Advantages and Disadvantages of Offering Freebies on Your Website

Advantages and Disadvantages of Offering Freebies on Your Website

*Advantages of Offering Free Stuff on Your Website:

1. Freebies can increase traffic.  It’s human nature.  Everyone loves getting something for free.  Business owners can use this behavioral truth to increase traffic to their websites and generate qualified leads.

2.  Freebies help you gain second chances to get your products and services in front of your visitors.  Not everyone who visits a website for the first time is ready to make a purchase.  In many cases, consumers will comparison shop, visiting several times before making a decision.  So even if your website is the main portal through which customers place orders, an equally important purpose of your website is to generate leads…and of course, your freebie can be the key to getting your foot in the door again.  Offering a monthly giveaway or some type of contest can be an ongoing marketing plan to bring back your visitors.

3.  Freebies can help you gather high quality leads.   Offering an ezine or newsletter is a good option.  Subscribers opt in, which means they are already interested in what you’re offering and they provide minimal personal information in order to receive the newsletter.  Each new subscriber becomes another lead.  The result over time is a large mailing list of qualified prospects.  In addition to the newsletter, business owners email announcements of new products or services to this custom-made pool of potential buyers.

4.  Freebies can help produce immediate action.  Offering a special report or ebook to increase newsletter sign-ups gives visitors to your website an additional incentive to take action, an important step in converting visits into a future sales.  Making the offer time-limited increases urgency and gives prospects a good reason to sign up now, rather than later.

5.  Freebies can provide valuable market information.  A significant response to an offer suggests the item is a hot topic among qualified buyers.  Such data can be useful in driving new product development for the business.

6.  Freebies can help you gain expertise status in your niche market while gathering further leads.  One such freebie of this nature is offering a free membership to your site.  Membership entitles the user to access restricted areas of your site, publish a profile and interact with other members of the communitiy.  Usually only a basic amount of information is required to join, such as their name and email address.

*Disadvantages of Offering Free Stuff on Your Site

Marketing experts have noted one downside of free offers.  And that is, the possibility of attracting people who solely want “freebies” but are not interested in purchasing anything in the future.  One way to decrease the likelihood of this is to make the free offer enticing to those in the market for the products and services offered for sale, but unappealing to others.  A direct seller, for example, could offer a free item to anyone who books a sales party that month.  By tying in the “freebie” with the desired action, only serious shoppers will respond.

Summary: Industry estimates show that response rates triple when a “freebie” is offered as incentives for prompt action, effectively lowering the business owner’s cost per lead substantially.  Even if the free gift increases the total expense of the campaign, the higher volume of qualified leads will result in higher sales volume, thus offsetting the additional expense.

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