Opt-In List Incentives - Your List-Building Bait

Opt-In List Incentives – Your List-Building Bait!

People don’t easily give up their names and email addresses online any more, mostly because of the destructive practices used by the spammers to flood people’s inboxes.  So it’s necessary to go that extra mile to build a goodly-sized opt-in e-mail list today.

So in order for you to capture names and email addresses for your opt-in list, you will need to give people a really good reason to do so and your assurance that the information they provide will not be sold to others or shared with others.

The incentive (bait) that you use to capture names and email addresses of those who visit your site is up to you, of course, but it needs to be of value to the potential customer and directly related to the topic of your website and to the product or service that you are selling.

Some ideas to use as incentives (bait) are e-books, reports, temporary access to membership sites, mini-courses, coupons, etc. If you really want to capture a lot of information, offer a physical product that will require that it be shipped to the recipient. Offering a physical product means that you will have to bear shipping costs, so go carefully there. E-books, special reports, temporary memberships, etc. don’t actually cost you any money and are among the more popular incentives used to harvest names and e-mail addresses for an opt-in list.

Increasingly marketers are using audio and video online, so don’t overlook their suitability as gifts with a higher perceived value. Recordings of interviews or teleseminars work especially well for attracting new opt-ins, if you were one of the participants or have giveaway rights to the audio or video.

One tip for people who have JUST signed up to your list… When you set up your opt-in software, or set up using an autoresponder company, be certain that you include instructions telling your potential customers how to keep your emails from going to their junk mail folders, especially in the free online e-mail accounts. That is important. Some people don’t realize that many of these free email accounts send emails from people who aren’t on a customer’s white list straight to junk mail.