One of the most important aspects of your email marketing strategy is the percentage of visitors you can convert to your list. Do you know how many visitors your opt in page converts to subscribers? Is it 50%, 10% or somewhere in between? No matter what it is, you can likely increase this by offering them something of value right away.

Offering good content in your auto responder is a given, but what I am talking about here is a short report that they can download right away. This should be of good quality and give them real information that they can use (not fluff). This way you will start to establish a relationship and your subscribers will come to see you as someone who gives them valuable information.

If you want to implement this as part of your email marketing strategy, you first need to know what kind of information your visitors need. One way to do that is to look at your keyword stats or use a keyword tool and see what they are searching for. If you can answer some of their questions in your report then I think you have a winner!

So, where do you get these free reports that you can offer?

One way is that you can create them yourself. This is the most time consuming solution but if you are a hands on type of person, you might enjoy it. The report doesn't need to be a novel, it can be around 10 pages – it's the quality not the quantity that counts. You might also consider hiring a writer if you are too busy to do it yourself.

If your niche is not so specialized and you don't want to spend a ton of money, then consider using a private label report. These types of reports can be purchased for only a few dollars and you can edit them if you want and put your name on them. They are sold to many people but chances are your visitors have not come across the same report before. This is a perfect low cost solution to get a high quality report into your auto responder and increase your opt ins right away.

Finding these reports is not that difficult but you want to make sure you get one that is good quality so that you are giving your visitors something of value. If you can, try to get a package that has a cover graphic so your visitors can visualize what they will be getting in the report.

As you can see, adding a give away report to your email marketing strategy is a smart move for gaining the trust and respect of your customers as well as increasing your opt in rate. Of course, like anything, you will want to test how offering this report increases conversions, and I think you will find that you get a good deal more sign ups from landing pages that offer the report than from those that do not.