I Stopped Using Gated Freebies to Collect Email Addresses

Here’s what I do instead (with a 90%+ close rate).

Image by the Author — Delaney at Lavendai Creative

It’s the B2B “gold standard” advice marketers have given each other for the last 10+ years. It goes something like this:

Create value with a free ebook, PDF, or email course
Put that content behind a registration form
Market your freebie
Collect email addresses (MQLs!)
Give value through a subsequent email series to warm these “leads” up
Subtly (or not so subtly) push your product or service (or push them to the sales team if you’re at a bigger company)
Rake in the sales

But this marketing funnel advice is outdated. Let’s talk about why.

Why It’s Time to Release the Freebie Method

I am not here to outright say this method doesn’t work. It does.

Just not well enough to justify the effort.

As a B2B marketer (for clients) and B2B entrepreneur (to get clients), I’ve tried this method more times than I can even count over the years.

Pros: it grows an email list. Cons: it’s an incredibly low-quality one.

Let’s back up a bit and discuss why.

Author’s Note: I’m going to focus on my company to explain this, so it’s most directly relatable as written to service-based freelancers. But trust that I’ve had similar findings doing work for clients at B2B corporations too. Let’s continue.

The User Experience

Think about the last few times you signed up to receive a free ebook or email course. Did you become a paying customer of the person who gave it to you?

Do you even know who or where you got it from?

I’m willing to bet the answer is “no.” There are potentially a few reasons for this:

You just wanted the freebie — it didn’t matter who or where it came from.
You unsubscribed from the email list.
The person you downloaded it from is more of a competitor in your industry than a vendor/supplier you’d purchase from.
You’re a DIYer looking for information, there was never really an intention to purchase.
Or maybe you opened the freebie once and never looked at it again.

The Problem With the Status Quo

But for some reason, we all want to think our freebie is different.

Here’s the glaringly obvious problem: no matter how directly relevant or high quality your downloadable is, someone receiving something for free isn’t in a purchasing mindset.

As such, they’re still a relatively cold lead — at least in every way that matters. There is a huge disconnect between the standard “Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)” and a converted customer.

I challenge you to look at your conversion rate from ebook to customer:

How many downloads/email addresses does it take to get a sale?
What’s the timeframe from download to close?
How many hours did the process take you from start to finish (ideation to conversion)?
Did these customers stick around long term?

I had to be painfully honest with myself to recognize it wasn’t working for me the way I hoped.

How I Fixed It (And You Can Too): What To Do Instead

I spent way too much time trying new freebies, more targeted landing pages, refining email sequences, and putting out more defined ads — all trying to optimize the process instead of questioning the process itself.

The Discovery: Faulty Metrics

Looking at my end goal — provable revenue — showed me that I had a disconnect in metrics. My clicks, traffic, and MQLs were just not getting me to provable revenue very often.

Instead, they were getting me a lot of sales work — effort that rarely resulted in revenue.

When I looked at it from the end goal and worked my way backward, I found that the highest most consistent revenue with the lowest amount of sales effort went through a process like this:

They came to me first, making them exceptionally warm leads (i.e., client referrals, people who followed my social media — mostly LinkedIn, those who found my website through search engines, those who subscribed to my email list organically — not in exchange for anything, etc.)
Converting those warm leads to small-product customers wasn’t difficult.
Once they had purchased this small product, they frequently wanted my main service.

I realized it took just as much effort to sell a low-ticket service as it did a freebie. Sure, the number of MQLs I got through the paid process was smaller, but the eventual close rates on the full-scale service more than made up the difference.

Quality trumps quantity every single time.

How I Applied This Discovery

I realized that I needed to stop collecting email addresses and treating this like a high-burn and churn numbers game.

There was an efficient process staring me in the face — and I had missed it up until this point.

Here’s what I did:

I anchored my social media, ads, blog content, and emails around my low-ticket product.
Then used that low-ticket product to upsell to my main product/service.

This turned my numbers from a low single-digit close rate (MQL to high-ticket customer) to a 90%+ close rate for the high-ticket service.

Key Lessons

I’ll explain Lavendai Creative’s most successful small-ticket product to date and why I think it works.

The product is an SEO audit. We charge $350 for the service and in exchange, our customers receive a PDF action-oriented review of their website. We go in-depth reviewing dozens of metrics to give it an overall evaluation and recommended action steps.

Here are the key points:

It weeds out people who have no intention of paying for anything.
It gives a taste of what our price-to-quality ratio is. $350 is not a small investment, but it’s not huge for a company either. It’s a sweet spot for our normal service pricing (gives them an expectation of what they’d pay for our main service). If our low-ticket product was $5–10 and we turn around and charge thousands for our main service, it may not connect as well. Similarly, if we offered a terrible quality product for $350, it would not connect as well either.
It’s useful. This product gives a lot of insight into a customer’s website with an action plan to improve their results.
It’s a standalone product. The customer can take it and walk away with something valuable. There’s no direct pressure to buy more from us.
It builds trust. We show them we know what we’re doing by giving them an insider peek into our expertise before they ever have to even look at a long-term contract.
It gives them a test run of our services. If they’re happy with the depth, quality, customer service, and processes we showed them, they get to see they’ll be happy working with us.
Most importantly, it directly precedes our main service. We sell marketing services centered largely around SEO concepts, so it’s an easy upsell.

Closing Thoughts

The B2B marketing funnels we’ve all taught and been taught are flawed. A lot has changed since these recommendations came out, and it’s time for us as marketers to adapt. I challenge you to rethink your methods in 2024.

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