How to Grow Your Business & Email List With A Free Challenge
Hey there Corporate Misfit!
Let me guess, you finally have an online course to show to the world, but you’re afraid to launch it to crickets. Yikes.
Or maybe your business is a little on a standstill, and you don’t know what to do!
You know deep down that you’re so ready to share your knowledge and finally stop trading your time for money. But, there’s just so many doubts limiting you from fully committing out there.
What if no one is going to want your course? What if all the time you poured out to create, design, and market it is all for nothing?
Which is why you’re willing to try out different strategies to level up your game. Well, hosting free challenges is the perfect tactic to do just that!
It’s the easiest and quickest way to attract and teach potential students that will flock to your paid offers.
Not only that, but it’s also the most creative yet guaranteed ways to build your email list.
We get it; you’re not that sure if this will work. After all, you want to start earning instead of giving; but trust us, doing this strategy is extremely beneficial for your business, and you’ll see tangible results!
We’re going to answer your questions and share why this is great for you and how you can deliver!
How to Grow Your Business & Email List With A Free Challenge
Why you should create a free challenge in the first place
The first thing you need to know is how impactful hosting a free challenge is. Here are just some of the perks that go with it.
- Builds trust towards the right audience that is specifically interested to learn from you potentially. Of course, they’re not sure yet about your teaching. But this is a great way to show your expertise, which will lead them to trust your paid offers soon!
- Creates a sense of urgency, therefore attracting more people. Setting a limited amount of time can persuade people to subscribe automatically. After all, they wouldn’t pass the chance to learn from you for FREE.
- Lead to future sales. Once you have accumulated the right people, you can have the excuse to drop by their email and promote your other paid material since they generally trust you now!
- Great way to continuously promote your brand. The fact that the challenge is free and lets you show off your skills will attract more people and KNOW your brand.
- It helps you test out the waters of a potential offer. This will help you tweak your paid material depending on the feedback of your audience. Alongside this, you can also test out if a potential topic will flop or not!
- Builds your email list with low risks. Yup! You’re not going to spend that much for free challenges, and this can be extended to new subscribers as well as your business grows.
Think of this free challenge as a way to market your skills, build trust with potential clients, and get the word out there for your brand!
How to outline and launch your free challenge
Now that you’re convinced of how effective free challenges are, you’ll now have to create it and ensure that it brings results.
The number one thing you’ll have to remember is that you should not be half-hearted with your efforts in this challenge, BUT you also don’t have to overshare your expertise!
In coming up with the challenge, you’ll have to ask yourself:
- Does the challenge address existing problems that people have trouble within your market?
- Does it align with your other existing courses and paid material?
- Does it provide ample answers but also leave your audience wanting for more?
You have to make sure that your challenge is result-driven in a short amount of time AND will also pique their interest to learn more.
In this way, you’ll have a sure-fire opening for your paid promotions!
Ensure quick results and avoid long drawn out challenges.
Don’t overwhelm your audience with information! We get it, you only want to show off your best, and sometimes this info and that info is just too good not to share.
Remember, your best material shouldn’t be in your free challenge; it should be your offer by the end of it!
This isn’t to say that you’ll only share “average” teachings. You just have to make it digestible, actionable, and ensure that it can bring out results quickly.
Your audience also has other stuff going on in their lives, and they will be prone to quitting if you bombard them with too much information.
Make sure always to keep it simple yet effective!
Deliver your juiciest knowledge at the start
Give them a taste of your exemplary teaching and expertise upfront to engage them and continue the challenge.
Again, don’t give away too much! Just the right dose to leave them wanting for more. Your goal should lead them to think, “If that was free, how amazing will their paid offers be like?”
Make sure it’s easy to finish.
Like our first tip, you have to make sure that it’s doable in a short amount of time. The sweet spot for your challenge is actually around the range of 3-5 days or 5-7 days.
You may be contemplating on creating a 30-day challenge but let’s be real people!
The average audience will have to be persuaded a LOT to join one, and you’ll have a high risk of people quitting your challenge. Yikes!
Believe us, that’s the last thing you’d want.
Having a concise and objective challenge can pump up your audience, and they’ll be more trusting of your brand once they finish your challenge with success.
Set up a landing page for your challenge
Create an eye-catching landing page for your free challenge that details the benefits and results they should see out of it.
This is a must-have, so you can link your challenge through other platforms and continuously promote it.
Make sure to give it your personal touch with the design! People have a short span of attention, so you better make it easy on the eyes and enticing.
Encourage social accountability
Hold your audience accountable for their progress, so they become more engaged with the challenge. You can create social media hashtags or a Facebook group to build a community and keep track of their growth.
Creating a Twitter or Instagram hashtag can encourage them to post their progress and connect them to other people doing it!
Having a virtual community to connect them will hype them and encourage them to stick throughout the challenge.
If you’re going to build a Facebook page, it can also be a great way to engage with them. Here are some of the things you can do with this:
- You can post daily videos or prompts to keep them engaged.
- Post detailed video guides to walk them through the challenge. It can also be an introductory one that you can pin on the topmost part.
- You can post polls for future topics they want to learn as well! This is great for feedback and to assess if they’re open to purchasing your offer.
- Encourage them to ask questions constantly while they’re on the challenge.
- Close the FB Page per batch so other people can’t access it.
Be prepared to moderate this page, though, if you’re taking this one! This will be a lot of work for you, but it could be fruitful if you do it the right way.
Make your email the primary form of communication.
Throughout the challenge, you’ll have to correspond through email daily to prime them to open it every time.
By making this your primary source of communication, you can make it more private and personal!
Not only that, but they can also be able to catch up with the other daily challenges here if they missed a day. It’s pretty handy and organized.
Alongside this, by the end of the challenge, you’ll be guaranteed that they will be used to opening your emails on promotions and other offers. Pretty neat, right?
How to promote your challenge
Now that we’ve finally covered the basics of creating your free challenge, let’s talk about getting the word out!
We’re going to be upfront with you. You’ll probably be spending most of your time talking about your free challenge tirelessly.
If you think you’re doing a lot by this time, you’ll have to double or triple your efforts again!
It may feel like you’re overdoing it, but honestly, your followers won’t be able to see that challenge as much as you think they do. So stay persistent always.
There are different ways to promote your challenge, but social media is your savior for this. Spread the word through your blogs, podcast, Pinterest, email, Facebook posts, or ads (if you have the budget!), Twitter, and Youtube channel.
Write an article around it for your website, put email opt-ins in your sidebar for the challenge, send out email blasts promoting it, sneak it in your other content, and everything in between!
Exhaust all of your efforts, and don’t just post once.
This might seem like a hassle at first, but honestly, you’ll be doing a lot of promotions not only for this challenge but for your other material as well.
With the right strategy, you’ll eventually see your following grow and lead to your business’ success in the future.
In Summary
Creating a free challenge can help you grow your email list and is highly beneficial to accumulate potential patrons that will take up your paid offers.
This is because you’ll be able to build their trust in your expertise. After all, they already know how amazing your teaching is even without a price; what more on a paid one!
Alongside this, it also builds your email list with little to no risk on your part, and it’s for the long run.
When it comes to launching your free challenge, you’ll have to keep in mind that it’s doable and results-driven in a short amount of time.
This way, you’ll be guaranteed that your audience will stay committed throughout the challenge and will be able to purchase your sales pitch by the end potentially.
You should also incorporate different strategies for accountability and promotion so your challenge will be known by future audiences as well!
Hosting a free challenge may seem a little bit tricky at first glance, and you probably feel iffy to give out free material.
The truth is, your paid material might not even see the light of day if you won’t be able to let them know your expertise!
This is seriously one of the easiest, quickest, and most FUN things you could do to finally attract and teach your ideal audience and then convert them into high paying clients.
However, like what we shared before, you’ll have to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible. This may be a major hurdle for you, and we get it.
You are NOT a freaking graphic or website designer, nor do you have the budget to spend thousands of dollars on one.
And you see all these course creators and coaches host AMAZING. Eye-catching, attention-grabbing, client-building challenges, and you don’t know how to turn your knowledge into a gorgeously-executed challenge!
How can you do this with your limited resources? Well, you can do just that!
Confidently Launch Your First Beautiful and Engaging Online Challenge in Less Than 7 Days with the Challenge Pack
And grow your List 10x with your dream audience, then fill Your Online Program with raving Fans without spending thousands on ads or a graphic and website designer!
Don’t believe us? Check out the Challenge Pack and see for yourself.
