tip#2; Over-deliver on expectations.
The best way to warm your audience and keep them reading what you send them is to wow them from the start. There are some emails from specific marketers where I read every one. I know when I see something in my inbox from them, there will be at least one piece of gold in there somewhere.
To get a readership like that, you will need to over-deliver on your initial offering. This comes from not holding back. For a while, the consensus was to keep your best stuff tucked away. Everyone wanted to save it for a paid product or course. I don’t agree with this at all. Give your community the best you can every time you sit down to create; especially if it’s information.
Give away your best information from the start. You can always create a product that will make the information easier to digest or make your community life easier. You don’t need to hold back information. You build a great community by continually over-delivering what they expect.
Email opt-in incentive tip#3; Don’t tease for the opt-in
Not teasing for the opt-in is something tough to do, but it can be done. I first got a lead on to this idea from an excellent marketer named Andre Chaperon. It goes something like this. Instead of saying, “Sign up for my email list, and I will give you this.” You would say something like this, “This is how I deliver, this, this, and this. The reason I do that is so that it is presented to you in the best sequence possible so that you will get the maximum benefit.”
It’s the same thing, but it feels less like a tease. In a tease, you are creating a feeling of power and holding back. You want it to feel more like a partnership or a club of like-minded people all taking the same journey. Which is essentially what we are all doing, Right?
You want to build trust with your opt-in community from the very first contact. You do that by being a friend. Friends don’t scam or tease to get something out of other friends. Friends are there to help other friends.
Email opt-in incentive tip#4; Use different incentives for different parts of your audience.
This will be way too much work from the very beginning if you are trying to create your very first opt-in incentive. Having multiple opt-ins for the different content interests on your site will come eventually, but it is something you will want to do as soon as your site is up and cranking your first good amount of traffic and you have a little revenue coming in.
The thinking here is to segment your list into different interests on your site. This will enable you to speak directly to your audience on the topic they are most interested in. If you share travel tips and financial tips all in the same blog, the people who are there reading about finances might not be so interested in how to backpack in Bali.
The best thing to do is to occasionally cross-promote by having them click a link to an article on the site that is different from what they were interested in before, to see if you could add them to a different list. If you want to maximize the potential for a sale, speak to them about the topic they are there to talk about.
Email opt-in incentive tip #5; Use delivered emails as part of the incentive.
I just got this tip recently from Ruth Soukup of the Elite Blog Academy. By including a series of emails with your opt-in incentive will get your subscribers used to opening your emails from the initial opt-in. I think this is also a way to over-deliver. At one time, my email was an opt-in consisting of a workbook and a six-email mini-course to aid in working through the different parts of the workbook. The workbook could stand alone, and the email autoresponder could stand alone, but together was my way of trying to over-deliver. I don’t offer this anymore, but it does serve as an example of what can be done.
I want people who subscribe to my list to take the course and be up to speed on the rest of the stuff I send them to make the content flow in a smooth progression. All of my blog posts and separate emails could stand alone, but they do continue to build on each other slightly.
It feels best for me to make sure everyone on the list is at the same place when I go to send them more. Using emails from the beginning will hopefully help build that bond.
People keep trying to kill the email list way of marketing by shining the light on every new and upcoming marketing platform. But email remains one of the most powerful ways we can build our brand and create a robust marketing platform. And, an opt-in incentive that works well is worth every painstaking minute we spend on making it perfect. The benefits of a well-responding email list are way too powerful to whip something together just to grow the size of our list. The connection you build with the community is way better.
Be safe,
Kevin