Earlier this year I took part in a summit.

Far less exciting than climbing Snowdon, an online summit is a gathering of ‘experts’ who share some snippets of knowledge over a few days. Think less Bear Grylls, more PowerPoint presentations.

As a speaker they are a great way to increase your visibility, share your knowledge and hopefully get some new subscribers. The expectation is that you provide a free download of some kind that means you are legitimately able to stay in touch with those people and ultimately get some new clients out of the event. (As an attendee you give your email to the organiser but not all the people talking at the summit, you get to choose who has it by signing up for their freebies).

For all the time I’ve been working online I have only seen people put their freebie behind a form where you give your email address. I have done this myself a few times and wow!

GOOD NEWS! I got lots of new subscribers.

However, BAD NEWS most of them never opened anything.

Because when you force people to give you their email as part of a summit then they often give you a ‘spare email’ address, and they are hugely overwhelmed. Once they are on your list they cost you money and affect open rates which can affect delivery so this time I decided to do something different.

What I did differently

I still had a landing page for the freebie but instead of forcing visitors to give their email to get my freebie there were 2 choices:

1. You could just download the freebie OR
2. You could opt in and share your email address to be sent it by email and added to my email list.

I had low expectations. I reckoned if 10% of people signed up that would be OK because better to have 10 keen beans than 100 people who never open a thing. Every marketing guru will tell you this is madness. ‘Alice,’ they’d cry, ‘you’re leaving money on the table!

But what happened surprised me!

Surprise no 1

In total I had 166 download of the freebie only (2 were me testing) So 164 people didn’t want to be emailed but got the freebie. I could look at this as 164 people who I didn’t get on my list but I’m choosing to think of them as 164 people I didn’t need to delete off my list in 6 months when they hadn’t read anything. I sent.

But 153 people signed up to get not just the freebie but to hear more from me.

While 164 people grabbed and ran (fair enough), 153 people essentially said ‘yes please, I’d like to hear more of whatever this is.’ I posted on LinkedIn at the time as was blown away by this… about 50% opted in. How good is that? Are you surprised? Or am I alone in my cynicism.

Surprise no 2

The summit was last spring so I’ve had a bit of time now to send emails to the new subscribers. I’ve just been doing a bit of email marketing analysis with Claude (you can connect up your MailerLIte… it’s so cool but that’s another post) and I have even better news about this strategy… the people who signed up for that freebie and are still being sent emails have a 60.92% open rate, 15.29% click rate. This is SO GOOD. An OK open rate is 20% and good tends to be about 40-50%.

I’m pretty sure that if I had forced everyone onto my list my open rate would be much lower. The bad thing about this is that lower open rates affect email deliverability.

In summary

So there you have it – sometimes the best marketing strategy is just being decent to people. Who knew?