People feel a strong pull to return a favor. Giving something genuinely useful first makes the audience more open to giving something back: attention, an email, a meeting, a purchase.
At the top and middle of the funnel; for cold audiences; for services and high-consideration purchases where trust has to be earned before the ask.
Free samples in store; a free audit or assessment; useful templates and calculators; a genuinely helpful newsletter; a handwritten note in the box.
A clean, compounding play for services, B2B and DTC. Flagged when the free thing is thin bait with a hard pitch hiding behind it.
