Hey folks! It’s Nicole again, back to chat more about email marketing — this time, we’ll go over setting up your download incentive in MailChimp.

(Not ready for this yet? Go back a step and set up your email list first.)

Let’s get started by talking about what exactly it is we’re setting up here.

What’s a Download Incentive?

Download incentives are a free piece of (useful) content you offer on your website. In exchange, people sign up for your email newsletter. This can take the shape of an infographic, a cheat sheet, a mini course, or even an ebook.

Download incentives — which you may also know as freebies — shouldn’t be an additional burden to you. Making them should be as easy as thinking about what content you already have — the blog posts, handouts, or other class, training, or marketing materials you’re using or have used — and figuring out how to break up the information or present it in a new, useful way.

The trick to getting current or potential clients to opt in? The freebie should be exclusive, exciting, and useful. You can find more tips and ideas for download incentives on our blog post here.

So, we’ve covered how easy it should be to make freebies, but how can it be easy to share them? That’s where your email marketing comes in.

Setting Up Your Download Incentive

Once you’ve chosen the incentive you’re sharing to get folks to sign up for your email newsletter (you might consider using the freebie we made just for dog trainers — get it at the link below this post!), you’ll want to set it up for folks to download.

The first step is to upload the document somewhere where it can live online — that might be uploading it to your website or to some other file-sharing service you can publicly link to. This is the link you’ll be sending to folks to grab their freebie.

From there, you have two options if you’re using MailChimp as your email platform:

Create a landing page on your website, or

Create a MailChimp landing page.

I’ll walk you through both options.

Creating a Landing Page on Your Website

A “landing page” is a page people go to that sells them on something — enrolling in a class, buying a product, or signing up for your newsletter.

To do this, you’ll need to have:

1. A website, and
2. Some know-how on building out pages on your website.

If this is the route you’re ready to take, watch the video below and I’ll take you through the steps you need to get set up!

Creating a MailChimp Landing Page

If you don’t have a website — or have one, but don’t know how to build or modify pages — MailChimp has a great option for free users: you can create a landing page through your account with them.

Choosing this option? I’ll walk you through it in the video below.

Next Step: Setting Up Your Welcome Automation

So now your download incentive is set up. What next?

You’ll want to put together your welcome email — the message folks get when they sign up for your list.

But it’s not just as simple as one email. Welcoming folks to your list is a great opportunity to sell them on your services and get them to buy in to your brand.

In order to do that, you’ll want to create a series of emails. And email platforms make it super easy to set up a series that goes out automatically to new subscribers according to your preferences (so you never have to worry about forgetting to send an email!).

We’ll go over that in the next post on email marketing with MailChimp. Stay tuned!