If your goal is to create a strong subscriber base or, better yet, generate leads that become genuine sales opportunities - you need to have an offer.
By 'Offer' do you mean '20% Off Plus Free Shipping'?
Well, that is definitely an offer.
But we're talking about inbound lead generation here – the purpose of which is to provide value to your ideal customer and build a relationship with them. Rather than dirty discounting to make a quick buck.
Why provide an offer at all? All I want is an email sign-up.
People don't just proffer their email addresses for no reason. Those who are already in the decision stage of their buyer's journey might make a direct enquiry via a form on a page, or even email or call you directly, but it's estimated that only 3% of your potential customers are at that decision stage at any given time.
That means a whopping 97% of your ideal customers aren't actively looking to buy, and therefore not making enquiries just yet.
So what can we do to earn the right to talk to that 97% and help them get to the decision stage faster? You guessed it: by providing them a valuable offer in exchange for their details.
What makes a good Inbound Offer?
An offer that provides real value to your potential prospects needs to do at least three things:
- Help achieve a goal or solve a problem that you know they're likely to have
- Give something that is practically useful to build trust in you and your organisation
- Keep them wanting more
And you're also going to have to give away some IP - probably more than you're comfortable with. Whatever you're thinking of right now... go a bit further.
In our Inbound Crash Course we reveal the process we use to create an inbound strategy and campaign for our clients. It's a fair amount of the IP that our business is built on, and we give it away completely free.
Why? Because we know that our ideal customer wants to be able to adopt an inbound approach with true sales and marketing alignment right across their organisation.
But we also know they are far too busy to do it themselves.
Our crash course gives them just enough info to be dangerous: They could put our approach into practice if they really wanted to, but it's going to be easier, quicker and probably ultimately cheaper to use us.
What form do 'Inbound Offers' take?
Inbound offers take the form of high-value pieces of content that help your potential customers on their Buyer's Journey.
Here are 10 examples of good inbound offers:
- Ebooks
- How-to Guides
- Infographics
- Calculators
- Checklists
- Courses
- Webinars
- Swipe files
- Podcasts
- Events
How do I know what to offer?
That's a good question! If you're going to commit to investing time, money and IP into this then you have to confident that it's right and will connect with your customers.
And that really brings us to the fundamentals of adopting an inbound strategy. We recommend signing up for that offer we mentioned: Hype & Dexter's Inbound Crash Course. It's totally worth giving up your email for.
