Getting an email address from a visitor to your site isn’t as easy as it used to be.  These days people are already inundated with hundreds of daily spam messages and most of them are aware that each time they add their name to someone’s subscriber base, they risk another deluge of spam arriving in their in-box offering them everything from liposuction to medication like viagra.  The best way to circumnavigate reluctance to share their personal information is to offer them something that they want in return for the information.

The first thing you need to do is consider what visitors would consider a value exchange.  Would it be a report on something related to the subject area of your site?  Would it be an e-book or workbook on a similar theme?  How about a list of resources that people interested in your site subject area would find useful?  Maybe an audio podcast they can download and listen to that will either educate or entertain them and be based on the subject area of your site? Or perhaps you could send them some cosmetic surgery or marks and spensers vouchers? Whatever you choose, it should be a quality product and easy to transfer automatically so that the visitor can be enticed with a “download immediately upon subscribing to our site” comment.

Creating these products doesn’t have to be expensive.  You can either produce them yourself, or outsource via a number of sites such as rentacoder.Com or elance.Com.  Make sure that you are very clear about what the product should be before you post the project however, and be very clear that you want original material and all rights to the product once it’s complete.  What you pay for the product will depend on your budget (which in turn is dependent upon what the conversion from visitor to subscriber is worth to you), and the kind of quality you can expect.   Extremely low budgets can expect products that require additional “fixing” to improve the standard of the product before it’s used as a conversion incentive.

Once you have your product, take the time to create a welcome page that promotes what the product will do for the visitor if they download it.  What can they expect to learn from it?  Educate them on how much they will get out of the product. How much they will save using their vouchers, how much more beautiful they'll look after the face lift, how much they will enjoy listening to the free music tracks.  Use language that enforces this and gets them to act now (chances are if they decide to do it later, they’ll forget)  so that they can immediately access the download of this product. 

Conversion incentive products are a great way of bringing new people onto your subscriber base but make sure that your product is of high quality, and that you are able to market it effectively.  If you don’t see an upsurge in your conversion rates once you offer the product, it’s probably the page that markets the product that’s at fault, so you need to consider if the page is saying what the visitor needs to read in order to get excited enough about the product to sign up as a subscriber.