Email serves as a direct and highly reliable communication channel between your small business and potential customers who have already shown interest in your products or services—making email a powerful and necessary tool in your marketing strategy.
In fact and despite our seemingly social media-driven world, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to engage with your audience, promote products and services, and drive sales.
But, in order to utilize email marketing, you need to have an email list (a list of your audience’s email addresses). And, to build an email list, you need an “opt-in.”
If you’re ready to experience the benefits of email marketing, let’s discuss eight kinds of opt-ins you can use to build your small business’s email list and provide value to your audience.
What is an “opt-in”?
An opt-in—also known as a “lead-generating offer” or “lead magnet”—is something of value you offer your audience access to in exchange for their email address.
Opt-ins serve as a useful tool for not only expanding your email list but also guiding your audience deeper into your sales funnel. This offer is part of the consideration stage of your funnel, meaning it should help your audience dive deeper into and solve a problem—and inevitably lead them to the decision phase.
With this in mind, whatever your offer is, you need to make sure you’re offering something of value. With how full our inboxes are these days, people can be hesitant to share their email addresses. Because of this, you want to make sure your opt-in—which you’ll share for free—is worth at least $10.
Opt-ins You Can Use to Build Your Small Business's Email List
While any opt-in you offer needs to provide value and help your ideal client, there are a variety of formats you can use to create opt-in content.
When it comes to creating opt-ins for your business, it's all about understanding how your ideal customers like to consume content. By tailoring your opt-ins to their preferences, your content is more likely to gain higher levels of engagement—and, consequently, higher levels of conversion.
1. PDF Guides
One of the simplest—but still effective—opt-ins you can create is a PDF guide or informative download. Whether it's a practical how-to, a guide diving deep into expert advice, or even a case study, a simple PDF with valuable content can attract prospects and help you build your email list.
All you need to generate a PDF opt-in is copy and design—making them easy to create and affordable for every budget. You can either collaborate with copywriting or design professionals for top-notch quality or, if on a tight budget, craft compelling copy and design yourself using tools like Canva.
As a marketing agency for small businesses, we love PDF opt-ins as they are a great way to serve your audience, have a conversion rate of 3-10%, and are relatively simple to create.
Because of this, we use PDF opt-ins in our own marketing as well as our clients’. We offer free online resources and guides such as “The Most Effective Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: The Flywheel Marketing Method”—our guide that details every step of the flywheel marketing method and how small businesses can implement it.
This opt-in not only showcases our expertise and knowledge in our field but also provides real value to our audience, giving them a reason to share their email address with us.
With their ease and ability to deliver valuable content, PDF downloads stand out as excellent lead-generating offers for small businesses.
2. Quizzes
With the world of digital marketing getting busier and louder, it’s become even harder for your content to stand out. Interactive content, like quizzes, is a great way to engage and retain your audience in the competitive landscape.
Quizzes allow your audience to directly engage with your business in a short, interactive way before they even subscribe. (They’ll take the quiz and be asked to share their email in order to receive their results.) By crafting questions related to your industry or products, you create an opportunity that directly connects your business and products to the audience in a personalized way—making the content more relevant to participants.
While quizzes can take more time and work to create, their nearly 50% conversion rate makes them well worth the extra effort. Plus, their interactive and engaging nature makes quizzes highly shareable, meaning you’ll be able to attract more people and—inevitably—more emails for your small business’s email list.
3. Challenges
Challenges are another great form of interactive content that makes your audience feel like they are a part of something.
These challenges are usually an event or series of steps that span over a specific period of time and encourage a course of action that correlates to your industry or a service or product you offer.
For example, if you’re a fitness instructor, you might offer a week-long ab workout challenge, with an email with each day’s workout. Or, if you are a marketing agency, you could create a five-day challenge focused on creating different social media content like Instagram reels to be sent directly to their inbox.
Regardless of your industry and challenge, it needs to connect directly to your business and offer your audience a “quick win” that will encourage them to sign up with their email—and hopefully work with your business later on.
4. Templates
Templates also serve as a valuable resource, saving time for your audience and providing practical solutions while also positioning your business as an authority in your industry.
Just like the PDF guides, there are countless possibilities for what you can offer with templates—such as templates for email newsletters, social media graphics, budget spreadsheets, and organizational worksheets.
Likewise, they can also be shared in a number of formats. You can use PDFs that people can copy and paste content from or you can share actual templates and documents that your audience can actively use—like a Google Sheet for planning social media posts or a design template on Canva.
The key here is to create something that gives your audience a tool they can immediately use to help solve a problem they may have by simply copying, pasting, and making a few tweaks.
Templates are also relatively easy opt-ins to create as you can often take something you already use in your business and repackage it into a template format. For example, if you manage social media posts, you can create a template based on the documents you use to plan out your posts.
Regardless of what you land on, a template’s appeal lies in its immediate usability. Be sure that what you create is something your audience can start using as soon as it hits their inbox!
5. Community Access
A more long-term opt-in you can use to build your small business’s email list would be creating an online community and offering exclusive access.
You can create a private community on a social platform such as Facebook, Slack, or even Discord that allows subscribers to engage in discussions, collaborations, networking, and more with both one another and your business.
Unlike other opt-ins, a community requires more maintenance and upkeep. It isn’t something you can create and then be done with like a template or PDF guide. Depending on the type of online community you create, you will likely need to monitor what is being shared and how people are interacting with one another and your brand.
That being said, an online community also offers you more opportunities to reach and engage with your audience. Over time, you can share new resources, exclusive offers, tips, and more that both increase the value of the opt-in community and directly engage and benefit the audience you have already gathered there.
So, while it may require more effort to maintain, an online community can be an effective opt-in that continues to generate leads long after being created.
6. Resource Lists
Curating comprehensive resource lists is a highly effective strategy for providing immediate value to your audience.
These lists can include a compilation of tools, articles, or references that address specific needs within your niche or industry. For example, if you’re looking to educate other photographers, you can provide a resource list of quality camera equipment brands and include links to where your audience can purchase the items. (Plus, if you use affiliate links, your opt-in can also help you generate additional revenue.)
This opt-in also allows for flexibility in sharing. While you can send these lists directly to inboxes as a PDF, you can also create a hidden webpage on your website that only those with the right link can view. Which method you choose to use should rely on what works best for your business and audience.
Much like with templates, the appeal lies in the convenience of having a curated set of resources at their fingertips, saving time for your audience.
Ensure the resources are relevant, well-organized, and continually updated to maintain the value they provide to your subscribers. Additionally, encourage feedback and suggestions from your audience to tailor future resource lists to their evolving needs, fostering a collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship.
7. Courses, Webinars, & Training Videos
You can also use opt-ins to position your brand as an authority by offering educational content in the form of mini courses or webinars.
Courses and training videos are most effective when there is a clear end goal that you help your audience work towards through specific and achievable steps. If you’re curious about how this works, take a look at our Marketing Guiding Statement Mini Course.
In this course, we walk small business owners through each type of Marketing Guiding Statement and how to write them. By the end of the course, participants have the seven statements they need to develop effective marketing campaigns for their small businesses.
By structuring our mini course this way, we’ve broken down what could be a large undertaking into manageable pieces that any small business owner or team member can accomplish with our guidance. This both provides the audience with valuable content and creates a sense of trust and authority for our brand.
8. Promotions & Discounts
Depending on your industry, promotions and discounts can be used as effective opt-ins for building your small business’s email list.
You can offer a discount or exclusive coupon code for those who sign up to be a part of your email list. This not only gives your audience an immediate benefit for simply sharing their email address, but it also increases the chances of them making a purchase in the near future.
Exclusive promotions and discounts are powerful incentives for growing your email list. By running limited-time offers or providing discount codes exclusively to email subscribers, you create a sense of exclusivity and value that will have more people wanting to subscribe.
Regardless of which kind of lead generator you choose to utilize, opt-ins play a crucial role in not only attracting subscribers but also building your marketing flywheel. The flywheel marketing method is the marketing strategy we’ve found to be the most effective for small businesses.
For a detailed breakdown of the flywheel marketing strategy and a deeper exploration of crafting impactful opt-ins for the growth of your small business, don't miss out on our complimentary guide that breaks down the exact marketing strategy we use to help small businesses grow!
Small businesses deserve to have a marketing strategy and partner that works as hard as they do.
Treefrog Marketing is a marketing agency for small businesses located in Lafayette, Indiana that builds effective marketing strategies and systems that help small business leaders take their companies to the next level. We specialize in marketing leadership, strategic marketing and advertising, digital marketing, graphic design, web design, social media, SEO, and more. For more information, please visit our website. You can also connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
