Freebies are a fantastic list-building tool. Nathalie Lussier teaches you to use them in her 30 Day List Building Challenge. Chalene Johnson calls them Freemiums as part of her Marketing Impact Academy. Google “email list building tips” and I guarantee you one of those tips is to offer something of value, like an e-book, in exchange for an email address.
I get this question a lot in my Facebook group (you can get access to it as part of the BFF Academy), but I thought I'd answer it here too!
If you want to deliver an e-book as your freebie for opting in to your mailing list – here are the steps. Note this tutorial uses Mailchimp, because that's my recommending mailing list provider and what I teach in the Free 5 Day Website Challenge and in the BFF Academy.
1) Make sure you have a paid Mailchimp account so that you can use the Automation feature (log in, click on your name at the top-right, then click on Account and you can upgrade there if you need to, it’s $10 a month.
2) You should have a List created as I teach in Day 3 of the Challenge. So you are going to set up Mailchimp so that when someone confirms they want to be added to your list, that Mailchimp automatically delivers an email to them with a link to download your free ebook in it.
3) Click on Automation in the main Mailchimp menu, then click on the grey “Create Automation Workflow” button (top-right corner).
4) Select your list, then select “Welcome Email”. You can always add emails to the series (like I have for the 5 Day Challenge), but we’ll start with one.
5) Fill out all the details, and click Next. Then your “trigger” is already set to send the email when people subscribe to your list – that’s fine, leave everything on that page as it is and click Next.
6) Then click “add email”, then “design email” and then you’ll give it a name and subject (I use the same thing for the name and subject) and click Next.
7) Then select “one column drag and drop” for the template (or whatever you want – I teach all about templates in the BFF Academy).
8) Then you’ll add all your content to the email. Then you can say something like “Click here to download your ebook” (whatever you want it to say) – and then you’re going to highlight that text with your cursor, and click the link icon (looks like a chain, right next to the underline formatting icon) and a new window will pop up, and you’ll see a dropdown that says “Link to:” and you’ll pick “File” from that dropdown list. Then you’ll upload your ebook, and now when you send out that email, people will click on the link and your e-book will download! Finish formatting that email, and click next, and finish all the steps (not sure how many are left) and then you’ll activate this email.
And then I’d test it out. Go to your site, use another email address if you have one to opt-in. You’ll get the opt-in confirmation email, then you should automatically receive this email you just set up within 10 minutes or so with a link to the e-book – click on it and it should open as a PDF in the browser tab and the person can save it OR it will download automatically) depending on their browser settings.
That’s it. That’s how to set up Mailchimp to automatically deliver your free e-book!
