I’m sure many of you are familiar with the original ice cream shop that offers you a taste of any flavor ice cream you want before you make your decision on which scoop you are going to enjoy.
Giving you a taste (or as many tastes of different flavors as you’d like) is a brilliant way to ensure that you not only order a cone at that moment, but it’s also a way to bring you back to try more flavors on another day.
You can use this brilliant marketing strategy in building your business, too. Offering your prospects a taste of what it is that you provide is a proven and easy way to get people to become part of your community, and part of your marketing/product funnel (the funnel is the “journey” (that builds a relationship over time) that your clients follow from the first visit to your website, where they enter by giving you their contact information, down through each level as they make their way through each purchasing step in the funnel). By offering them a sample, you’re giving them an opportunity to get to know you without risking anything more than perhaps a bit of time.
In your marketing/product funnel, the taste you are giving your potential clients is at the top of the funnel, the widest part. The taste is your freebie/complimentary/gift offering and is your first (and usually only!) opportunity to engage your prospect. Your taste needs to be something of value that you offer for free to people who visit your website in exchange for their contact information, usually their name and email address.
This is often one of the most overlooked steps in building an online business. A prospect needs to see your message many times (it ranges anywhere from 5-10) before they will feel confident enough to risk handing over their money to you. In order to build a relationship with people you need to be able to contact them again, which means your goal is to capture their email address before they click away from your website.
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