Have you or anyone else ever experimented with “locking” some content to only paying users?

In other words, blogging is great and thought leadership seems to be helping tons of companies with inbound marketing efforts and establishing a valuable community.

But could making some “premium” content (the real good stuff) only accessible to paying customers increase some levels of conversions from inbound and maybe even retention due to the tailored nature of that content?

For those guys on the fence but love your content – I wonder if this could be something that would add value to a paying customer community.

But, How easy/hard it is to translate these ideas over to a B2C Service? …..especially the Blogging piece – Besides delivering value and addressing a pain point, should the Blog be Value Driven, Service Focused?

Feels like you could do a follow up post with tools that help achieve growth oriented results that don’t require a dev. Optimizely/Unbounce, A/B testing emails in a tool like Vero, etc. can help move the needle with little or no dev time required.

First month retention is our biggest growth opportunity, so I’m refining my company’s welcome email series — Do you have an email series that you send to new customers (similar to #4 in this article), and if so, is there a place online my eyeballs can take a look?

Stay radical,
Tim 🙂

I had a quick comment on number one in the takeaway. If a reader is using Google Apps/GMail, they can install the Yesware plugin. Yesware features email templates to make this exact type of thing easier to do. I don’t work for Yesware or anything like that, but I found it tremendously helpful when I was doing customer outreach in the past.

http://www.yesware.com/

Do you have a base script that you followed when you did the skype calls with your clients?

Can you share it, please?

Thanks!

For us it’s just normal to right a ton of content now, but a few months ago it was tough to find inspiration anywhere. The only thing that changed was that we started actually writing!

One thing that really helped us was moving from Tumblr (we started there too!) over to Ghost (https://ghost.org/). It’s distraction-free writing, making it much easier to actually get stuff done. We went for the hosted option too, so no developer needed.

You can check out our blog over at http://blog.timelock.io if you’re interested – we post about startups, social media, email, that kinda stuff. If you look through the archives you’ll see the progressions in writing styles too 🙂

I’m wondering about your opinion on Live Chat. Do you find tools like Intercom useful, or do you still prefer email for communication with customers?