There was a time when very few WordPress products supported content dripping. Today many do. Yet, they still struggle.
The Call was for Dripped Content
Some time in 2010 I experienced three distinctly different dynamics with online information that changed my thinking on dripped content.
The first was that I started selling my first eBook on Amazon. That was a great and fun experiment, but the weird dynamic that struck me was people paying $7-10 dollars for an eBook they could ready in an hour or two, and then asking for a refund.
Now, I know what you're thinking. Maybe they wanted a refund because the book sucked. I know, I wondered that too. But the patterns were pretty clear. For every 10 people that bought, one would want a refund. And over time, some returning folks would do it more than once. Yet the Amazon ratings and feedback were great.
They were doing it because they could.
The second experience started by logging into the Third Tribe membership site. It was a joint venture, if I got it right, between Darren Rowse, Sonia Simone, Brian Clark and Chris Brogan. I liked their material but noticed what I was doing—logging in, downloading a bunch of stuff, logging out, and reading/listening to it offline later.
Now nothing about this experience was all that strange. Until I was asked to help a client out with their membership site. As a guy who has worked on a lot of membership sites, this was the first time I was noticing a particular pattern.
People were buying their membership, logging in, downloading everything, and then logging out. Much like I was doing at Third Tribe. The difference?
While I paid, month after month, these folks were asking for a refund 6 hours after their initial purchase.
The solution, for my client, and the one I would share with anyone who would listen, was the notion of dripped content.
But there's a problem with dripped content…
The third experience of 2010 was purchasing the Teaching Sells membership / course from CopyBlogger. They were offering the course in modules that were dripped out over time.
My problem?
I often forgot to go back to the site a few weeks later to check on the latest content.
What I really wanted was a link between dripped content and notifications. And it's been something that's been crucial on most of the membership projects I've worked on since.
If you drip content on a schedule, you need a simple way to let users know that the new module is now available.
That notification dynamic is the main problem with dripped content. And often, it requires integration with an autoresponder, like MailChimp.
The flow goes like this:
- User purchases course / membership
- User gets subscribed to both email list AND to autoresponder series
- Autoresponder sends emails on a weekly/monthly basis
But to make that happen, you often need to do a decent amount of configuring and integration.
MemberPress Solves this
I believe MemberPress will likely be the best Membership Plugin of 2015. It's the last post in my series on membership plugins. And I don't want to give away too much—except to say it's awesome.
But what I really like is that it understands how to drip content via rules.
And it knows how to configure emails that go out, as reminders.
And when you put these two things together, you don't need to use reminders to thank people for signing up. You can use them to notify them that a new set of content is ready for them. And when you do that… you get… wait for it…
MemberPress: The perfect solution for Dripped Content and Notifications.