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From CSI to Member Benefits

It is going to take me minute to get to my point, but I figured I would give you my crazy train of thought. My wife and I have a game where we try to figure out how our brains jumped from one thing to a seemingly unrelated other thing. So here is the road map to the point of this blog post.

I saw that William Petersen is leaving CSI, the CBS TV show. It reminded me that I totally missed last season. I figured I should catch up on the show before the season starts. Turns out, CBS doesn't put all old full shows online. NBC and ABC do. So now, I may not really watch CSI this fall since I missed a bunch of shows last season. Why wouldn't you put up old episodes to help drive traffic to the new ones?

So here it is. Are you giving your members old products for free to help drive traffic to new ones? If not, maybe you should be. The best example I can think of is market research. If you have a new version of the study out, why not send all your members a copy of the old study? You can say you want your members to have the solid data available to help them do business. So here, take this study for nothing. But, if you want the most up-to-date data, this new study is available for purchase.

I am sure this could work with other benefits/products/services. There are probably arguments against it, but just like me with CSI, you may have people expecting it. And if they don't get it, they just walk away.

Comments

Lisa Junker said…
"Why couldn't you put up old episodes to help drive traffic to the new ones?"

I was just reading a few weeks ago about how the marathons of old episodes of Project Runway helped to drive viewers to start watching the the new episodes of the show. People watched the marathons in the summer and then tuned into the show in the fall ...

I wonder if you could do a membership marathon--with a free article/white paper/webinar/etc. each day for a week, or once a week for a month, to get potential members excited about membership?
July 17, 2008 at 2:18 PM
Scott Oser said…
Something else I have seen used effectively is using pieces of content or older content to give people a taste of the type of gret stuff they will get as a member. Giving people samples is always a good way to get them hooked.
July 17, 2008 at 5:08 PM
Lindy Dreyer said…
I like your specific idea about releasing an older study just as the new study is about to be launched. It jives with my "show, don't tell" philosophy. I can describe the benefits of the study till I'm blue in the face, but it's still not as powerful as personally experiencing it.
July 19, 2008 at 10:48 AM
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