4 Ways To Use Free Guides To Retain Customers And Improve Your Business
If you’re building a business then free guides are a great way to add a little extra incentive for potential customers.
When you’re freelancing, you can do worse than point out the above to potential clients.
We’ve all seen the adverts… “Get My FREE Seven Step Guide To Becoming The Best X You Can Be!”
Usually, these are written in order to get you onto the subscriber list. It’s a fair transaction in a way. We put in our email, we get something free and hopefully valuable and in return we submit to the occasional email from the creator of said free thing.
However, there are a lot of different things you can do with free PDFs (and other formats) that most people don’t do. Make no mistake… these can be easy selling points which will give you an advantage over your competitors.
In this article, I’m going to talk about stuff that you give paying customers. Most free stuff is given to people in exchange for being able to put them into a sales funnel. I’ll write about that another time. But here’s a basic primer on sales funnels.
This article is about how to add value for people who already pay you.
After the Purchase: We All Love Extras
A lot of marketers fall into the trap of stacking all of their offers into the pre-sale funnel.
They’ll give you sixty-seven free 5-page e-books in exchange for your email address. Then, you’ll get nineteen FREE products with your initial $5 purchase. After that, you’ll get the upsell to the shiny $5000 premium program, which you buy knowing you’ll get quality.
…And then nothing ever again. Except maybe the odd affiliate email out of nowhere.
This is a big mistake.
Customers are never going to say no to free stuff after they’ve paid money.
They’ll like you more. Customers will continue to subscribe if you randomly give them something extra every now and then. If you provide value, you’ll create a loyal follower base as opposed to one-time customers.
But… you’ve already got their money and building content is hard right? Wrong.
Unannounced Bonuses: Five Things You Can Do With Your Product
Let’s assume that your product is a good one. It has some helpful use.
If the last two sentences aren’t true, then I’ve got some bad news. You need to go back and make your product valuable.
When your product is valuable, people are going to use it. Hopefully, your product will have multiple uses and multiple different target markets using it.
This is an easy way to create short products that’ll be useful to your customers. For example, let’s look at a piece of software that finds leads for a business:
- How to use X to find local business leads
- How to cut down on marketing costs with X
- How to use X to find your first customer
- How X can help you save money as well as make money
These are all simple product ideas. They needn’t be anything too specific or time-consuming to create. If you already have happy customers, then email a few and they can give you their experiences, practically creating the product for you.
What they will do though is help customers feel that staying on your list a more valuable prospect. It’ll also discourage refunds and cut down on people emailing you asking for help… which brings me to the next idea for a free product.
RTFM: The Traditional User Manual
I’ve spent so much money on products that come without adequate instructions. Luckily for the people who’ve sold me things, I’m a patient person who is willing to work out things on my own. Otherwise, their refund rates would be higher.
An easy thing to do – and a valuable thing for you to do – is create a user manual for your product. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling a $5000 mastermind or a $5 e-book – create some form of Support document. People will think you care more and it’ll make life easier for you because you’ll have less support emails to deal with.
It’ll look like you’ve gone the extra mile (which you have) but you’ll have created little more than an extended FAQ.
Integrating Your Product With Others
I hate when I’m on an emailing list and out of the blue, a company whose product I’ve bought emails me with some poorly concealed affiliate offer.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m trying to make money too… but just because I bought your book once upon a time, doesn’t mean that I’m going to spend $100 on a piece of software or $1000 on a private coaching call with your buddy “Who really knows how to make money online.” It doesn’t matter how many times you say in the email that he’s different, trustworthy or anything else.
The problem with that approach is that people are a) wary of salesy email letters, and b) there’s no segue.
Just because I bought a book in 2010 on making money online doesn’t mean I want to jump into a guru membership program.
There’s a better way to do this, and that’s by creating a little product which shows how customers can use your product with another product.
To do this, you simply state how you can integrate Product X with Product Y. You don’t have to go into great detail with Product Y, just enough detail that people are intrigued about Product Y.
If they buy the product, you’ll get your affiliate commission and everyone is happy.
On the other hand, if they don’t buy, you’ve gained their confidence that you aren’t selling them stuff just for the sake of it, they’ve probably learned something and you haven’t lost their trust of their subscription.
Final Thoughts
These are just four simple ideas that’ll help you build a better business, make more money and build goodwill with your customers.
There are hundreds of different ideas you can try along this line of thinking; some of them will be a lot more effective. That said none of the ideas above are going to be difficult, expensive or time consuming. In a lot of cases, the product you’ll create will take about the same effort as a decent blog post.
Good will is important for any business, and it mostly occurs after the purchase, in the back end of the sales funnel. Most companies spend all of their attention on the front end, so you’ll be doing better than them all with just a little effort.