Do you include a free gift as part of your sales process? If you don’t, it’s almost certainly costing you sales. And it may well be hurting your profitability.

If you do, is the free gift helping your sales process? Or hindering it?

The fact is, there’s more to the art of giving away a free gift than first meets the eye. In this article, you’ll discover how to give away a free gift so that it boosts your sales, and your profits.

It’s better to give…

It’s worth your while to give away a free gift as part of your offer. For a start, a properly chosen free gift increases the desirability of your overall offer. This increases the level of excitement, and helps secure the sale.

What’s more, you can help this process along, by following my guide to giving away free gifts below. In short, by including a free gift in your overall offer, you’ll get more sales and make more money.

A free gift can enhance your product

A free gift will certainly increase the perceived value of your offer. From the client’s perspective, they get more for their money than would otherwise be the case.

A smart entrepreneur will take this one step further, and make sure the free gift also enhances the product. In other words, the free gift ought to allow the buyer to get more use out of the product than would otherwise be the case.

For example, a person selling digital cameras might include a free memory card. Or a spare battery. Or a camera case.

While these types of free gift will enhance the experience of owning the camera, they’re easily matched by your competitors. I have a much better idea…

A free gift can bring add-on sales

A very smart entrepreneur will attempt to push the envelope even further, by creating a free gift that his/her competitors can’t easily copy. Our seller of cameras might prepare a customized guide to digital photography.

This type of free gift is harder to copy, and offers the seller plenty of opportunities to make further sales. For example, the camera guide could describe the photographic situations in which various accessories can be used. The guide would then provide vouchers that give the client exclusive discounts on those accessory items.

This achieves two goals. It enhances the experience of owning the camera, and it gets the buyer to think about accessories by explaining where and how to use them. Without the guide, the client may never even get to hear about many of these accessory items.

Even better, the guide gives the client a good reason to return to the original seller and purchase the accessories from him/her.

This type of free gift achieves multiple goals…

• It increases the chance of getting further business from the client.
• It makes it harder for competitors to muscle in on the client’s future business
• It enhances the buyers enjoyment of the product

This type of free gift is not a pointless giveaway, to be quickly forgotten by the client.

How to introduce the free gift on your sales page

It’s definitely worth giving away a free gift. You can increase the sales you make, and boost your profitability.

But there’s an art to introducing the free gift on your sales page. Here are my tips for maximizing the impact of your free gift.

First of all, remember that the main purpose of the gift is to get the potential client to act (i.e. to buy). The gift helps do this by increasing desire for the product you’re trying to sell.

This means your free gift can’t be introduced at any random point on your sales page. It has to be a part of the call-to-action (i.e. the part of the ad where you ask for the sale).

It makes no sense to tell your prospect about the free gift before you tell him/her about your main product. Or before he/she has decided to buy. The only place a free gift will have the desired effect, is at the point where you ask the prospect to buy.

Hype the gift

Your free gift has a job to do, but it can’t do that job if it doesn’t add to the overall excitement of the offer. This means you’re going to have to create desire for the gift itself. You’re going to have to explain the benefits of owning the gift.

You can enhance the desire for it, by placing a time-limit on its availability. Or by making it clear there is a limited quantity of the gift available. This increases the pressure to act immediately. It removes the luxury of procrastination.

Don’t overshadow your main product

Your free gift must add value to the overall offer, not overshadow it. You don’t want people buying your product simply to get hold of the free gift!

A free gift works best when it serves to enhance the overall offer. For example, where a gift acts as an accessory that enhances the client’s experience of the main product (e.g. the camera guide discussed above).

The free gift is always going to be seen as a part of the overall offer, so it makes sense to ensure it works to increase the value of the main product.

Place a value on your gift

Does your chosen free gift have a known retail value? If it does, make sure you tell the prospect exactly what the gift is worth. You can then use this to increase the perceived value of the overall offer. For example…

Order the DigiPro Ultracam now, and you’ll also receive our exclusive guide to digital photography absolutely free of charge. That’s a $19.95 value!

If your gift doesn’t have a known retail value, create one for it based on similar products. Our example of a guide to photography can be valued at whatever such guides sell for on Amazon.

By giving your gift a stated value, you increase it’s worth in the mind of the client (assuming your chosen price is believable). This increases the impact your free gift has on the client’s decision to buy.

Force a choice

You can bring further attention to the added value imparted by a free gift, when you specifically require that a client selects it. That is, where the client must opt-in to receive the free gift. Here’s an example…

In the above example, the client is forced to check the “Yes” box to receive the guide. This ensures the client is aware of the free gift, and its value. It’s a simple technique, that adds kick to the overall sales mix.

Every man and his dog…

On the Internet, it seems that every man and his dog is giving away a free gift to entice more people to buy.

A closer examination reveals that the free gift is often an afterthought, tacked on because marketing “gurus” recommend it.

You are now armed with a set of guidelines that give you a competitive advantage. Your free gift can make your overall offer so attractive, it blows the competition right out of the water. What’s more, you can even lock your competitors out of consideration when it comes to future sales from your client.