Top 5 “Gimme Your Email Address” Bribes

I’m not claiming that these be universal, but these are the top performing reasons people have given me their email addresses and signed up for a mailing list. These are cross tested over a bunch of real market places, one of which was the internet marketing space, the others were persuasive communication training right here on this site, another was for magicians, one for the fitness industry and two others that I cannot expose because of NDAs with larger organisations, one being in the financial sector.

Regardless of any of this, I want to emphasise that these are NOT a bunch more of those theoretical bull Top 5s. These are the results I’ve got in these niches through testing each ‘type’ of bribe. Let’s do it in reverse order as some kind of attempt to build make-believe suspense:

5. Online Video Presentation. Although this is at the bottom of the list in our Top 5, it is still one to be considered because at least it made it to the Top 5. People assume high value with video presentations. However I think the resistance is that they have to make the time to sit down and absorb the content.

So this is a high perceived value piece where you share some crucial information that will absolutely help people.

We also found a notable growth in the sales gained from these subscribers if you make an extremely casual mention of a very LOW price point product during the video, but not at the end. E.g. “I’ll not go in to this in detail now, it’s in my £5 audio download How A Lama Made A Million…” and then immediately back to the point at hand giving real value.

What we found is that some people will go and seek this out, but more importantly there is a higher buy-rate when you send sales messages to people who were exposed to a sales message early on. And far less people unsubscribing from our lists too.

4. Subscribe For Updates / Newsletter. We did this test as a sort of ‘lets make this one the low ball to measure everything else against’ joke. It turned out that the joke was on us. As we mentioned in the previous article on this blog, if you have a ‘fan’ type or ‘celebrity brand’ website, or a blog we are getting a massive response of sign ups from simply offering to keep people up-to-date with the happenings of the person or business.

Lets not go in to detail as to why that is here, because we covered that in the previous post.

3. Report With A Stupid Name (or feature). Of all the reports we offered, the ones that were novel and often stupid, if not a little sexual in title pulled the best results.

Analysing this I’d make a guess at the curiosity being the reason people thought it fun to enter their names and email addresses.

One of the things we did is looked at what each market place’s ‘Addictions’ are and offer them another ‘fix’. For example, magicians just LOVE to learn new tricks. So we gave them a really fantastic new trick they could do.

This applies to all market places. Another thing that seemed to skew the results was that we did things that no one else was doing, or they weren’t used to us doing. So we;d never given away a trick before, and now we were. A really good one.

In another market place we gave away a hand-written report. This worked extremely well for a very short time and then tailed off. The initial interest was exciting I think because of how novel it was/is.

2. Reports That Their Friends Recommend. We use a piece of software called List Wax (www.listwax.com) that gives away a free report and then offers the user a 2nd piece of MUCH nicer content with FAR higher value if they will share the link to the report with their friends.

We found that when someone tells their buddies about a report or download, their buddies trust their friend (this is that good old social proof at work) and go download it themselves.

This thing built our list VERY quickly indeed because we only rewarded people with the bonus super content once they got 3 of their friends to download the first report. The excitement comes when each of those 3 friends see the same offer, and suddenly they each refer 3 friends and so it goes on.

We might dream that the list building goes on infinitely, but the truth is that after the initial burst you can probably expect around 6-8 layers deep on that one set of data. For example we sent it to a new market list of 23 people and within a week had over 1000, qualified people who opted themselves in. We’re now making a couple hundred off this list each week. Which is fine for absolutely no manual work as that piece of software does all the tracking and delivering the content and stuff.

1. Free No-Pitch Teleseminar. The teleseminars I ran were detailing the biggest current concern that the market place had. The word current is very important because this acts as a double blow to the urgency psychology. Not only is the issue you’re dealing with urgent and should be acted on straight away, but the fact that the teleseminar has a definate date that it will be occurring (which you openly advertise) there is a real proof that they actually need to sign up right there and then.

In addition to this we added more urgency by introducing scarcity of seats. In the teleseminar programme I use there are different package sizes, so the seat restriction was provable should anyone want to go check it out.

This attracted the most amount of brand new opt-ins my businesses have ever seen across all market places.

That said, offering the replays of these calls produced the LOWEST opt-in rates. So the live event is good, however the replay is much poorer.

Results like this make us look at running a new teleseminar each month on a new topic and area of business.

The traffic from this was sourced from forums and Facebook Advertising. We have not tested the response on Adwords.