Hey Reader,
I recently looked at four freebies in one client’s account. One of them had no automation behind it at all. People signed up, got their download, and then nothing. No welcome, no next email. Nothing.
Another freebie in the same account was giving people loads of emails after signup. It was a free email course, and nearly everyone who started it made it to the very end. That’s a brilliant result! But first, nobody was being pointed to it, and second, once people finished, there was nowhere for them to go.
Two different freebies, and the same leak. Both went quiet at the exact moment people were most interested.
The silence after sign-up
Someone downloads your freebie because they want something from you. That’s the warmest they’ll ever be as a new subscriber. If the next email arrives three weeks later as a regular newsletter, they’ve half forgotten who you are.
A welcome doesn’t have to be long. Two or three emails is plenty: deliver the thing, tell them who you are and what you’re about, and point them to one next step.
And while you’re there, check whether your forms ask for a first name at all. I see lists with almost no first names more often than you’d think, and then every email says “Hi friend” to everyone. It works, but it’s a little less personal, and adding a first name field to your form only takes a minute.
The dead end
The other version is quieter, because the freebie works. People love it. And then nothing happens. A client described it to me recently in almost those words: they were giving people a taste of what he was good at, but if they loved it, there was nowhere for them to go.
In my Marketing Circles, a freebie sits in Trust. It’s there to help people decide whether they want more of you. If you never show them what more looks like, they can’t take that step, even when they’d like to.
So let me ask you what I ask clients, Reader: So they sign up and then what? What’s the first email after the download? And what’s the next step after the last one?
If you’d like help answering that in Kit, I wrote a step-by-step guide to setting up the automation behind a freebie, so every freebie gets a welcome and a next step without you building the same thing five times.
A freebie is the start of a conversation. If you don't say anything after hello, people wander off, no matter how good the freebie was. It’s a party without a host.