How To Create Targeted Email List Building Offers

In today’s world, Email Marketing is hands down, one of the best marketing strategies a business can have. It tends to be one of the biggest converters in sales, and it’s a place for you to really connect with your audience and build that know, like, and trust factor. Well, this blog post is intended to dive a little deeper into email marketing, and is all about How To Create Targeted Email List Building Offers, What Content Upgrades are, how they can skyrocket your email subscriber list, and how to create your content upgrades.

So, let’s get started with How To Create Targeted Email List Building Offers.

How To Create Targeted Email List Building Offers

The More Targeted The Offer The Better

When using in-content list building practices one of the things you must remember is that focus is everything. The more targeted your offers are to your ideal audience the better. The more targeted they are the better they will help your audience. The more targeted they are the more value they add. But the most important thing is, the more targeted the offer, the more likely they are to take advantage of the offer. To create a highly targeted opt-in, offer here are some things to consider.

Know Your Audience

You hear this constantly because it’s so important, but it cannot be stated enough. Continuous study of your audience so that you can develop your ideal customer personas or avatars will help you not only create better products and services but lead magnets as well. Once you develop your ideal customer persona consider also making them for subsets of this audience so that you can laser target your audience even further. 

For example, if your audience consists of divorced women who want to learn to get on with their life you may have subsets of this population. Some with kids, some without kids, some who caused their divorce, some who were victims and so forth. If your products are right, you can dig deeper with your targeting.

Know Your Products & Services

It might seem obvious, however, if you’re not a product creator but instead promote other people’s products as an affiliate, it’s up to you to understand the products and how they really work beyond the sales page information. 

The best way to do this is to buy and use the product. If you’re a super affiliate you may be able to contact the producer and get a free review copy, but otherwise, until you’re more known you’ll need to buy the products so that you can know them inside and out. 

Determine Your Goals & Objectives

Before creating any type of content at all you need to know what the point is. Why are you creating this freebie? What content will the freebie go with? What do you want the audience to do? What do you want them to learn? How do you want them to feel about the content they download after signing up for your list?

Remember: One Problem Means One Solution

It also helps to keep in mind that you need to create lead magnets and offers that focus on only one problem and one solution at a time. This is the best use of a lead magnet. Your audience wants the solution and they want it fast. They want it instantly, in fact. People aren’t very patient these days, so you must give them what they want.

Expand the Content

One way to create an effective lead magnet is to expand on the content in the blog post. So for example, let’s say you’ve created a recipe for roasted chicken. You’re making a lot of assumptions that they know how to carve the chicken but what if you added a lead magnet to the recipe on how best to carve the chicken to serve it? How many people would want that extra information, grab it, and sign up for your email list? 

Help Them Do Something

Another idea is to help your audience complete something that you’ve written a “how to” blog post about. For example, let’s say you wrote a blog post about How to Build a Basic Website with Self-Hosted WordPress. You may want to include an opt-in within the content that is a checklist that they can use to ensure that they don’t miss a step. 

Know Where the Lead Magnet Should Be Placed

Before you even create the opt-in, you want to know where you’re going to put it for maximum impact. You can put it in more than one place too if it has something to do with other content and will fit in. Knowing where you want it will help you focus it better. After that, you can use it elsewhere if you want to. 

Creating highly targeted offers requires that you understand your audience and you understand your products and services. Knowing this information helps you develop better lead magnets because they all have a reason for existing. Eventually, you’ll get so good at thinking about list building and lead magnets it’ll come more natural with each type of product you create. 

Let’s Talk Content Upgrades 

When we talk about How To Create Targeted Email List Building Offers, A great way to grow your list is with content upgrades. Content upgrades are in-content lead magnets that are related to the content you attach them to. It’s kind of like bonus content that adds value to the content your audience is already reading and interested in. To get the additional content your audience member will have to sign up for it because it’s gated. 

There are many types of content upgrades that you can create. Let’s look at some examples.

• Cheat Sheet – Help guide them through an action. For example, if you write a blog post about webinars you may include a cheat sheet of the things you need to do before, during, and after the webinar to make it more successful. 
• Check List – If you’ve provided a long blog post to your audience you can help the information stick with a good checklist that will help your audience follow your process and do what you have stated works.
• Resource List – While a resource list is a great blog post idea, providing a download PDF version is even better. That way they can keep it on their computer and refer to it whenever they need it. You can make the resource list slightly different than the blog post as it can be a simple linkable list to the items you described fully in your blog post. 
• Transcripts – Anytime you create a video there is an opportunity to also provide a transcript. Some people prefer reading transcripts to watching videos. Give them that option any time you have video content of any kind. 
• Additional Videos – You may choose to put a clip of a video within a blog post, but offer the entire video via gated download. As you see, content upgrades can be in any type of format.
• Recording of Webinar – If you have a webinar, offering the recording is a great way to get people on your list for those who missed the webinar. It’s a great way to repurpose webinar content.
• Quick Start Guide – This is helpful information to help people get started with something quick. For example, if you have a yoga website you could offer a quick start guide to getting started with yoga.
• An In-Depth Guide – You can also go deeper with the guide to make it more in-depth. For example, you may want to create a guide that teaches people how to get their first site up with WordPress or another builder.
• eReport – You’re familiar with reports, and it’s still a great way to offer a content upgrade.
• eBook – Same with an eBook, it’s a great way to offer a content upgrade to provide an entire book about the topic that you’re blogging about. 
• Whitepaper – These are always a great way to explain to your audience more about their problems and the solutions that you and others provide for those problems. 
• Printable – This works great on recipe sites, homeschooling sites, and even self-help sites. You can let people download and print all sorts of things like coloring books, exercise sheets and more.
• Worksheets – Whether it’s math problems for homeschoolers or a quiz to ensure that your audience member understood the concepts you taught them in a blog post. Worksheets are very popular content upgrades.
• Assignments / Homework – A great way to show your expertise is to teach something within content on your website and then give them assignments and homework to do. 
• Interviews – Put transcripts of interviews on your blog as a blog post and offer the recorded interview as the content upgrade.
• Case Studies – Any time you can provide a case study regardless of format that expands on the information you’re providing it makes for a great content upgrade.
• Additional Points – Write a blog post about 20 ways to do something, then offer a content upgrade that is 101 ways to do the same thing. 
• Challenges – Writing about how to do anything, you can also offer a content upgrade that is a 30-day challenge. That challenge can be delivered via email, or you can use the email to invite them to a secret Facebook group.
• Templates – This works for all sorts of things. If you have good templates, you use in your business why not share them?
• Product Teasers – Offer your audience sneak peaks of products and services that you offer. 
• Free Chapter – Did you write a book? Give away a free chapter.
• eCourse – Teach something more in-depth that you wrote about on your blog.
• Swipe Files – If you use swipe files to help you get ideas for things, share them with your audience. 
• Spreadsheets – Is the content you’ve posted full of data and other information provide a downloadable spreadsheet that they can use to organize the information. For example, if you want to share keywords you can do it in a spreadsheet. 

You can likely think of even more content upgrade ideas than these. Ideally, you want to include a content upgrade within the content of every blog post that you publish.

So, next we’re going to talk about How To Create Your First Content Upgrade From Scratch.

Creating Your First Content Upgrade From Scratch 

When we talk about How To Create Targeted Email List Building Offers, by now you realize that content upgrades help you get more subscribers to your list by providing extra value to your audience. A content upgrade is content that goes deeper into the information or provides a simple way to organize the information you provide your audience when they download the gated content from your blog post or website. But, how do you create your first content upgrade from scratch?

Step #1: Analyze Your Content to Find Most Popular Blog Post

The most effective opt-in will be on pages that get a lot of views. Since the page already gets a lot of views that means the content is already popular. Your best course is to find out which post is your top post now. If you want to, you can pick the top three posts, go over them, update them if needed. While doing so, look for ways that you can add to or expand on the information in the post.

For example, if you wrote a blog post about How to Start Your Own Digital Retail Business there may be spots in the post that go over the info in a basic way that is a spot you can go deeper. For example, you might want to provide a resource list that gives your views and recommendations on the correct software to use. You may also want to create a checklist of steps to go through from A to Z on starting a digital retail store. 

Step #2: Decide the Best Way to Offer a Gated Opt-in Depending on Your Audience

Every audience is slightly different, and you know your’s best. Will they prefer a PDF file or a video? Will they be fine with providing more than a name and email address to get it? Usually, the less information you can collect the more people will grab the freebie and sign up for your email list. 

Step #3: Create the Opt-in

Once you know what you need to create, make an outline for it and create it. It’s likely you even have information you can use to create the opt-in already. It can be private label rights information, or you can create the information from scratch to match the blog post better. It’s totally up to you. But get something created. Keep it short and simple for this first one, such as an additional “how to” video, a checklist, cheat sheet or resource list. 

Step #4: Create an Autoresponder List for The Audience That Downloads the Freebie

One step you don’t want to skip is creating the list for your freebie. How you do this will depend greatly on your system. Some systems you create an entirely new list, for others, you can tag the people who grab this freebie to send them to a particular list. You may need to learn more about your system to get specific instructions. 

Create 7 to 10 emails for the autoresponder series that recipients of your download get and load them into your system. Consider what your goal is for creating the freebie and publishing the blog post in the first place. What do you, ultimately, want the audience to do? 

Step#5: Create a Form or Landing Page for the Freebie

Depending again, on the technology you’re using you’ll do this slightly different. You may need to create a landing page, or you may be able to do it all through your landing page or email software. But you need a place to collect the email addresses. 

Normally this will require you to either copy the code from your email software and paste into your website, or you’ll integrate your landing page software with your email software to accomplish this. This is how your audience will sign up for your email list and then receive the freebie.

Step #6: Create a Download Page for the Lead Magnet

Now you need a place for your audience to download their freebie after they provide the information. Again, how this looks and is accomplished depends on your technology. With some technology like Convertkit.com and Drip.com combined with Leadpages.net, your subscribers can be sent directly to the freebie after signing up. 

For some, they may need to opt-in to the subscription before the system sends a thank you note with the link to the download page. Either way, you’ll create a download page that is for your freebie. You can upload the freebie directly to your website server or you can use a system such as Amazon S3 to host the freebie for you. 

With some setups, the freebie is uploaded to a server on your landing page software. How you do this depends on the technology you have, and on how much traffic you believe you’ll get. It’s usually advisable to host it on a third party that can handle high levels of traffic.

Step #7: Add Freebie to Download Page

Once you’ve created the infrastructure for your freebie, now you can add the freebie to your download page via a link or the technology that you use. Remember that your download page is also valuable real-estate to market other paid products or affiliate products that people who are getting this item might also want. You can put that right below the download button for the freebie. 

Step #8: Add the Link to The Freebie within the Content of the Blog Post

Once you have all that set up, now you can grab the link to the landing page you created for your freebie (or form page) and just add the link to some anchor text on the blog post. It is advisable that you create something that will make it more visible such as using an image with text that stands out for the freebie. 

Pointing out the freebie is the best way to ensure people find it and subscribe. If your call to action is not clear people may not click the link if it’s just on top of the text so, do what you can to highlight and call attention to the offer.

These steps will be, more or less, the same, depending on the technology you use. For example, if you use technology from LeadPages.net or Convertkit.com for your landing page some of your steps will be different as these types of systems helps you create the pages for the freebie all at one time. Otherwise, you create each page separately on your system in a manual way.

Want to Learn How To Create an Email Marketing Strategy Like A Boss? Check this out!

Planning Content For Content Upgrades 

As you move forward with your business you probably want to start planning content for content upgrades so that it works seamlessly in your overall content marketing planning. You can do this in two simple ways that will make a lot of sense to you and show you how you can repurpose content to create amazing information and value for your audience plus offer the right in-content opt-ins to build your email list fast.

We’re going over two ways to do this: 

1. Create a blog post series first consisting of 7 to 10 blog posts about one topic. You’ll offer the entire content from the series as the upgrade offer as a PDF file. 
2. Start with the content upgrade offer first such as a short report, eBook, or webinar recording that you already have. What you’ll do is take that info and brainstorm future blog posts that will be a good fit for this upgrade offer. 

Let’s get Started:

Create a Blog Post Series

You may wonder why anyone would want to download the entire blog post series in one PDF file, but people do like to do that because most of the time a blog post series takes a few weeks to be published so instead of digging through your blog they like the option of downloading it all in one easy to read report. 

1. Outline the Series – The best way to prepare for success is to create an outline for the series and each blog post. That way you ensure that you stick to each topic for each individual post and make each one complete but also ensure that each post builds on the other before it and mentions what comes after it.
2. Write Each Individual Post – Now that you have the overall outline you can start writing the posts. You can write them all at once, or you can write them each week. For speed’s sake, I suggest you consider writing them in one or two sittings. It makes it easier to stay on topic. You can write them all into one document then easily cut and paste to add to your blog. If you outsource the blog posts the writer can do them all at once usually at a more reasonable rate than one at a time.
3. Schedule the Posts – Once you complete a post you can go ahead and schedule it even if you’re not done with the freebie. If you finish everything first, then you can add the freebie to each post now instead of later. There are pros and cons of doing it both ways but the best way to do it is the way you’ll get it done. Don’t shoot for perfection, shoot for done. 
4. Compile Blog Posts into One Report – If you wrote each separately, compile them all into one document. If you wrote them into one document, then all you need to do is add some transition words between each post to make it flow. 
5. Upgrade It – To make the freebie more valuable to yourself and your audience take the opportunity to make it look great. You can make it in Word, then transfer it to a PDF file. You can also ask someone to design the layout in in-design, and some people like to use Canva.com to make it pretty. Create a cover for it, and add graphics inside to make the things you say stand out even more. Don’t forget to keep your affiliate links in the report too. It’s fine to add an upsell to the end of the report if you want to as well as invite them to follow you on social media.
6. Create the Components of the Freebie – Create your landing page, sign up form, download page and so forth. Also, remember to create some emails for the people who sign up such as a thank you for signing up email and other educational and promotional emails just for the people who grab this freebie. 
7. Attach the Freebie CTA to Each Blog Post in the Series – Once the freebie is done, go back to each blog post and add in the call to action for the freebie on each blog post in the series. You can even add this freebie to other posts that fit the criteria and cover similar topics. Make the CTA stand out so that they don’t miss it. 

You can choose to write each blog post on the fly, on a daily or weekly basis or you can write all the blog posts in one sitting so that you’ll have the entire series done before you publish it along with the freebie. It doesn’t matter how you do it if you do it and follow your plan to completion. Now, look at the second way you can do this. 

Note: Starting with the Content Upgrade

In some cases, you may already have some good freebies that you’d like to provide to your audience to get them on your email list. If you have webinar recordings, reports, eBooks, checklists, cheat sheets and other information already whether you created it or it’s private label rights content, you can use it for the opt-in.

When you start with the opt-in you’ll need to think backward from the above by creating blog posts around the freebie that you have, attaching the freebie CTA to each blog post you create. You should still outline the blog posts, publish them in a series, set up all the pages and information that allows your audience to get the freebie content just like you did in the steps above. The only difference is, you’re staring with the freebie and designing content to go around the freebie.

Whichever way you choose to do it remember that done is better than not done. Let go of the idea of perfection. Sure, you want the content to add value, but no one is perfect. You can always fix issues later. More than likely, it’s a lot better than you personally think it is anyway. If your information is targeted toward your audience and created with the idea of adding value to your audience while solving their pain points you’ve got a winner.

How To Create Targeted Email List Building Offers Product Reviews:

Keap

For my Email Autoresponder Software I personally use Infusionsoft by Keap. I first started, I used Convertkit, and then eventually transferred to Infusionsoft by Keap.  Keap has 4 different levels of products and services to choose from to fit everyone’s price points, and it had more options for what I was looking for in terms of automating my business. You can check them out here.

ClickFunnels:

For my landing page builder, I use Clickfunnels, and I have been very happy with them. Not only am I able to create my landing pages, but I’m also able to create my funnels.