Freebie opt-in offers (aka lead magnets) are a great way to build your email list. All you have to do is give your audience something in exchange for their email address.

You can offer a template, a mini-guide, a recipe—basically anything that provides value to your ideal customer and gives them a juicy preview of what it’s like to work with you.

Here’s how it works:

And the best part? We made this entire process easier than ever.

Here are the four steps you’ll need to take to offer your freebie through Flodesk.

This is where people sign up for your freebie. Forms can be embedded on your website, blog, landing page or any other place on the web that allows you to embed custom HTML code.

If you don’t have a website yet, you can also publish a form directly to the web as a landing page—just copy and paste the link and share it wherever you want (like your Linktree).

Either way, your form will collect subscribers' data and move the subscribers into your Flodesk account, organized by segments. (More on segments in the next section.)

Think of forms as the universal connector between the world wide web and your Flodesk account.

To get started with setting up a form:

When you create your form, you'll want to indicate which segment to add new subscribers to. You can create a new segment or add them to an existing one.

Of course, everyone who subscribes to any of your forms is added to your total subscribers list ("All subscribers" segment), but segments allow you to get a little more specific about who this person is and/or where they came from. Knowing exactly how someone joined your list allows you to send them the emails they care about most.

For example, let's say you put a form on your website so new subscribers can opt in to receive your free guide "Top 10 Business Tips." When you create your form, you'll want to indicate that these new subscribers get added to your "Top 10 Business Tips Opt-in" segment.

These new subscribers are a part of your total subscribers list ("All subscribers" segment), but they're also part of your "Top 10 Business Tips Opt-in" segment.

This allows you to automatically deliver your "Top 10 Tips" email, and even automate a workflow a few days later to send a hyper-relevant, hyper-personalized email that says "Hi [name]! Because you downloaded my Top 10 Business Tips, I thought you'd like my Entrepreneurship 101 Guide, too."

So that's how subscribers get added to segments automatically when they submit a form. But you can also import subscribers into a segment manually via a CSV upload.

Ready to recap? (You're basically a segments pro by now.)

After your dreamy new subscriber fills out the form and gets added to your “Top 10 Business Tips Opt-in” segment (or whatever you want to call it) in your Flodesk account, the next step is to send them an automated email that contains your lead magnet. You can attach a PDF file directly to your email or link to an external file via URL.

Before you can automate it using a workflow (more on that in the next section), you’ll need to create the email.

This is where you put it all together! It’s the magic that automatically sends your freebie email to your new subscriber.

Remember when we talked about how a form adds a subscriber into a specific segment?

You'll want to set your Workflow to begin when your subscribers come in through a form or a manual upload into the segment you created. This will be your Workflow trigger.

Once you've set up your Workflow trigger (that is, when someone submits your form or when you manually upload them into a segment), you can now add the email you created in the previous step to immediately send as soon as someone comes in through your form.

Now you see how these four components work together to create a beautifully automated system!

You'll need these four components set up correctly in Flodesk to have a complete system—and start growing your list!