The Challenge:
This week, we're focusing on an old favorite – the lifeblood of any site or business – your email list! We recently learned a genius trick from one of our listeners – Shaunta Grimes. Thanks, Shaunta!
The Trick? Create a Secret Freebies Page to house all of your great opt-in offers that relate to blog posts, new products, or content you're promoting.
I've outlined the whole process on the blog. It's super easy to do, and since implementing this ourselves, Sarah and I have seen incredible list growth. We're so excited every time we create new content, because adding a subscriber-only freebie is now a breeze!
If you're an Etsy Seller without a website to call your own – not so fast! You're not off the hook. I know you're conditioned into thinking you should just offer a coupon code to all of your subscribers and be done with it, but it's time to think outside of the box!
Offer a seasonal style guide, a collection of your favorite gift ideas, or a tutorial based on one of your products. You don't need a website to do this. Just mention your great freebie in your shop header, about page, at the bottom of your listings, and in your thank you message to customers. Then simply create those great freebies, store them on dropbox or google drive, and share the link to the Freebies folder in your welcome email.
DONE!
Once again, your challenge this week: Build your list by creating a secret freebies page. After that? Get to it and create those amazing freebies!
Struggling to come up with some great offers? No problem! Let's brainstorm in the Facebook Group!
Update:
Freebies that are directly related to the content we offer continue to be the main way we've grown our email list in the last few months. It's easy to see that when a blog post or landing page gains traction (as ours did when we guest posted on the Etsy blog!) our email subscriber numbers skyrocket. Based on which page people choose to sign up and how many people are visiting our freebies page, it's easy to tell that the freebies are the compelling aspect of signing up! For example, I spent hours whipping up an extensive guide to Etsy SEO for the new visitors to our site who headed over from Etsy. Did it pay off? Yes, absolutely! So far we can safely attribute almost 100 new subscribers to the Etsy guest post + related freebie. I'll take it!
I've been amazed at how much more quickly we've grown our list in 2015 versus 2014 simply by offering more than one thing to new subscribers – and offering each visitor to the site something that's directly related to the content they're consuming.
And once your freebies page is set up, adding new freebies is just so easy to do!
What about you? What freebies are you offering on your secret page? Have your subscriber numbers increased as a result?
~ Beth Anne
