Your free offer has no value

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Last month, I got a piece of direct mail from the NZ Herald (one of the main newspapers here, for my overseas readers). It was trying to get me to subscribe to the Herald. Here's its headline:

Then the rest of the letter follows that same theme - about how I can get the Herald for free, what that offer includes (access to premium articles online and the print version), and so forth. It's pretty standard try-before-you-buy stuff. You can see the whole thing here if you're interested.

And that was pretty much it. The entire letter talked about the benefits of the offer (the Herald free for a month) rather than the benefits of the Herald itself. It was all positioned around one main idea: "free."

I think this approach is a mistake. A free offer is nice, but it’s not that useful on its own. Here’s why, and what I would do differently.

"Free" has no intrinsic value

A mistake many marketers make is to assume that their audience automatically understands the value of the product they sell. If you start from that assumption, then it makes perfect sense to offer something for free. You're offering something valuable, that your customer would usually have to pay for, for nothing.

In reality, a free offer is only valuable if the audience sees value in the thing being offered. Lots of stuff is free. Air is free. Dirt is free. But that doesn't mean people are going to jump at an offer of free air or free dirt.

More to the point, lots of news is free! The Herald's main competitor, Stuff.co.nz, puts all their news online without a pay wall. So does Radio NZ. And those are just a couple of examples. There are all kinds of other sites, local and international, pumping out news for free.

So it's not enough just to say that the Herald is free for four weeks. In order to persuade, this letter needs to make a case for why the Herald's product is better than all the free options out there. Otherwise, they're just offering a four-week free trial of something that people can get for free, forever anyway.

(I'll touch on how they could do this later).

Paying for customers

A free offer is essentially paying for a customer - around $80 in this case (four weeks of foregone revenue at the $20/week it would cost me to subscribe to the Herald online and print version). There's nothing wrong with that. Sales and marketing are just costs of doing business.

However, by positioning the letter around the free offer, and not the benefits of the Herald in general, they've significantly narrowed the pool of people who are likely to respond. Anyone who takes them up on this offer was already familiar with the value of the Herald.

Right off the bat, that's a smaller group than they could have influenced if they had talked about the value of the Herald itself. That group further divides into two sub-groups: people who would not have bought, and needed the deal to tip them over the edge,and people who would have bought anyway, but took the deal because it was on the table.

This means that the Herald paid some portion of people $80 to sign up, who would have signed up anyway. It basically gave them a free $80!

Again, cost of doing business. But that cost is proportionally higher than it would have been if the letter had spent some time explaining why the Herald is worth subscribing to, because doing that would have made the offer appealing to a larger group of potential customers.

A different approach

With all that in mind, here's how I'd approach this.

As you can probably tell, I wouldn't focus on the free offer. Rather, I'd focus on the value of the Herald itself. Which isn't actually that hard to do! The Herald has some really solid investigative journalism. These are stories that take months to put together, and really peel back the layers on an issue in a way that day-to-day news can't really do. What's more, these stories can't be easily replicated the way day-to-day news can.

That in and of itself is a really solid value proposition.

So if I was writing this, I'd structure the whole thing around the value of the Herald's investigative reporting team - some of the big stories they've published in the last 12 months, the awards they've won, so on and so forth. Maybe I'd even attach one of the more impactful stories (although that would make the postage more expensive).

And I wouldn't get rid of the free offer - I just wouldn't structure the whole thing around it. Rather, I would put it at the bottom as part of the call to action - "find out our point of difference for yourself, for free," or something like that.

In most cases, that's where a free offer belongs. It's a sweetener to push people over the line, once they've already been convinced of the value. It's not something to structure your entire piece of material around, because that limits you to people who already see value in what you have to offer.

Have a look at your own free offers. Are they the focus of your copy, or the icing on the cake at the end? I reckon you'll get much better results if you focus on the latter, not the former.

See you

Sam

PS: That's me done for the year. You'll hear from me again in January. Have a good holiday.

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