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Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to believe that people would want a free whitepaper or something like that in exchange for their email address. Why offer them anything - if they are interested in you product they'll sign up for your mailing list - if not, is there really something you can offer them to help.

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Freebies work, no denying it. Doesn't matter if its a pen, a keychain, a white paper download.

They're probably interested in your product - they Googled it after all, thats why they ended up there - but they have a dozen similar pages to quickly review. So no, interest doesn't mean they want to give you their email.

What I'm trying to ask is whether offering them something which they don't want is going to help the conversion. My intuition says no.

Agreed. Web tchotchkes are so much less satisfying than physical ones.

That's because you're not your customer. It's a technique that works extremely well, and is extremely profitable. If you can't get out of your own head, and imagine that other people are different from you, you are going to fail in business... so consider this an exercise.

And the better the offer, the more a landing page can "get away" asking for. Offering a month of free software? Test and see if you can extract a company name and role from the visitor, or even a phone number. Offering just a short article or low-value offer? Stick to email and name. People are so used to filling our forms with their information online that if an offer is compelling, you can really push the limits and ask for an extra piece or two of important info.

Thank you for the condescending reply.

Actually, I'm trying to get more information here. Its not clear how this would work, or what sort of person would care about some whitepaper.

I guess part of the problem is that the post is very vague about what the product is, who the target customer is, or why they would care about a whitepaper. If you make a consumer product/SaaS, what could they be offered that they care about to make this work?

A short course delivered over email on $PROBLEM_DOMAIN works fairly well. SEOs of my acquaintance frequently use Cosmo headlines, like 7 Mistakes Most People Make When X-ing. Yours now, totally free, if you'll give your mailing address. Deliver one a day, ask for a sale on day 4 and day 7. This works ridiculously well.

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