When you have an email list, filled with people who have already indicated that they are in the market for what you are creating and who are pretty warm leads because they obviously trust you enough to download your freebie, you can speak to that list, you can nurture it, promote to it, give value to it, sell to it. 

You can get your message out to people who are more likely to be listening, and that’s why having an email list is so important.

The question is: how can you go about building your email list? And if you’ve already started but it’s ground to a halt pretty quickly: how can you grow it?

Well, we need to turn our attention to what it is you are offering in exchange for your ideal client’s email address.

This is your downloadable freebie or resource that have, or will, create that you hope your ideal client will find so tempting and want it so bad that they download it without much thought.

The problem is that your ideal client is fed up of an inbox full of emails. So they are more picky about who to give their email address to. So you need to make sure that the freebie you are offering is desirable enough to them that you pass their mental roadblock. 

Here are 3 ways you can make sure that the opt-in you’re creating actually gets downloaded by your ideal clients

• First, it’s my old favourite and my go-to thing: know who your ideal client is.

You need to know who you are actually targeting with your freebie if you want what you create to be compelling enough for them to download it. Knowing who your ideal client is is so important for thinking about your freebie because it will dictate what freebie you offer.

You need to think about:

What kind of freebie will you offer? A guide like a checklist? A resource like a calendar, or something they can plug their own content into? A service from you like a free Instagram bio review? A product-type freebie like 5 free stock photos?

• And in deciding this you need to think about what kind of freebie your ideal client wants.

Do they want a resource, something they can use, or do they want guidance and help? Do they want something that involves more interaction, like a free review, or do they want something that involves little/no interaction?

Knowing this comes from knowing the type of person your ideal client is, knowing what their end goal and current problem is, and knowing how they look to you and how you show up in their story.

• Once you know the type of freebie you want to offer, you then need to think about the subject/topic of that freebie.

What does your ideal client need help with most? What do they see as being their biggest struggle point?

And bonus tip: make sure that what you are offering as a freebie is related to who you are and how you help them, i.e. your paid-for-services.

You want your freebie to be a taste of how you can help them with a particular problem, because if they really like what they see from your freebie and the free valuable content you are giving them that relates to this problem, they will be more likely to want to take it to the next level and pay you to give them even more help.

In Episode 11 of The Copy Coach podcast, I’m diving further into this topic and I’ve got a couple of extra bonus tips up my sleeve for how you can make sure your ideal client actually wants the opt-in you’ve created for them.