What to Consider Before You Give Away Your Book for Free
Giving away your book for free can be a smart move – but only if you approach it strategically.
For business owners, a book is so much more than just a product. When a book is leveraged correctly, it becomes an invaluable lead magnet and a cornerstone in your marketing and lead generation strategy.
With the right approach, a free book lead magnet builds trust, generates leads, and drives long-term business growth.
So, what do you need to consider to make the most of your free book giveaway?
This article will explore the key factors of giving away your book for free, so you can overcome your misconceptions and avoid common pitfalls, plus how ScoreApp can help you maximize your return on investment.
1. Have you defined your business goal?
First things first: why are you giving away your book?
To run a successful free book giveaway, you need a clear end goal in mind.
Otherwise, how can you measure your success and where to make improvements for better results in the future?
Your goal could be to:
- Generate new leads
- Build authority in your industry
- Drive sales to high-ticket products or services
How ScoreApp helps
ScoreApp provides all the tools you need to track the performance of your free book campaign, down to the finest of details.
Our in-depth analytics dashboards can help you monitor a wide range of statistics, including:
- Reader engagement levels
- Calls to action (CTA) click-through rate
- Conversion rate of readers to customers
- Quiz completion rates
And much more!
This data will help you create (and then refine) targeted follow-ups based on your goal.
For example, if your goal is:
- Nurturing leads – Send follow-up sales enablement content related to your book content, such as worksheets and video mini-courses.
- Building brand awareness – Encourage people to share your book on social media and offer them an incentive for doing so. An interactive quiz can be a great way to do this!
- Increasing sales – Send targeted offers for your premium products and services to your highest potential leads.
2. Are you targeting the right audience?
It’s tempting to see the total number of downloads or requests for your free book as the benchmark of success.
But when it comes to long-term business success, a smaller group of high-quality leads will always trump a large audience of ‘freebie collectors’ with no intention to buy.
A free book works best when it attracts the right people – those likely to continue engaging with your business after they have finished reading.
Before you start promoting your book, you need to understand exactly who you want to read it and ensure that any content you create speaks directly to their needs and challenges.
How ScoreApp helps
ScoreApp helps you build a clear profile of your key customer groups.
Our quiz marketing software automatically segments leads based on their responses to the quiz or assessment to promote your book content.
For example, if you run a marketing agency and have written a book called “The SME Guide to Mastering Marketing”, you could set up a Small Business Marketing Review quiz that helps prospective clients understand their performance…while promoting your book, of course!
Based on their quiz results, you could then segment these leads based on the areas in which they need the most help, and send personalized follow-ups specific to the challenges and goals of each group.
You could also send check-in surveys to readers as they progress through your book, to gain more insight into their thoughts about the content, and use this information to continuously refine your free book funnel.
3. What problem does your book solve for your prospects?
The best way to encourage the right people to read your book is to demonstrate what’s in it for them…
When you give away value for free, people want to buy from you. As a result, it’s much easier to convert readers into paying clients!
A book that solves a real problem is much more valuable to your audience than a fluffy filler piece that is constantly trying to sell.
Ensure your book focuses on a clear and specific problem that aligns with your business offering, and that the content throughout offers practical solutions and actionable advice that readers can apply immediately to their own situation.
How ScoreApp helps
A ScoreApp quiz or assessment is the perfect tie-in for your free book!
Create a quiz that identifies the specific problem your prospect is facing, and tie it back to the solutions in your book.
Let’s say you have written a book about leadership in the workplace, and your target readers’ main concern is a lack of confidence in their leadership abilities. A Leadership Skills Evaluator quiz can help your readers self-diagnose their leadership strengths and weaknesses, and demonstrate how reading your book will help them improve.
Once your quiz is live, you can track reader engagement to identify which problems resonate most and adjust your follow-up strategy (and subsequent offers) accordingly.
(If this quiz template isn’t the right fit for you, don’t worry! Our award-winning team has designed hundreds of others for different use cases and industries.)
4. What part of your book are you giving away?
Another important factor is what part of your book to give away. You don’t need to offer the entire book for free! Sometimes a chapter, key section, or workbook is enough to generate interest from your ideal readers.
Giving away a single part of your book can be a great way to build intrigue in the lead-up to its official launch.
Offering people a sneak peek at what you’ve been working on can help you build up a highly-engaged waitlist of qualified leads who want to learn from an industry expert.
The goal is to choose a section that provides real value, while still leaving the reader wanting more.
That way, they are more likely to purchase the whole book or want to learn more about your other products or services!
How ScoreApp helps
Test different sections of your book as lead magnets to understand which one your audience responds to best.
A key way to measure this engagement is through your quiz completion rates.
People need to give you their data (plus other insights) to access your chapter. If one section of your book is gaining a lot more conversions than others, you should refine your messaging and make that section the entry point for your book funnel.
5. How will distribution work?
Next, consider how you’ll deliver your free book (or section) to your readers.
Think about where your book sits within your sales funnel. Is it a standalone campaign or part of your wider marketing strategy?
You can deliver your book through an automated email marketing journey, a dedicated landing page, or you might even want to send it by post!
The goal is to make it easy for prospects to access your book (and ensure you’re capturing their contact information in the process), so you can continue to nurture relationships after they have finished reading the final page.
How ScoreApp helps
ScoreApp’s quiz marketing platform thrives on automation, so you can easily create a streamlined process for book delivery.
For example, if you choose to distribute your book by email, you can set up automated email marketing journeys based on how readers engage with your book.
These journeys will be triggered when someone completes your quiz. Each lead will receive the section of your book most relevant to their needs, alongside further content and resources to continue building trust and sharing value.
The best part is, all of this happens in the background – keeping you connected to potential clients with minimal manual work involved.
6. Do you have a clear follow-up strategy?
One of the most important things to understand is that your free book alone isn’t enough.
People need to give you their contact information in exchange for your book. If you don’t utilize this opportunity to develop a relationship after they have finished reading, you could be missing many chances to convert your readers into paying clients.
To encourage people to take the next step, make sure you include strategic calls-to-action throughout your book, for example:
- “Schedule a consultation”
- “Enquire about our program”
- “Join our community”
Then, you need to have a clear plan and system in place to follow up.
How ScoreApp helps
Alongside delivering your book, automating follow-ups is a breeze with ScoreApp!
After segmenting and scoring your leads based on their quiz answers, ScoreApp automatically delivers targeted content by email based on how readers engage with your book.
To act as sales enablement content, these emails should be full of value that helps people build on what they’ve learned, such as:
- Workbooks
- Exclusive webinar invites
- Blog posts
- Case studies
- FAQs
By setting up these follow-ups to include the same CTAs featured throughout your book, you can track which ones are driving conversions and refine your strategy accordingly.
7. Are you measuring results and adjusting your strategy?
Finally, you need to think back to the goal of giving your book away for free in the first place!
All of this effort becomes meaningful when you track the results of your book giveaway.
- Are you generating new leads?
- Are you building authority in your industry?
- Are you driving new sales of your products and services?
The only way to discover the answer is to measure and analyze every piece of data you collect.
You also need to be prepared to adjust your approach if the results don’t align with your goals.
How ScoreApp helps
Use ScoreApp’s data analytics features to monitor the key success metrics for your free book giveaway.
The results you prioritize will largely depend on your goals, but you need to go beyond download rates.
With ScoreApp, you can easily monitor tangible insights around engagement levels with your book, such as:
- Quiz completion rates (to get access to your book in the first place)
- Follow-up email open rates
- CTA click-through rates
- Reader to customer conversion rates
You can then use these insights to adjust the content at every stage of your book funnel – from your overall messaging and landing page to individual follow-up emails – to improve performance and optimize your results.
Maximize the business impact of your free book with ScoreApp
Giving away your book for free can be a game-changing strategy, but only if you approach it with a clear goal, a qualified audience, and a solid follow-up plan.
When paired with ScoreApp’s engaging quiz templates, lead generation resources, and data insight tools, you can turn your free book into your best business growth tool, ensuring you get maximum value from every reader interaction.
Discover how powerful your free book can be when you try ScoreApp today for FREE!
