Free Report Pattern

Summary:

Free Report pattern is a variation of an old freebie/bonus pattern, where the freebie is a report on a topic, important for your niche.

Name of the pattern:

Free Report Pattern

When to use this pattern:

When you need an incentive for your prospects to opt-in or buy, along with filtering out those who are not good prospects (not really interested in your product or niche in the first place).

How to use this pattern:

Produce a report or a guide on a topic important for your niche. For example, in online business it may be a report on getting free traffic using some specific technique, in a gardening niche it may be a report on how to improve survival of sprouts by controlling acidity of the soil, etc.

Do your part and make a quality report that any reasonable person interested in your niche would want to read. As a criteria, think of your report as a web page and ask yourself a question: if your idea customer will come to such a web page, will he read it to the end or browse away? If he’d read, you’ve got a winner.

Then offer it as a bonus to those prospects who convert: opt-in to your mailing list or buy.

Attribution:

As far as I know this pattern is old as Internet and actually longer.

Related patterns:

Bonus, Freebie

Related anti-patterns:

None

Comments:

It’s known that bonuses increase conversions. However targeted report does one more thing: it increases conversions mostly with those prospects who are highly targeted, interested in your niche and offer, and has a good chances of buying more from you. To put it simple, your bonus should be relevant and reports are easiest to make them relevant and targeted.

When producing report (whether you do that yourself or outsource the effort), follow the best practices like putting proper interesting headers and subheaders; targeting problems and pains, not the tools; being useful, and specifically being useful for your ideal customer; and the rest.