One of the biggest mistakes women entrepreneurs make is to jump into sales without preparing for it. Remember, if you want to increase sales and grow your business, your sales efforts must follow a structured process. When you build a winning sales process, it helps boost conversions, increase the likelihood of closing more deals with your prospects, and ensure your clients have a positive experience with your business on a consistent basis. How can you do that? One of the simplest ways to build a winning sales process is to offer valuable freebies and warm welcomes to your clients. Let’s explore further and show you how to easily implement into your own sales process.
Why You Should Offer Freebies and How They Can Help Increase Sales
In sales, we can often feel like our hair is on fire, especially the small business owners who are wearing way too many hats. Your aim is to land new clients and retain the existing ones to stay relevant and increase your sales and profit by providing warm welcomes.
What most forward-thinking business owners and entrepreneurs do is offer free giveaways. Offering advice on a service or product and providing freebies to your valued clients can help you achieve your ultimate goal: increasing sales. How? Well, simply because clients love freebies and it builds your reputation as a business that gives back to its clients and rewards them for their loyalty.
When you build your brand image around such a solid reputation, it helps you stay ahead of the competition and keep growing, taking a larger market share.
How to Build a Winning Sales Process with Valuable Freebies
Yes, the key lies in the word “valuable.” If you want to win their business and make them keep coming back, you must offer value to your clients for free as part of your sales process.
The vitally important activities to build a strategic sales plan for your business attract, connect, and capture your prospects’ attention, and a valuable lead magnet does exactly that. It gifts your lead a valuable piece of your work, delivering a delightful client journey as you welcome them onboard.
Creating a High-Value Lead Magnet That Converts via Warm Welcomes
A high-value lead magnet, when created with the right ingredients and delivered with a method that trains your prospects to open and click through your emails, will give your prospects a WOW experience, and they’ll be more likely to convert.
Wondering how you can do that? Well, the recipe is simple! You need to answer your client’s why with the value they’re seeking in a planned, strategic process to let the leads roll in. Here’s how you can create valuable freebies for your prospects to ignite sales.
- Ensure that you’re offering real value in exchange for an email.
- The freebie content must align with your Client’s Why and what they want, need, or lack.
- It should address or answer a specific pain point or area of concern.
- Give them something that would make them consume your freebie content.
- Consider 10 questions, objections, or pain points your ideal client might have and build your lead magnet content around one of them.
- Choose a lead magnet format based on the psychographics picked from your ideal client avatar.
- Make sure the freebie lead magnet connects with your prospects’ emotions and motivations.
- It should offer both perceived and real value.
- It should help increase brand awareness among your visitors.
- The freebie content must be easily digestible.
You can always offer longform lead magnets such as an eBook, and they’re a perfect way to grow your email audience. The key is to ensure the freebie content aligns with your client’s WHY to create interest and consumption of your content. It should bridge the gap, addressing your prospects’ area of concern or the problem they are trying to solve.
Delivering the Freebie to Your Prospects
This freebie can be used on multiple platforms, such as creating your own master class or through social media, and attracting them with a valuable item they are looking for.
You can also feature your freebie on your website. It could be a:
- Call to action (CTA)
- Main image content or something lower down the page
- Popup that appears when someone chooses to exit the site
Once they click, they should be taken to your lead magnet landing page which welcomes them with a bold headline answering their BIG WHY. There should also be an image outlining what they will get, copy that answers their WHY, and finally, it should include a CTA button to get the freebie.
But before they can claim their freebie, they must provide their email and first name. Try not to ask for too much information here as it will reduce the click-through rate.
Once they click, they will receive a message that the freebie is on its way. It should also have additional information to book an appointment regarding the need, want, or lack that the freebie addresses.
Next Steps to Create Warm Welcomes
Once your prospects receive the email and click the download button, take them to a new landing page where you can WOW them with some additional value or bonus content. It could be anything, like a video related to what’s in the freebie.
By now, the visitor has turned into your audience, a subscriber, or a prospect, and they’d be delighted to have this extension to their freebie content. Again, at the bottom of the page, you can add a CTA saying “Book an Appointment” or “Schedule a Consultation.”
This little sequence of additional steps actually trains your new subscriber or prospect strategically to open your emails in the future and click through them. As you over-deliver every time, you’re telling them what it’s like to work with you and your team. Thus, they will keep coming back.
You can now launch an automated Welcome email sequence. In these emails, you should:
- Introduce yourself
- Share value
- Show gratitude
This is how you create warm welcomes. You can drive engagement by adding a simple Yes/No question in your welcome emails. Also, tell your prospects that you are going to offer free and paid resources. This sets the expectation that not everything is going to be free. At the same time, offer welcome perks like exclusive content and resources only your subscribers can access.
By the end of the process, you’ve got them. They’re interested, and they are part of your community. You can now nurture your relationship, take care of them, and turn them into a raving client!
Lynn Whitbeck is the co-founder and President of Petite2Queen. She is focused on identifying and evaluating opportunities for women at work, helping them define their personal roadmap. She dedicates herself to delivering tools and insights, embracing visualization of the big picture, and identifying and implementing the minutiae of detail. Lynn aims to share lessons learned along her journey and enable positive uplift for women.