88. Why people don't take you up on your FREE offer

You put something out for free — something truly valuable, something you were proud of — and got crickets. Nothing. Nada. 

What gives?

I learned the hard way that there's a good reason people don't take you up on your free (or low-cost) offers.

Let me teach you how to problem-solve around this.

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I’m Simone Grace Seol. Let me help you build community care, social responsibility, and spirituality into every part of your business.

📩 My emails — my most intimate writing, sent in real time: simonegraceseol.com/get-emails

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Transcript

Hey, you're listening to Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

Now, I'm bringing back some episodes from my old archived podcast that I think very much stand the test of time — just as powerful and useful now as they were back then. This one in particular, I think you're gonna have a lot of fun with.

It's about how to introduce yourself and your work in ways that break out of the formula. So listen and enjoy.

When nobody takes your free offer

Today I want to talk to you about free offers, and the disappointment that ensues when nobody takes you up on it — or just a few people take you up on it, and it's a lot less than you expected, and it's all kinds of sad and disappointing and discouraging.

I've had this happen a lot in my business history, where I would put out something that I thought was amazing for free — whether it's a product, or something I offer my time to, like free coaching and free sessions — and had way lower interest than I anticipated.

And I made that mean that, number one, I suck. Number two, everybody hates me. Number three, nobody values my work. Number four, if I can't even get people to take what I offer for free, I'm never gonna make money. Nobody's ever gonna pay me if nobody's even willing to take what I have for free.

So all of those are thoughts I used to have, and I'm happy to report to you now from the other side that none of that is true.

Just because nobody, or very few people, took you up on your free offer does not mean you suck, or that your offer sucks, or that people don't like you, or don't trust you, or that you're never gonna make money. It means none of those things.

So I want to suggest some helpful ways of thinking about free offers that will hopefully allow you to take away the right learning from what you've done, and generate more interest for your next offering.

It's not about the price

So number one: the reason we get confused when not enough people take us up on our free offers is because we're believing that people's primary decision-making motivation is price — that their primary filter is price.

People who have this thought often tend to — when they feel anxious, when they're not selling enough — discount their prices, thinking that'll get more people to buy. Or they offer it for free, because they have this idea that if you have to pay more money, people are less likely to buy, and if you don't have to pay as much, or if it's free, people are more likely to buy.

And the important point here is that price is definitely a concern. Price is a filter for most people, but it is not number one. It's probably, like, number five or six. That's not precise — just think of it as being low on the list of priorities when it comes to filters for how people decide to buy. Because even when people think price is the most important thing, there are multiple things that come before it.

And the number one thing that comes before price is the perceived value to that specific person at that specific time.

So maybe something that helps people cook giant meals for many, many people in a short amount of time with low effort is not a super-duper priority. It's not all that interesting to a lot of people most of the time — but during the holidays it becomes a very high priority, so people value information that helps them with that.

And how to get your kids ready for school without drama, without screaming, without fighting or yelling, might be super high value for moms or dads with kids — but not for somebody like me who doesn't have kids.

So what I'm trying to say is it all depends on where somebody is who's perceiving your offer — whether your offer is scratching their itch, so to speak. If you're conveying the value of your thing in a way where it's not crystal clear to the buyer whether it's going to scratch their itch, whether it's going to help them with the precise thing they're considering very high priority at that moment — then they're not going to buy.

The skincare lady in Seoul

So that reminds me of a funny story. I live in Seoul, South Korea, where there's a lot of interest in skincare. I was walking down this sort of very trendy neighborhood street, shopping or something or other, and I got accosted by somebody representing a skincare company who started to talk to me on the street and tell me about everything that my face needs help with.

This might be considered very unwelcome and intrusive and rude in some contexts, but in that particular neighborhood it kind of made sense, just because everyone is super appearance-obsessed. And this lady started telling me, "Oh, you have very dry skin. You have a beautiful face, but you have sunspots, and this kind of treatment can help you."

She basically started to educate me about all the treatments that could improve the look of my skin, and the whole time she was talking, I was just thinking, "This is just so... I could not care less." It's not that I thought the lady was offering a bad service, or that I didn't trust her for any particular reason. It's just — on my list of priorities in life at that moment, and even now, reducing the appearance of sunspots on my face is, like, number 572. Very, very low priority. I got 99 problems, and sunspots on my face ain't them for me at this time in my life.

So she talked my face off — or she tried. I told her honestly, "Look, I appreciate what you're doing, and I just have zero interest in improving the appearance of my skin." And she was very taken aback, like, "What are you talking about? What do you mean you don't care about getting better skin?"

And I was like, "I just don't care that much. I think I look good enough." And she was like, "Okay." And then she just kind of let me go. I thought this was really funny, because she was so visibly taken aback by my response.

I didn't tell her, "Oh, I can't afford it." I didn't tell her, "I don't think this is the right company for me." I didn't tell her any of these things. I just told her, "I don't really care about skincare. The itch that you want to help me scratch, it doesn't really itch."

So the moral of the story is that if the benefit you offer isn't on the other person's very high priority list, it is not going to land. They're not gonna care. They're not gonna say yes.

When you didn't describe it clearly enough

Now, there are times when you offer something that you know is high priority for the other person, you know for a fact that your offer could help, and you thought you communicated that — and they still didn't take you up on your free offer. It's because you didn't do a clear enough job describing exactly how the solution you propose will help them in their day-to-day lives, in a very specific and concrete way.

So for example, I work with a lot of life coaches. I am a life coach. I have a lot of life coach colleagues, and they might say something like, "I will help you feel more calm and in control of your emotions in your life." Now, you might think — well, who wouldn't want that? We all struggle with anxiety, we all struggle with negative emotions, so why wouldn't anybody's highest priority be to feel more calm, right?

But feeling calm might not be what feels like the itchiest itch for the people reading. So for example, what if you had said instead: "I will help you stop yelling at your child. No matter what the child does, I will help you to always speak in a calm voice to your child. And after you go through my signature three-step process, you will never yell at your child again."

Now that might be more interesting, because this person might specifically be feeling bad about how much she yells at her child, and the prospect of never doing that again might be very appealing. That might be an itch they want scratched.

But do you see how it's almost the same thing? Learning how to not yell at your kid is emotional mastery, you know. But putting it in terms of these concrete, specific examples of how it could help them in their lives is often much more compelling.

The internet ruined free

Now, all these ideas are just good principles to think about sales in general, but we forget about them when we offer something for free, or something that's heavily discounted — because we think we don't have to do as good a job selling, or writing copy, or making a compelling case, because it's free. Because it should be enough of a selling point that it's free.

My stance is always: you should sell your free things with just as much conscientious, strategic effort as you would sell any of your paid products or services. You don't just plop it in front of people and expect them to be interested just because it's free.

I often like to say that the internet ruined free. The internet ruined free because it's become so easy to offer something for free — to slap together a PDF, to record something on video and call it a webinar and say, "It's free." But the availability of the technology that makes that easy also makes it easy for anybody with maybe less than honorable, conscientious intentions to just slap together something low quality — basically create something that's fluff and isn't all that useful, and lure people in saying, "It's free, and it's going to be the greatest thing in the world, and you should download it right now."

But then you download it and it's like, "This is not useful." We've all had that experience. Or if a service is free, we might assume there are strings attached that we don't want to deal with. Or we might be justifiably worried there's going to be an awkward upsell at the end. We've all been there.

If you've interacted with online businesses at all, we've all experienced freebies that are fluffy, or any kind of free situation that's just a long sales pitch for something else. So people are understandably wary about free.

So it's almost like you have to be even more strategic, even more intentional about conveying why this is going to be really useful for them, why it's going to add to their lives, why it's going to scratch the precise itch that's bothering them — and not just fail to register that a lot of people are suspicious about free. There's that added, honestly, pressure on you to convince them: "Hey, this is going to be really worth it. This is gonna be good, and this is how."

Don't despair

So I hope that helps. And if you take away one thing from this episode, may it be this: never, ever, ever take low engagement, or low sales, or a low level of people taking you up on your offer, as a sign that your stuff is not valuable, or that people don't think you're great. That could not be further from the truth.

As you can see, there are so many things you can tweak to change your response. Just because nobody's willing to grab your thing for free does not mean people are not willing to pay you. Remember, it's not about the price. Everything is based on perceived value. If you know how to talk about the value you offer, then you'll be able to sell anything, no matter what the price point — including if it's free.

So lots of things to play with. There's always something you can tactically improve on in order to understand your customers better and position your products better. Do not despair and think, "Nobody wants my thing." It's not true. You're just being invited to think about how you talk about your thing in a different way.

I hope that helped, and I'll talk to you next time.