What’s Your Free Offer & How Are You Using It?

July 29th, 2013 by Diane Conklin under Marketing. No Comments.

You hear a lot of talk about the importance of building your list.  Your list is made up of all your potential customers, and all the people who have invested in your business.  You can go out and buy a list, as well – that’s up to you.

However, one great way to get people on your list is with your IFO.  Your IFO is your Irresistible Free Offer.  It’s very specific, and targeted, so it attracts only the exact people you want on your list and in your database.

So how this works is simple.  You make an offer to your target audience that they can’t resist.  In return they provide you with their email address, and maybe even a mailing address.  The more information you can get from them the better, because you may want to market to these people through direct mail later on down the road.

Suppose your product is about information marketing.  You may have an IFO like “The Nine Key Building Blocks For Starting and Building Your Information Marketing Business.” Now, not everyone is interested in building an information marketing business.  That’s fine, you’re not looking for them.  But, the person who does need your services sees that, and in order to get that information, they need to give you some information.  So, they give you their email address and maybe some other information, and that goes onto your list.  In the future, if you want to market something specifically for information marketing, you go to your list, you pull up the people who requested this information, and you market to them directly.

Here’s another example, because maybe information marketing is not what you do.  Maybe you do live events, or maybe you’re an event planner who helps others with their events.  Your IFO may look something like “The Seven Costliest Workshop, Seminar, And Live Event Mistakes And How You Can Avoid Them.” Again, you’re targeting specific people.  The information marketing person isn’t looking for your business, but someone else is.  Now they put their name and information into your webpage, they get automatically put on your list, and you can market to them in the future.

The point is to find what irresistibly free thing you can offer that makes people want to give up a little bit of information.  This is a very, very important strategy to develop your list, and can be a huge tool for your business.  So, spend some time thinking about the products and services you offer that people may want or need, and the things you can give freely to get those people to come see what else you have to offer.  If they’re not interested, that’s fine.  Let them move on.  Focus instead on the people who are interested in you and what you have to offer them.