One of the first things that we look at, as an Internet marketing company, when building a marketing campaign for a client is the offer that is currently being communicated, if it’s an existing site. Many times we see that companies are trying to sell there product right off the bat, and wondering why it’s not working.
The bottom line is that if you are selling a higher priced product, and your brand is not well established, you have to provide something of value for free. Why? Because you need to establish credibility and trust with your prospect. You have to prove to them that you are good at what you do and that you deliver on your claims. And the more you give away for free, the more you can charge.
This brings us to the topic of this post, should you give away something of immediate value and gratification, such as an eBook, or should you give away a free event, such as a webinar? This is actually a heavily debated topic. There are pros and cons to each. Let’s take a look. With a free eBook, you will likely generate more lead volume and, therefore, a lower cost per lead (CPL). As a matter of fact, we tested an eBook offer versus a Webinar offer for one of our clients and the eBook opt-in rate outperformed the Webinar by three times. This means that the CPL for the eBook was one third of the Webinar. If you were to look at this number alone, you would definitely use the eBook as your offer, not the Webinar.
This is why it’s important to also track you cost per sale (CPS) and lifetime revenue per client. And why it’s so important to test. You may find that your CPL is more expensive for your Webinar offer than your eBook, but you may find that your CPS is lower for your Webinar offer than your eBook.
There is no right or wrong strategy. The truth is in the numbers. You simply want to get the most out of your marketing investment as possible. You want to generate as many sales as possible from every campaign that you’re running at the lowest cost per sale possible. It’s that simple.
Your offer allows you to convert the traffic that is driven to your Website and scale up a profitable business. If you don’t currently have some type of free offer on your site, you may want to consider adding one. If you have any questions regarding how to set up an offer, please comment. We’d be happy to help.