If you have been doing Email Marketing then most probably you use some freebies to collect email subscriptions. And if you don’t do it all, you better start doing it. Email marketing is a marketing strategy for long term, if you think that you can do wonders in short term, then you may but it is not meant to be a short term marketing solution.
Email Marketing is the key to success for any business in the long run.
So if you use freebies to collect emails and if I say that” Doesn’t use freebies for email marketing”, I am sure it will sound weird and unconventional but that’s the reality. I am sure most of the bloggers would disagree because offering freebies like E-books is the most common practice by bloggers when it comes to collecting email subscription for their email marketing campaign. But the point is why you do email marketing?
Why You Do Email Marketing
The reason email marketing is so popular and every blogger must do it because of the fact that it helps you in building a list which can be used by variety of purposes. Some of the most important and common applications are;
- Traffic
- Internet marketing
- So when there is update on your blog and you send an update to them, they visit your blog thereby, getting traffic. Technically this traffic is not free as you are spending money to maintain an auto response service. But it is economical than other forms of paid advertising.
- You mail them attractive offers (affiliate programs) and make money when they purchase using the link given in the email.
But practically irrespective of the popular conventions, conversion rate is relatively lower.
The reason it is lower because you have lot of junk in the form of emails when you are offering freebies in return of their email id.
Your subscribers are interested in your blog; they are simply interested in that FREE E-book. If you want just run an experiment by charging $1 for that same ebook, you will be hardly able to make any sale.
Advantage of Offering Freebies
When you offer freebies you get lot of subscription because there is something in return for your subscribers.
Disadvantage of freebies
The advantage of offering freebies is the biggest disadvantage of it. Remember the purpose of email marketing;
Traffic & Internet marketing
Now, the person who has subscribed to your newsletters has actually not subscribed to the ‘newsletter’. They are subscribing for that free E-Book.
If you think that you can make loads of money by distributing an e-book flooded with your affiliate links, then you will be disappointed to know that most of the subscribers don’t even completely read your e-book.
I may sound rude and harsh but that’s how things are.
Often Free stuff is regarded as low quality material by the consumers.
If you are a blogger, you know that if you have written a real high quality book, you will rather sell it than distributing it in free.
Most of these free e-books are either PLR or hand written by the blogger with the intend to give away in email marketing campaigns. And it is most of the time reflected in the quality of the content in that book.
As mentioned earlier, these subscribers are extremely random in nature and as it doesn’t count anything to them, they simply subscribe to get that book or any other ‘give away’.
In fact most of the time, these people don’t even use their regular email id. We all have more than one email id. One is the regular email id which we use for personal and professional communication like using them in bank, investment and with friends. And there is a second id which we use everywhere else. If you follow probability, then under most of the circumstances, this second email id is being used for your subscription.
They don’t even check these emails regularly.
So you end up with too many email ids which are inactive. If you monitor your email campaigns, you know that you have lots of them. We all have.
Now most of the email auto responders like Aweber, Getresponse or Mailchimp charge us based upon the number of email subscribers we have. So as you have a long list, you have to pay more.
Eventually you are paying for something which is worthless and is literally garbage as far as your campaigns are concerned.
So don’t collect email ids just because everyone else is collecting.
Even if you are manually doing the clean up, but it is still taking your time.
Time = Money
So stop offering these freebies.
Advantage of “Not Offering” Freebies for email subscription
- Subscribers are interested in your content.
- They are looking for future updates.
- They are interested in your future announcement and offers.
These freebies act more like a distracter.
When there is nothing like that, only those visitors will subscribe to you who are actually interested in your content. So
- They come back your blog regularly.
- They read the blog broadcasts sent by you.
- They look at the offers sent by you.
As interaction is much better in this case, your conversion rate is much better.
I have tried it, I’m still half way but I have noticed that earlier when I was offering e-book (which I am still giving but stopped mentioning in the subscription form); my subscription was high but with low conversion.
Now as you can see, I don’t mention any freebie in my email opt-in form. Subscription rate has gone down significantly but I can say that I’m still getting subscription, these users are quite active.
You need a good auto responder to support your email marketing campaigns; if you are running a blog then blog broadcast from aweber is must for you.
“Target quality, not quantity.”
Then this is your turn to share your story of email marketing.
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