I’ll never forget the first freebie marketing piece I created and put on the internet: a free guide to help you grow your Instagram following.
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I wrote all the copy in a Word doc and tossed it out to my audience. Within a few hours, I had a few hundred new subscribers on my email list. Seeing people jump onto my list in exchange for the value I was offering was an exhilarating feeling. After that, I was hooked.
Over the years I’ve made dozens of freebies to help me grow my email list and in the process, I’ve learned what makes a freebie generate leads successfully.
Table of Contents
What is freebie marketing?
Freebie marketing is a strategy where businesses offer a product or service at no cost in exchange for a customer action. Freebies can be digital or physical and the most common customer actions include signing up for an email or text list, engaging on social media, or downloading an app. Freebie marketing has the power to increase a brand’s perceived value, customer loyalty, and leads.
Does a freebie marketing strategy work?
In most purchasing decisions, customers perform a mental cost-benefit analysis to determine whether a purchase is worth the cost and risk.
With freebies, however, an interesting phenomenon takes place. Psychologists have found that labeling an item as “free” skews the traditional cost-benefit analysis. It boosts a product’s perceived value, sometimes even above a higher-quality paid item. This phenomenon, known as the “zero price effect,” activates an emotional response in our brains. To me, it feels like a dopamine hit. A freebie can:
- Increase value perceptions.
- Foster customer loyalty.
- Lower inhibitions and guilt.
- Increase quantities and order amounts because of the perception you are getting more for less.
Now, will freebie marketing work at converting your new leads into paid sales? That depends on how well you’ve aligned your freebie with your audience — and what you do after the offer.
How to Choose the Right Freebies to Give Away
There are hundreds of types of freebies. The wrong one could seem off-brand or attract the wrong audience. The right one, however, can boost your visibility and give long-time lurkers the nudge they need to take action.
First, take a look at the wide range of freebies businesses use to attract customers — some of these are better for B2B, while others for B2C.
Freebie Marketing Ideas
- Free product samples
- Free trial periods
- Downloadable templates like project management trackers, social media calendars, or budgeting tools
- Ebook or white paper
- Quiz results
- Free consultation
- Discount codes or coupons
- Online course or webinar
- Cheat sheet or checklist
- Content bundles such as templates, guides, or videos
- Referral program, such as offering gift cards or discounts for referring new customers
- Branded swag
- BOGO (buy one, get one)
- Free shipping
With all these choices, here’s how to know which will work best for your business.
1. Know your audience.
First, I always ask, what’s the number-one thing my audience is struggling with right now?
Freebies should feel like a shortcut to solving that. For instance, a lot of small ecommerce businesses struggle with choosing the right tech stack and overcoming platform limitations. So, I might want to consider creating an “Ecommerce Tech Stack Cheat Sheet” with a list of free and affordable tools and the best third-party apps for each of the major ecommerce platforms.
2. Leverage what you already know.
Second, the best freebie ideas are the ones you don’t have to reach for.
Think about checklists, swipe files, or tools you’ve already created for clients or internal use. What are the topics you could get on a soapbox and talk about for 30 minutes without warning? One of my best-performing lead magnets came from a slide deck I almost deleted.
If you’re a service-based business, you don’t want to give your entire proprietary framework away, but you can offer a pared-down preview of what you do for clients. Consultants and service businesses often don’t share enough of their process with prospects, but this gives just enough of a sneak peek for potential customers to feel comfortable hiring you.
3. Pick the right format.
Next, consider the format for your freebie. If you’re offering a consumer product for a giveaway or BOGO offer, choose something low-cost and high-inventory that will work across sizes and genders.
On the B2B side, consider what format your audience is most likely to respond to. Should it be long-form or short? Interactive or static? Text or multimedia? Here are a few formats that have worked well for me:
- PDF checklist: Quick wins in a tidy format
- Email mini-course: A multi-day drip that builds anticipation
- Interactive quiz: High engagement, especially on social
- Notion or Google Sheets templates: Practical and instantly useful
4. Test and iterate.
To test if you’ve found the right freebie, start small. Launch a free offer or A/B test multiple offers, track your conversion rates, and tweak the offer or format based on how people respond.
Freebie Marketing Examples
Here are six examples of how brands have used freebie marketing to reach their goals.
1. HubSpot Marketing Plan Templates
At HubSpot, we love a good freebie. And we’ve learned that you love it too. Most marketing, sales, and service pros didn’t major in the field we end up working in — our work changes fast and we figure everything out as we go. For that reason, free knowledge templates are worth their weight in gold.
We’ve built a library of 116 (and counting!) free business templates powered by HubSpot tools to help knowledge workers win at work every day. One popular one is our free marketing plan template, a Google Doc that marketers can simply copy and complete.
The template comes with fill-in-the-blank example copy to make planning quick and easy, with tips for completing each section. Other templates include a social media content calendar, a sales plan template, and a coding template.
2. Grow with Google AI Training
Most resource-strapped small business owners know that AI can save them time, but they don’t have the skills to get started.
Enter Google: In partnership with America’s Small Business Development Center (SBDC), they started offering free AI training to small business owners. They offer a one-hour workshop, two 10-hour courses, and an AI course for educators.
This is a smart move for Google since small business owners make up a large proportion of their Workspace and Ads customer base. The more skilled they are, the less customer support they’ll need and the more they’ll use Google’s products.
And, of course, it’s beneficial to help business owners learn and grow.
3. Dairy Queen’s Free Cone Day
When I picked my daughter and her friend up from school the other day, they begged me to drive them over to Dairy Queen for free cone day. So, eyeing the opportunity to be the hero, I drove them to the nearest DQ. While we only saved about $6, everyone was happy and the win felt much bigger.
One year in a tongue-in-cheek “study,” DQ found that a free cone made 92% of people happy, increased in-store traffic by 10%, and drove in-store sales by 12%.
Wendy’s has another twist on this promotion — instead of offering Frosties just one day a year, they sell a $3, limited-release keyring allowing customers to claim a free cone all year.
4. Pixory Product Giveaway
Travel brand Pixory knows how to do a giveaway right. This classic social media giveaway offered the chance to win 11 different products including plane tickets to NYC, a 5-star hotel stay, Sax gift cards, new luggage, and other luxury items for the winner and a friend.
To enter, participants simply needed to follow their account, then like, tag, and share the post. The Instagram giveaway boosted engagement and visibility for the brand, earning 32,612 likes.
5. Panera’s Unlimited Sip Club Free Trial
The only thing better than a freebie? Repeated freebies. Several years ago, I was delighted when my MyPanera rewards account offered me a free coffee every day for a month. You can bet that I was there before work most days that month and bought quite a few pastries too.
Today, that offer still exists in the form of Panera’s Unlimited Sip Club membership. While the membership costs a monthly fee, you can get started with a generous two months free before paying anything. That means that for two months after signing up, you can claim a free hot or cold beverage every two hours with unlimited refills.
Panera, like many other brands, has learned that a freebie can bring people in the door for larger purchases and build habits that will be hard to break once the trial period ends.
6. Jenna Kutcher’s List to Launch Course
Want to build your email list? When I want to tackle something new, there’s nothing more valuable than insider knowledge from someone who’s been there, done that. In the case of email marketing, that’s HubSpot Creator Jenna Kutcher.
Kutcher’s List to Launch Lab is a step-by-step blueprint for growing an email list, packed with core strategies, email copy templates, and plug-and-play guides for creating lead magnets.
Her genius offer taps into free educational content as a lead magnet, creating value upfront to build trust and increase the likelihood of future purchases.
By offering valuable content like step-by-step guidance for email marketing for free, it attracts and nurtures a specific target audience who are trying to do the same thing and can later convert into paying customers.
Freebie Marketing Strategy: How to Run a Successful Freebie Campaign
There’s much more that goes into a successful freebie marketing campaign than the freebie itself. If I were starting from scratch again, here’s the strategy I’d follow:
1. Define your goal.
First, determine what goal you’re trying to accomplish. Is it email signups? App downloads? New social followers, or demo requests? Make sure your freebie maps directly to that outcome.
2. Create a high-value freebie and offer.
Remember that perceived value matters. Make it feel premium — even if it only took you an hour to make. Try to offer a case study, data, or some juicy insider knowledge that isn’t already available on the internet.
Then, write an offer that speaks to your audience’s pain points (Remember: solve their problems and make their lives simple!) and reflects your unique voice. A focus for my brand is that all my offers truly feel like they’re coming from me, because they are!
3. Build a dedicated landing page.
Next, create a mobile-friendly, SEO-optimized landing page with a clear CTA.
Here’s the very specific, very actionable CTA that Kutching uses for her course. You’ll find “Enroll Now” and “Get started for just $79” on the landing page as well, but this one is the most compelling.
Pro tip: Use HubSpot’s free landing page builder to create a mobile-friendly, SEO-optimized page for your freebie campaign with a clear CTA. You can even generate a first draft with Content Agent.
4. Promote and distribute it with automation.
Here’s the most important key to success with freebie marketing: you need to set up a workflow for what happens after someone claims your freebie.
For example, connect your freebie to a follow-up email sequence welcoming the prospect and sending them relevant content or another offer to bring them in-store or connect with you for a consultation. You can add them to retargeting ad campaigns to remind them to use the freebie or upgrade to paid products or services.
This doesn’t need to take manual work. Instead, use a CRM with automation to create multiple touchpoints with the prospect. Reach them with website pop-ups or follow-up emails to nudge them to the next step in the journey.
Pro tip: This is where HubSpot Marketing Hub really shines — you can set up customer journeys and segment based on what they downloaded and what they click on next.
5. Refresh and relaunch.
A common mistake people make is creating a free offer, then setting it and forgetting it.
For me, reworking and refreshing my top-performing freebies is a consistent practice. I need to schedule regular check-ins to see which pieces are performing well and how I can keep them fresh and effective. If you created a timely resource, you might need to either scrap it or rework it to make it timeless.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself when evaluating an existing freebie:
- Does the freebie still align with my brand and messaging style?
- Does the freebie’s content still deliver high-quality and valuable guidance?
- Does the freebie have any time-sensitive language or outdated pop-culture references?
- Are there new insights or examples I can add?
Once you make updates (even minor ones), it’s time to relaunch it. You don’t have to hide the update and let the same ol’ system roll on as usual. A concentrated burst or promotion could kickstart a new wave of leads. You likely have tons of people in your audience who’ve never downloaded this particular freebie (or who aren’t even paying customers yet!).
A good reminder here is that we’re always talking way less about our offers than we think we are. I recommend relaunching your freebie with excitement and intentionality. Give your refreshed freebie a mini-spotlight wherever it feels right for your business.
Start attracting leads and customers with freebies.
Several years and countless downloads later, I still get excited every time someone opts in for one of my freebies. Why? Because I know it means the content resonated — and that I’m helping solve a real problem for someone.
I’ve seen firsthand how a well-crafted freebie can spark meaningful engagement, grow a high-quality email list, and open the door to long-term customer relationships. But I’ve also learned that not every freebie works. The most successful ones are rooted in deep audience understanding, valuable expertise, and alignment with your business goals.
If you’re just getting started with freebie marketing, my advice is simple: Start small, test relentlessly, and don’t be afraid to put your ideas out there. You don’t need a perfect PDF or fancy funnel. You just need to solve a problem your audience cares about. If you lead with value, your audience will follow.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2024 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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