Charles Lau dot Com

One after another, the Internet marketers are adopting free gift marketing to the rest of the world.  Free things give access to your prospective customers.  Free things open up your horizon to the people whom you have always wanted to reach.  Free things spread like wildfire from one person to another (viral marketing).  Free things start with yourself to work out a good plan about what to do with your target market right from the beginning.

Get Your Market Interested In You!
From a suspect, to become a prospect, to become a customer, to become a loyal customer, to become a leaving customer.  It is part of the business process of retaining a customer.  When you are able to pull in any suspicious characters in your website, this person is potentially interested in your products if he intends to stay more than 1 minute on your website.

If she is able to stay more than a minute on your website, it probably means something on your website has caught her attention and she is looking attentively to what you have to say.

Why not offer her something for free to get her contact information so that you can email her when you have something she might be interested in?  This has been a common tactic by many websites nowadays by asking for your first name and email address, and offering you a free e-book.

Some of the websites are actually quite disappointing in fulfilling the contents of their free ebook.

• They either keep on upselling you with affiliate links
• Or they are pushing sales to their website for “more information”
• Or they are just trying to get your contact information with no real product delivery
• Anymore from the comments?

When your market has taken up your free gift, you are vitually given access to any potential sales if you can start building up your virtual relationship with them through the various auto-response programs out there.

The idea is that this market actually knows you have something to sell them.  Probably not now only.  There must have a good relationship to build up as quickly as possible while you have the access.

Taking Advantage Of The Delivery and Handling Charge

The contents in the delivery are definitely very important in building your relationship with your potential customers.  There are some marketers who actually give free CD or DVD (or for a charge of something like $1) in their website.  And ridiculously speaking, they are actually making money from the handling charge which is not inside the sub-total.  “For a free CD, you will only need to pay the delivery and handling charges of $30.”  For sure, they are covering their expenses for the items and delivery as well as some profit from there!  Smart marketers will make probably a few dollars from their free gift.  But in return, they are building up an even further relationship with their customers.

I ever had one delivery charge of USD$49.90.  It is almost the same kind of cost of buying a product in a shop!  That’s so crazy leverage that smart consumers are less likely to be taken in for.

Pushing Sales For The Magazines
Free gift (or at a minimal cost), comes with a no-obligation of free 1 month magazine subscription to be sent to your home.  I was previously enticed to such offers from Yanik Silver and Russell Brunson for similar kind of offers last year or so.

Yanik Silver has been selling underground information to his customers.  I had been in the subscription for a while.  I also had magazine subscription from Russell Brunson as well as Joel Comm.  Now, it’s Mike Filsaime doing it as well.  No doubt that they are providing some quality magazines out there.  Russell Brunson has got some interesting contents to teach about.  Though these information may be easily available through your RSS feeds in your Google Reader, I must admit that it feels nice reading at the comfort somewhere and read about my favorite topic “Internet marketing”.

It looks to me that there is some success in building up sales by giving away one month of free magazine subscription.  Their “advertising cost” is up to the production and delivery of the magazine.  It is definitely measurable when you compared to huge companies spending millions of dollars on advertisements which may not give them any returns but to have more marketing exposure for a potential future gains (only!).

Mystery Gift

Some people prefer to give something mystery to lure them.  It is a way of telling people of having a mystery gift for free when they do something at your website.  It can be in the form of a purchase.  It can be in the form of a e-newsletter subscription.  Nevertheless, the problem with mystery gift is that you have to reveal a bit about the contents of this gift before the person actually asks for the delivery.  I wouldn’t want to download an e-product in the zip format which I don’t even know what it is all about.  It may be a virus software.  Who knows?

The whole idea about a mystery gift is that it must be anticipated.  Not easy to work with this one definitely.  But it must be something of some value to the receiving person.  By taking part of this contest, or buying a certain product, you will get a scratch card to find out the mystery gift you will be receiving.  This is a definite win for the customer.

The whole idea of free gift marketing is very simple.

1. Put up one very good disturbing advertisement with as little money as you could while maintaining some branding for yourself.
2. Offer a very good free product (with little or no cost from you) which can attract the correct group of prospects you would want to market to in future.
3. Marketing to this group of people with really good pre-sale information through their emails
4. Offer them your product which can give them solutions to their area of interest.  Offer them your competitors’ products by referral.  Offer them things in their interest.

Any better idea about free gift marketing from you guys?