You’re an online business owner or a creative, and you’ve created a great freebie/lead magnet for your audience that helps them out with a certain issue. Congrats! Email marketing is a great way to promote your offers and content and connect with your ideal audience. Promoting a lead magnet that people can sign up for is the most common way to grow your email list.
But what happens after people sign up for your freebie and join your list? If they’re just added to your email list and receive regular newsletters from you, that’s good, but you could be leaving some money on the table.
If there is no clear next step, no guided journey, and no immediate opportunity to buy when people join your email list, you might be missing out on opportunities to turn your new subscribers into customers much faster and make more money. In this blog post, we’ll explore one of the ways to turn subscribers into instant customers: creating a freebie funnel.
This post contains affiliate links, which means I gain a commission at no cost to you if you decide to make a purchase through these links.
What is a Freebie Funnel
A freebie funnel is a marketing system set up with the goal of turning subscribers into customers/leads. It involves nurturing your subscribers and guiding them toward a paid product or service, from the minute they sign up for your freebie.
If you offer just a freebie without a freebie funnel, something that can happen is;
- Someone signs up for your freebie
- They see a thank-you page or message that instructs them to check their email
- They download the resource from the freebie delivery email
- They hear nothing sales-related for days or weeks, or they receive your regular newsletters, which misses out on the chance of nurturing new subscribers in a more targeted way.
By the time you finally try to sell something to them, the connection is weak. They may not remember who you are, what they signed up for, or what problem they were trying to solve by joining your list. This happens because there is no natural bridge between the freebie and your paid offers.
A freebie funnel fixes this, giving you more opportunities to connect with and sell to them. The word funnel might make it sound complex, but you can actually set it up to be as simple or as complex as you like.
How to create a simple freebie funnel
To set up a simple freebie funnel, you need;
- A freebie/lead magnet that offers valuable support to your ideal audience
- A sign-up/opt-in page for people to learn more about your freebie and sign up for it
- A tripwire page that gives them an immediate opportunity to buy from you, or a thank-you page that guides them towards the next step
- An automated email sequence with 3 – 5 emails that subscribers get before they join your regular email list
This is pretty much what a freebie funnel entails; it can be tweaked and refined over time and made more complex with longer email sequences, A/B testing, changing up the tripwire offers, etc. But we’re keeping it simple, so you can set yours up in record time. Let’s go over each step.
π» Your freebie opt-in page
This is the landing page where people can learn about your freebie and sign up for it. You want your opt-in page to;
- Let viewers know how the freebie will help them
- What they’ll get when they sign up. A PDF? A video of a workshop? A checklist? Let it be clear.
- Have minimal distractions, no other offers or links on the page.
- A strong call to action and buttons that lead to the signup form
- Optional: Trust cues like a headshot, a short bio, or even a testimonial if relevant to the freebie
You can create this page on your website and embed the sign-up form on the page, or create the page directly in your email marketing platforms like Kit (ConvertKit), Flodesk, etc.
Tip: If you have a website, it’s better to create your opt-in pages on your website, rather than on other platforms. This way, you get traffic towards your website and more flexibility in your opt-in page design.
π» A tripwire or thank you page
After someone subscribes to your list, they should be taken to either a tripwire page or a thank-you page. This can be set up in the email marketing platform you use, so once they click submit on the sign-up form, the redirect automatically happens.
A tripwire page lets subscribers know they’ve successfully signed up for your freebie and presents your subscribers with an immediate opportunity to buy a product/offer, with an added incentive (discount, first-time bonus, membership trial, etc.) that makes the offer more attractive.
This can be any smaller offer you have, like a masterclass, mini-course, template bundle, toolkit, membership, or power hour, etc. You’d need to pick one that relates to your freebie or the problem it solves. The best tripwire offers are the ones that help subscribers faster implement the knowledge they get from the freebie, and are not priced too high.
For example, if your freebie is a list of 30 content ideas for instagram, a good tripwire offer would be a bundle of 15 Instagram Canva templates + caption templates to make creating content for Instagram much easier for them. Tripwires are more effective if the offers are highly discounted with a time limit; e.g., 30 – 50% off for the next 30 mins.
Freebie Funnel Template Kit
Easily create the essential pages you need to capture leads & grow your email list, warm up subscribers, and make sales, with these beautifully designed, conversion-ready freebie funnel page templates.
Right after opting in, your subscriber is in a unique mental state:
- They were interested enough to give you their email
- They are actively thinking about the problem your freebie solves
- They are already in action mode
- They are paying attention to what you say next
This is the moment of high engagement from your subscribers, which is why having a tripwire offer to show them is a good idea. Presenting a helpful, relevant, lower-priced offer at this point feels natural and doesnβt feel like a hard sell.
Don’t have anything to offer as a tripwire? Then redirect your subscribers to a regular thank-you page.
One that confirms their freebie is on its way to their email and gives them the next steps to follow, like joining your free community, exploring other resources on your website, following you on a social media platform you’re most active on, etc. This way, you guide them deeper into your world, which is part of nurturing your subscribers.
If your freebie is a video like a workshop, your thank you page can have an embed of the video, any other additional resources like a workbook and a section that promotes an offer that relates to the workshop.
πRelated Post – How to add an online shop to your Showit website and start selling your products
βοΈ Email sequence
Instead of sending only the email that delivers the freebie, you want to create a sequence of emails that are targeted towards your freebie subscribers. The goal is to nurture these subscribers and build a connection so they remember who you are and make good use of the freebie, which can lead to them being interested in your other products/services.
A simple nurture sequence might include:
1 – A welcome email that delivers the freebie with a brief introduction of yourself, information on what to expect from future emails, and you can also mention a low-priced offer you think they might be interested in (no hard selling, just a sentence or two).
2 – The second email offers more free resources & recommendations to help them with the problem the freebie solves.
3 – The third email highlights a common mistake or struggle they might have. This is your chance to educate them and give tips that lead to a quick win for them.
4 – An email that introduces your main offer, how it can help them and how you support creatives/business owners like them.
5 – An email asking about how they found the freebie, if they have any questions, and what next steps they can take after utilising the freebie, etc.
These emails will be automated, so anyone who signs up for that particular freebie gets all the emails over a time period. After they go through this sequence of emails, you can then send them your regular newsletters.
You can set up the email sequence with whichever email marketing platform you use. Flodesk is my email marketing platform of choice, I like it because of its minimalist interface and how easy it is to create stunning emails and sequences with it. Another recommendation is Kit (ConvertKit), which offers more complex features than Flodesk, so if you need all the tools, it’s a good choice as well.
Mistakes to avoid with your freebie funnel
π ββοΈ Your tripwire offer is too expensive or not related to the freebie
Smaller, lower-priced offers work best for tripwires; a good spot is something priced between $9 – $47 that gives them a quick win related to the issue your freebie helps them with.
π§ Overwhelming subscribers with too many emails
No one likes to receive a flurry of emails within a week of signing up for an email list. Be sure to space your emails out by at least 2 – 3 days for your nurture sequence.
π€ Your freebie doesnβt align with your services/offers
You could have created a good freebie that gets a lot of subscribers, but if your freebie is too broad or doesn’t align with what you offer, you’d end up with subscribers that are not a good fit for your business or content.
π Overcomplicating your freebie funnel
People assume they need complex funnel builders, advanced automations, or multiple tools to make this work and quickly get overwhelmed. But as I’ve shown you in this blog post, you can get started with a simple freebie funnel with just an opt-in page, a tripwire/thank you page, and your email marketing platform.
π¨ Lack of consistency
For a freebie funnel to do its work, you need to send traffic its way. So promote your freebie consistently, send newsletters to your list regularly (once a week is a good start), sharing tips and resources for your niche and selling your offers.
πͺ§Recs: Sending newsletters consistently might be hard for you if you’re not sure what to send. The Email Marketing Membership helps with this! You get weekly newsletter copy templates, sequence templates, trainings on how to be better at email marketing, monthly Q & A’s and more, all for $9 a month.
Creating a freebie funnel doesnβt have to be complicated and I hope this blog post has helped break it down and made it easier for you to set one up for your business.
If you need help designing the pages for your freebie funnel for your Showit website and setting up your sign-up forms and email sequence, I can help. Book a website support day, and I’ll design all the pages for your freebie funnel while you focus on your zone of genius.
Prefer to do it yourself and just need templates to get started instead of starting from scratch? Check out The Freebie Funnel Template Kit, a collection of 6 templates to make the design aspect of setting up your freebie funnel a breeze.
