Act Now and as Your Free Gift…

July 22nd, 2008 Chris Posted in Marketing | No Comments »

Giving away something of value is a great incentive to get a prospect to do something like sign-up for a newsletter or make a purchase. However, making sure that free offer is credible is sometimes overlooked in the stampeed to sell.

I recently saw a special offer for someone selling a product. While the product was priced at $200, if you purchased it you would get $600 worth of bonuses. Maybe I’m more paranoid than others, but I am always skeptical of offers that include more free gifts than the product is worth itself. I typically assume one of the following:

• The free gift value is bogus – something artificially inflated to make the offer sound better than it is. In other words, if the gift was being itself sold, it would not be at the price suggested by its “value” as a free gift.
• There are strings attached. I’ve seen free gifts where there is a follow-up component that entails me forking over some dough. Like, getting a free month of a particular service that, after that month, magically starts being charged to my credit card.

These types of free gifts give, well, free gifts a dirty name. And the more you do that to your prospect base, the less valuable they’ll perceive your offer.

That doesn’t mean that a free gift can’t have good marketing value for you. Here are some of the things we think of:

• Gifts that have low variable cost to provide and high value. Again, not value that is some B. S. number made up, but stuff we legitimately can sell. Often for us, recorded web classes are good ones as they are very inexpensive to produce copies of and stand-alone do sell for a good price.
• Gifts that get you customer information. Direct mail, despite all its issues, still has better conversion rates than email. So we love to get our prospects’ addresses. A gift that gets mailed requires an address and getting that address for the price of shipping a CD is a good deal.
• Gifts that get you a payment information. I don’t know how I feel about this… We’ve not done it but I’ve seen free gifts offered for simply the price of shipping and handling. This is done so that prospects have to provide credit card information. Once you’ve got some one’s payment info, it’s a heck of a lot easier to convert them later. Offers that do that conversion automatically unless you cancel (often called “forced continuity”, see above) are dirty pool IMHO.

So in short, don’t burn your bridges with prospects by making outlandish free gift offers. I think most are smart enough to tell when something stinks. Make sure it’s not you.

Next time, I’ll also talk about the challenge of getting your offer of a free gift to your prospect!

C.