Last week, we talked about creating an author email newsletter. I mentioned that offering a freebie is a great incentive for sign ups. My freebie is a free plotting/revision roadmap, for example.

What I didn’t mention was how, exactly, to make that happen with your newsletter. A friend asked me how to set it up, and I realized it might be good to explain it more generally, too. It took a while to figure out all this, but it’s not too hard to do, and it’s free. I only know how to do it with MailChimp. If anyone else is familiar with other email list service, please share in the comments!

First, I customized the confirmation emails. To customize your messages, go to the Dashboard in MailChimp, and then to Design a Form. On the Design a Form page, there’s a pull down menu of Forms & Response Emails you can view and edit.

I customized the Signup Form, Signup “Thank You” Page, Opt-in Confirmation Email and Final Welcome Email to mention the freebie (and to match my site colors—click Auto-Design to get started here). Just click on the text box and add some text.

Here’s the important part: for the Confirmation “Thank you” Page, use the box labeled “Instead of showing this thank you page, send subscribers to another URL.” If you have hosting for your website, you can upload a PDF file, for example, to your site and send readers directly there, or to a page to say thank you and link there. (But make sure the page and file are hidden from users & search engines).

If you don’t have hosting for your site, you can upload a freebie doc to Google Drive. Open the document in Drive, click on the “Share” button in the upper right, and Change the sharing settings. Set the privacy to “Anyone with a link can view this page,” and make sure the “Access: Anyone” option is set to “Can view” (you don’t want them editing your freebie!

Then use the same box as above with the Confirmation “Thank you” Page to go to the link. You can also turn off the Final Welcome Email if you’re using it; I’m tempted to turn it off anyway, but I like having the backup link to my freebie there just in case.

Now you’re all set up!

What do you think? What would you offer for a freebie? What would you like to see for a freebie? Come join the conversation!