How To Create The Perfect Opt-In Offer To Build Your Email List

What Is An Opt-In Offer?

In short, an opt-in offer is a free gift that you give away in return for a visitor's contact information. This is commonly a name and email address. But it can also additionally be a phone number depending on the nature of the business.

Opt-in offers are often quick and simple to consume and can be delivered as ebooks, videos, checklists or even short email courses.

But the most crucial thing about them is that they solve a specific problem that a prospect wants a solution for.

The main goal again is to build a list of emails that you can contact regularly.

As we touched on earlier, having an engaged email list of customers who want to hear from you is the single most valuable asset you can have in your business.

It allows you to email them at any time with free content and promotions with a level of control that's simply not possible using any other medium.

Knowing Your Audience

To get started in creating an opt-in offer and ensuring that it provides value, you must know who your audience is; knowing what their problems are and creating a solution for it.

It's crucial to spend as much time researching your customer first before doing anything else. The more time you spend, the easier it will be creating offers, writing content and setting up successful advertising campaigns when you're ready to begin promoting.

Some things to think about during your research process:

- Where do they like to spend their time?

- Are there any discussion boards available?

- Are there any Facebook groups?

- What do they like to buy?

- Are there any products already in the market?

- How old are they?

- Are they male or female?

Again, it's crucial to spend as much time on this as you can as not doing so will make deciding what to create for content and opt-in offers a lot more difficult.

Fortunately, most of these questions can be answered easily and will require a bit of time to get the information. But by the end of it, you will have a better overall understanding of who it is you're serving and will be able to move on to the next step.

3 Rules For Ensuring A Successful Offer

Once you're ready to begin constructing a successful opt-in offer, the next stage is to ensure that you stick to some simple rules. This is important as it's very easy to get carried away and go off track from the main purpose of the offer.

There are a good number of rules to adhere to, but to keep this article simple and straightforward, we'll be listing 3 of the most important ones that when followed, will ensure that your offer will be on the right track.

Rule #1 - It Must Provide A Solution To ONE Problem

When first deciding on a lead magnet offer, it's very common to think writing one would be a momentous task consisting of hundreds of pages of in-depth content.

However, this is far from the truth. The value of the offer isn't defined by its length, but whether or not it delivers on the solution. 

The best way to ensure that you deliver on the promise is to **make the offer as specific as possible and that it solves only one problem.** 

This makes it very easy to write and provides a clear direction on the content. The best part is, you'll be able to deliver the value in as little as a few pages.

Rule #2 - It Must Be Quick To Consume

Following on from the first rule, it needs to be very easy to consume and shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes to read from start to finish.

A lead magnet offer that can deliver value as quickly as possible is more powerful than a meaty book full of padding. 

In fact, it will only reduce the need for a subscriber to want to learn more about your business and what you have to offer.

So keep your lead magnets short, sharp and as simple to consume as possible.

Rule #3 - It Must Be Consistent With Your Messaging

Finally, all of your offers must stay congruent to your overall message. If you've yet to know what that is, then we would strongly recommend going back to an earlier step and defining what this is.

A business with a clear direction has a much better chance of succeeding than a business that hasn't.

Write out a mission statement and get clear on what your business is all about and how it will serve your customers. The more clear you are with this, the easier it will be when it comes to writing compelling offers for your customers.

Key Takeaways

As you can see, Lead Magnets and opt-in offers don't have to be complicated and simply require a little planning in order to get set up.

• Know who your customers are.
• Understand their biggest pain points.
• Create a solution that's quick and easy to consume.