The Best Email Opt-in Gifts for Growing Your List

Offering a free introductory resource on your website is a great strategy for connecting your business with new prospective customers and clients.

Not only does it help to pique their interest, highlight your expertise and build rapport, but these free resources can also serve as opt-in gifts to grow your mailing list—a key part of growing an audience for your business, and ultimately making more sales!

The importance of growing an email list for your business

Building an email list for your business is mega important—and, for online business owners, essential.

It allows you to continue communicating with prospective clients via email marketing, continuing to serve them and offering additional opportunities to connect with your business products and services.

Especially if you happen to offer pricey products or services (for example, most coaching or consulting packages), not all of your “somewhat interested” audience members are going to be ready to invest hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in your services at the moment they first happen upon your website.

However, if you can add these maybe-someday-interested website visitors to your mailing list, you can maintain contact with them, continue to offer valuable information or resources along the way, and ultimately build the trust and authority needed to keep you top of mind when they’re in need of your services at a later point.

How to use opt-in gifts to grow your email list

An opt-in gift (also called a freebie or lead magnet) is a free resource or item of value that is offered to your website visitors in exchange for their email address.

This is an important element of growing your mailing list because email addresses are valuable too!

Few people are willing to just hand over their email address these days. (Right?! Think about how willing you are to give away your own email address… we’re all getting increasingly wary of it.)

So, not only does offering a valuable opt-in gift provide a reason for people to happily give you their email address, but it’s also a strategy to ensure you’re attracting the “right” kind of people to your mailing list.

Not in a mean way, but your mailing list should be an exclusive club! It’s a club of people who are especially interested in the content you have to offer, and the services your specific business provides.

There’s no point in building a mailing list of people who aren’t interested in your expertise, and aren’t likely to purchase from you down the road!

So, your email opt-in should be constructed with your target audience (“ideal customer”) in mind, so you can be sure it is something that will be interesting and useful to them. Meaning: they’ll be interested in “opting in” to receive it.

This post contains affiliate links through which I may earn a commission if you choose to purchase, at no additional cost to you. As always, these are products or services I personally use & love!

5 opt-in ideas for your business

There’s a wide, wide range of opt-in gifts that can work for growing your mailing list (the sky’s the limit!).

If you already have a specific service or resource that would be a good fit, that’s awesome! There’s certainly no need to reinvent the wheel, and you could go ahead and use that if it’d be a good fit for your audience and your business goals.

Or, if you’re looking for ideas, here are some of the most common opt-in gifts that work well for online businesses:

1. Checklist

A downloadable printable/fillable checklist is one of the simplest (and easiest/quickest-to-consume) lead magnet options. If you already have specific checklists you offer via your existing services, consider using or adapting one of these as your opt-in gift.

Or, if you’ll need to develop a new checklist, think about:

Which area(s) of your expertise could be easily described in the form of a checklist?
Do you have any recommendations or protocols you typically offer to your customers or 1:1 clients that could be formalized into a checklist?

Focus on providing value, rather than holding back to avoid “giving away your secrets.”

The value of 1:1 services is in the customized support and accountability you provide, not necessarily the information itself (which, in many cases, is easily available online for anyone willing to search for it).

You can both offer a valuable checklist for audience members looking to try their hand at a DIY-approach, as well as provide valuable services for customers looking for that increased level of support.

For example, I offer a Squarespace Website Checklist—a detailed checklist on something I also work with clients on (designing and launching custom websites).

This checklist is an overview of what I do for my clients, in an easy-to-follow list for others to DIY if they choose.

Offering this as a free resource provides value to someone who prefers to DIY their own website, yet doesn’t take away from the value others receive from having a professional web designer create their website for them.

2. Email series

One of my primary opt-in gifts at Four Wellness Co. is 7 Days of Wellness, an email “mini-series” in developing a daily wellness routine.

This is set up via Flodesk (my email marketing tool of choice, though you could also do the same via any other email service you prefer).

Subscribers opt-in via the website and then are sent a 7-day email automation offering a unique wellness activity to try each day.

Similarly, you could develop an email series that fits what you offer in your own business. Whatever your area of expertise, consider adapting it into a 3-14 day email series with a helpful tip and supportive message each day.

3. E-book

E-books make a great opt-in gift because they’re easy to create, package and distribute. Consider one of the first and primary “pain points” you can address for prospective clients, and create an e-book resource on that topic specifically.

Some examples may be: a recipe book for a specific set of dietary guidelines; a 10-step program to overcome your fear of public speaking; or a how-to guide for starting a blog.

Whatever makes sense for a pain point your audience has, and that relates back to the services you provide.

Creating a simple e-book for your target audience is a great way to offer them an item of value they can put to use right away.

You can easily design an e-book with a word processor (saving it as a PDF). If your e-book will include a lot of graphics, you could design the graphics (or even the entire e-book) in Canva, my favorite design tool. Or, of course, you could hire a graphic designer to help.

4. Video training

Video is an increasingly important tool for online business owners, as it helps communicate both your expertise as well as your personality. Particularly for 1:1 or educational services, your personal fit with clients really matters—people prefer to pay for coaching or consulting from someone they connect with and trust!

Recording a simple video training on an area of your expertise (a yoga routine, a how-to tutorial, etc.) can be a great way to offer both opt-in value and show your personality (and what it’d be like to work with you) to prospective clients.

You can record a video training with a tool like Loom (or even simply your smartphone or webcam!). You can then upload it unlisted to YouTube or Vimeo, and share the link with your new email subscribers who have opted in to receive the video training.

(More details on how to link and share the opt-in gift below!)

5. Mini-course

Another way to provide a quick teaser of your expertise and personality is to create a free mini-course that walks prospective clients through a transformation you can help them achieve. An example of this is my SEO Basics for Business Owners e-course, which was previously a free opt-in offering (though has now been upgraded and expanded into one of my full online business trainings).

There are a few different technology options for setting up an online mini-course, including Teachable (which my SEO course was originally built on) and MemberSpace (which I love and have talked about lots before, as it can be used to create different types of membership programs).

Both can be connected to your email marketing tool to help grow your mailing list.

Tips for developing your opt-in

Whichever specific “medium” you choose, here are my top tips to keep in mind as you develop your opt-in gift:

Keep it short & sweet

Your “freebie” should be easily digestible—something users can reasonably get through and receive benefit from in just 15-20 minutes or less.

It absolutely must be relevant to your business services

There’s no point in growing a mailing list of people who are not interested in receiving the services offer. It’s important to design an opt-in that reasonably leads into the paid products or services you offer. (This also makes remaining in contact about those offerings easier to do down the road!)

Provide value

Some business owners worry that they don’t want to “give away their secrets” for free. Let go of that worry a bit, and give away some info of value. That’s what helps your prospective clients begin to see and trust your expertise and authority on the topic.

Keep in touch

Don’t love ‘em and leave ‘em—when a new prospective client asks for your resource (yay!), don’t just send it and then drop off. This is a great opportunity to use a welcome automation to warmly offer a brief series of additional information or material relevant to what they’ve requested via your opt-in. And then, you can follow up with regular, helpful content via your email newsletters.

How to add an email opt-in gift to your website

Depending on your specific opt-in gift, there are a few different ways to add it to your website and connect it to your email marketing service (e.g. Mailchimp, Flodesk, etc.).

If you have a Squarespace website (which I design on and recommend! 👍), setting up your opt-in is as easy as adding a link in the post-submit message of your newsletter block. Here’s how to do that:

Add a Newsletter Block to the page and location you’d like to promote your opt-in.
Connect the Newsletter Block to your email marketing service (and the appropriate list, if you have multiple).
In the Post-Submit Message, write a nice thank you message and include a link to your resource (if your opt-in is a downloadable file, you’ll have the option to upload the file via link settings).

Note: Another option, instead of using the Post-Submit Message, is to use the Post-Submit Redirect, which links new subscribers to the page you’ve designated. This could be set up on your website to include the opt-in resource or link to access or download.