The conventional wisdom for online businesses has usually involved offering some type of free report on your web page. The advice that expert marketers tend to give is for companies to have a squeeze page. This is where you would offer your free report. When potential customers land on your page, they’ll sign up for that free report. Now they’re on your list, and you have the means to follow up with auto-responders. You can now market and sell to them because they have given you their contact information.
Offering a free report is generally good advice because it gets the people who are truly interested to take the step forward and make themselves known to you. It means that you are marketing to people who have given you permission to market to them. So, on that basis, it is a sound practice.
The trouble is that when everybody does it, it starts to lose its effectiveness. How often have you personally had the experience of browsing online and landing on a site where something is being offered for free? Maybe this would have tempted you four or five years ago, but now you are wiser. And so are your prospects. They will think twice about handing over their email address to you now, because they know these free offers are a marketing approach.
What can you offer instead that would have a higher perceived value and almost compel people to give you their email address?
I am a huge proponent of teleseminars. They offer tremendous value for you and your business for a couple of reasons.
Think about how much great content you can give clients in a one-hour-long teleseminar. And, they can really get to know you, up close and personal.
Even if someone does download that free report on your web site, it may just sit in their inbox or on their computer. They might not ever get around to looking at it. You know how many things we all download and never actually read. It’s like the stack of magazines that sit unread on the end table, but without the actual clutter. Or, they might actually print it out, put it to the side to read later, and, well, later never comes.
But a teleseminar offers actual human connection. People are getting a lot more than just information from you. They are getting to know you.
A teleseminar allows your personality, sense of humor, and everything about you that is the reason for your business, to come across. It shows who you are, and that’s what’s important.
At the end of the day, people buy people. The beauty of the teleseminar is that it gives people a live experience of you.
And because it’s an hour long – certainly not any shorter than that – it’s an opportunity to pack in a lot of content. You can really convey a lot of knowledge and build up an intimacy with your audience in this amount of time.
Here’s another major advantage about teleseminars. They are time-limited.
If you are offering potential clients the opportunity to sign up for a teleseminar next Tuesday via your web page, they know they have to make a decision. If they click away from the opportunity, they miss out for good. So, they are less likely to hesitate than they would be with signing up for a free report. They know they can always come back for that later.
There are many people who get between 30%-40% opt-in rates from the free reports on their squeeze pages. If you get 100 visitors to that page, 30 – 40 of them will give you their email addresses. Many people are very satisfied with that. And that’s fine.
But if you offer a teleseminar instead, your opt-in rate could increase to 70%. Mine did. Just by switching one little piece of the lead generation process, and offering a teleseminar instead of a free report, you can double the number of leads you’re generating with no extra traffic.
Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com
