Free Plus Shipping Offers And Their More Effective Alternatives

Everyone loves free stuff. That’s just obvious. For you to gain something without having to give anything in return… how excited does that make you?

Personally, I dig free stuff. Ask anyone I know. They’ll tell you that I go way out of my way to get some free stuff in my life.

Giving away free things is simply a fantastic way to gain new customers. It’s low commitment, low risk, and is immensely enticing.

Now, unfortunately there has been a plague in the eCommerce world, and that plague is called “free plus shipping offers”. These offers in themselves aren’t all that bad, but they’re executed in the worst way possible.

People think that they can throw up a random product on their site with price tag of zero dollars, charge $7.99 for shipping, and people will just come running to give you their money.

This is wrong, and I guarantee more money has been lost trying this bad method than has been made.

So in this article, I’m going over the concept of correctly giving out free stuff to bring in new customers to your store.

There’s a big factor of these “free” offers that a lot of people don’t really take into account - and that’s the fact that the free offers are used to ONLY introduce people to the company and get them wanting more.

Unfortunately, when someone pays $8 for a watch, it takes 4 weeks to arrive in a crappy yellow envelope, and the watch doesn’t even work, nobody is going to want to purchase from you again.

Surprise surprise.

This approach at getting one-time customers can work for some people, but for most it is simply a waste of time. There’s no other way around it.

Additionally, most customers are aware of this scheme.

They know that the quality of products is low and that your company is making a decent amount of money with your $7.99 shipping.

You need to give people a premium experience right off the bat with these offers. You need them to say “Wow, they must have lost hella money with sending me this”.

That way, they have an amazing first impression with your company and will come back to get more of this amazing experience.

I’m going to show you some examples of carrying this out, and go over theoretically how you can create a “free” offer of your own for your eCommerce store.

First off, I’m going to show you two subscription services that lured me in with an entirely free offer, and have ALMOST gotten me to come back to them.

There are many subscription services that offer a free trial to get people introduced to their service. However, two companies have hooked me in with their free offers recently, and I need to share them.

The first company is CareOf Vitamins, a subscription service for getting daily doses vitamins and supplements shipped to your house monthly.

As someone that really cares about his health, this is a fantastic service. However, I never would have even tried out their service had I not gotten a free trial.

An Instagram ad presented me with a $40 coupon for my first month subscription, which entirely covered the cost of the box and shipping. So effectively I got my box for free.

This offer allowed me to try out the service risk-free and see for myself, in person, the quality of the products that they offer (and the quality is good).

Because of this pain-free introduction, I am now a monthly subscriber to this service.

The second company is Graze, which is a subscription service for healthy snacks.

Much like CareOf Vitamins, this company offered a free box, no strings attached.

Because of this, I got a box for entirely free, got to experience the quality of the food they offered and the speediness of their delivery, and really got this company standing out in my mind for the niche that they're in.

I never would have even thought about giving money to this company, but because of their pain-free introduction, even if it did cost them a few dollars, they almost got a paying customer that would have paid for that trial 10x over (I'm too cheap to sign up, personally)

I can assume most of you watching this do not own a subscription box service, but you can understand how this concept works for them.

It’s a great introduction to the product and a taste of what you’ll get when you pay for the next one.

Now, I’m going to show you an ecommerce store that I love, and they’re doing things just a little bit wild.

This is a website that you yourself need to check out, because they do this "free offer" stuff very well. The company in question is Survival Life.

Their initial free offer is something a little bit different, and something I cover a little bit later on in this article - a non-physical good.

Their approach to getting people onto their email list is simply offering a beta testing program for those that sign up. No products, no money being spent. All free.

This approach is great because, as I said, it's all free. They don't have to spend money here, and they get people's emails which they then market to to make money. But they don't stop there.

After someone signs up to this list, they're taken to an offer for a product with what's called an OTO, or "One Time Offer".

This OTO is a free plus shipping offer for a multi-tool, and it's one of the few good examples of a free plus shipping strategy being used.

Not only does this offer perfectly compliment the "beta tester" program that people just signed up to (in the offer, they bring up the point of beta testing the multi-tool), but they do a great job at selling the product.

Most people, when offering a free plus shipping product, don't make much of an effort to sell the product, so the sales page is very uninspired and customers don't feel driven to purchase.

However, Survival Life has a massive landing page giving all of the benefits of the product, giving the impression that the reader is crazy if they don't take this offer right now.

They're only making a couple of dollars profit per multi-tool sold, but after that sale, they offer higher and higher ticket items to customers over time, turning them into money machines.

As you can see, when you’re selling physical products, you can get people into your grasp initially through some non-tangible products.

The OTO works for SurvivalLife because the first free offer played into the second, and their sales page for their OTO isn’t half-assed. It SELLS.

Finally, I’m going to show you how I do this for my education business.

For my online education business, I never try and make sales right up-front. I'm well aware that conversion rates skyrocket when more value is provided.

Therefore, my free offer is offered in an attempt to collect emails so that I can market to those leads further down the line.

In all of my YouTube videos and on my website as a whole, I push everyone to this one page: https://zach-inman.com/free

My free offer is a 20 page review of 3 seven-figure stores, covering their success strategies. Totally free value, a very interesting learning opportunity, and very clear about what people are getting.

This offer has netted me 100's of emails that I can then market to in the future, and I can expect to make, on average, a couple of dollars per email that I collect per month.

This is a much more sustainable and high-converting strategy in comparison to trying to sell people my $197 training straight off the bat.

Anyone can use this strategy for their business, because of the fact that you can give away information regarding anything. Name a niche, you can make a PDF guide or cheat sheet for it.

Sometimes you may have to get creative, but creativity is what sparks interest, and your conversion rate may spike.

Now, let’s quickly talk about creating one of these offers for yourself.

You can really go one of two ways - offering a “free” product with either a little bit of shipping or no shipping and you just take the loss, or offering a free info product, which is a great free way to get people affiliated with your brand.

Either way, we’re not making money with this strategy yet.

Think about what people in your niche are interested in, and what a great introductory product into your niche would be.

Survival Life has that free multi-tool, which is very entry-level and enticing and would build people up to more advanced purchases.

You can offer a free PDF training on how to perform a certain task that people may find difficult, give a list of the top 10 secrets of your niche, or really anything that’s valuable enough for people to say “Yeah, I’ll give my email for that.”

If you go that free product route, make it small yet quality.

You don’t want to lose money, but you want to give people a nice enough product to where they want to spend more money and get even better products once they have that amazing initial experience.

Additionally, with the product, have fantastic packaging and shipping times (Yes, you’ll have to fulfill these yourself.

It isn’t bad when you only have this one product, and it’s worth it to get these valuable customers into your clutches.) to give that extra “wow” factor when your customers get this super cheap product.

No, the above strategy is not easy. It takes effort, planning, and a lot of trial-and-error.

However, this pays off. This works.

This is how you’re going to get customers that don’t just buy from you once, but two, three, or ten times. All without really spending much money at all.

It’s hard to give all-encompassing information for this, since there are so many different strategies that differ between niches, so experiment with yours.

Just remember, value is king here. Show people that you’ve got a good product, give them a taste, then taunt them with more. It’s all one big game that you can’t win with one move.