What’s Your Free Gift?

One of the recommendations I’ve heard from marketing people pretty much since the day I started in business twenty-five (!) years ago was that you should have a free gift to offer potential customers.

You have to think any advice that’s been around that long has probably survived for a reason.

And it does make sense. There are several good reasons to offer value to a potential customer first, before attempting to engage them for an actual transaction. This accomplishes a few important things:

• They get a chance to see what working with you is like
• They get to see what kind of value you offer them for no cost which often sets the bar for what kind of value they can expect if they were paying
• They get to see what kind of expertise you are offering
• They get to build a bit of a relationship with you and your business before having to decide to buy

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You also benefit from this, if you do it right:

• You get to demonstrate the things you offer and your unique value to them
• You can establish a relationship with them, and people prefer to do business with people they know and like
• You can create a certain sense of reciprocal obligation on their part since you have now provided them with something of value, and they haven’t given you anything (yet) in return
• There are a few catches to this, however.

How to Design the Perfect Free Gift to Attract Quality Customers

The first is the thing you are offering must provide real value to the person you are giving it to.

We’ve all seen the giveaways and add on bonuses that say “$50 value, yours free” and everyone can immediately tell that bonus isn’t worth more than $1.50 on its best day. People aren’t stupid. They know when you’re massively inflating the claimed value to make it look like you’re being generous.

If what you are giving away is something real people would pay money for then you know you’re on the right track.

The second thing is it should directly relate to a connection with you and your business. We do accounting. I could give away hoodies as a free gift to people who sign up to our email list, but the pool of people who want a free hoodie and the pool of people who need accounting help doesn’t have a ton of meaningful overlap.

It would make more sense for me to offer access to a webinar on saving on income taxes or a free in-depth cash flow review or a free five point profit finder audit. Something that aligns with the problems and value my potential customers are looking for where I can demonstrate our skills and service.

Giving a free gift in itself accomplishes nothing if it doesn’t build toward a customer relationship. It won’t always happen, but it should pay off more times than not otherwise you’re probably doing it wrong.

The thing is I see many businesses not doing it at all, or offering something that doesn’t offer much value or doesn’t connect with the customer in a way that relates to the business.

It’s a powerful and useful marketing tool and one I think nearly any business can use. The challenge is to come up with something that is valuable, useful, desirable and lets you connect with a potential customer in a meaningful way. That is the hard part. Easy to write, but hard to design and execute.

You will know you got it right when you offer it and the recipient shows genuine surprise that you are willing to give that much value to someone who isn’t even a customer AND then they turn into a customer. The second part has to be there, too!

Once you’ve figured it out, you can use the same incentive forever and know that it works and brings in way more new business than the cost of the offer. And it may really then be the only marketing tool you need to bring in as many new customers as you can handle.