Drip content might be just the concept you need to ensure long-term engagement, increase product satisfaction and build a sustainable community around your brand. Your top-notch marketing efforts, usually by leveraging the promise of great content, can ensure that people will arrive on your website. However, the way you organize and deliver said content determines whether those people will turn into curious but fleeting visitors or long-term & engaged users of your website.
In this blog post, we aim to give you all the information necessary to determine whether drip feed content is a good fit for your business.
That means we go over its benefits, when it should and shouldn’t be used and how to implement it for your website using the two most popular & robust membership tools available online. So let’s jump straight into it with just what exactly it means to drip content!
What Is Drip Feed Content And When Should You Do It?
In its most basic sense, we are talking about releasing the content on your membership website or online course bit by bit over a period of time. So instead of a person gaining access to your entire library upon signing up, at least part of if not all of your content is scheduled out to be delivered in a predetermined fashion.
This content could be course lessons, videos, website pages, posts, tests & quizzes, pretty much anything that could provide value to your users. No tactic applies to every situation, so when should you deploy it? We want to take a moment here and differentiate between two types of drip content, going over their preferred use cases:
Scheduled Release Drip Content
This means that content is being released on a specific date for all users. It doesn’t matter if Person A becomes a member a year after Person B, they will both get access to the material at the exact same time. This can work great for membership sites that wish to foster a sense of community since every new piece of content is an opportunity for everybody to come together, sharing their thoughts and ideas. It also lends itself to updating new information efficiently as time goes on.
So if you have a group of people passionate about woodworking, it might be a good idea to release content centered around new project ideas/techniques to everyone. This can foster discussion and a sense of long-term value.
Evergreen Drip Content
Keeping with the amateur woodworker idea, let’s say you have a person who is at the beginning of their journey. Then they have no use for the cutting-edge innovations in this field. What they need are the basics. Thankfully, these usually don’t change much overtime in a given area of interest.
This allows you to structure your content for the optimal learning experience – A natural progression curve, building on fundamental principles and skills, with well-placed brakes, to allow for the knowledge to be fully absorbed and understood. Once you have the design of your learning journey, you can tailor this content to drip for every single new student from the moment they sign-up. Regardless of when they join, each student will have a journey tailored to their needs that they will progress through step by step at their own pace.
Benefits of Drip Content
Let’s run through a few of the significant benefits you might see when you decide to drip content to your members.
- Ensure long-term engagement since people will regularly visit your website to consume the latest content. If a user has to take more trips to your site to get your content, that is fantastic news for you. More visits mean more views, more traffic, and more opportunities for advertising to and engaging with said user.
- Maybe you haven’t created the whole course yet, and the built-in brakes between content pieces can act as a buffer, buying you time until the next part needs to be put out in the world.
- When you drip course content, it can be consumed in the way it was meant to. If the course, through research and testing, was spaced out in a certain way, determined to be the optimal way of consuming and understanding it, then drip-feeding lets you bake this spacing into the course’s DNA. This eliminates the possibility of some students giving up the course because of the way they interact with it. (Maybe they rushed through the first 20 lessons without leaving time for the information to be fully understood. So now they feel overwhelmed with the rest of the course and end up ditching it, thinking it is just “not for them”.)
Now that we have our “When?” and “Why?”, let’s look over the “How?” The actual method. We’ll go over how you can drip content in two of the most popular and dependable WordPress plugins around, MemberMouse and MemberPress.
Can You Use Drip Content In MemberPress?
MemberPress is one of the most used WordPress plugins for a reason. It anticipates your users’ particular way of interacting with your content and lets you tailor the experience to their needs. Thus they have a dedicated drip content dashboard, and the MemberPress drip content creation process couldn’t be more straightforward.
Simply go to your “WordPress Dashboard”, then the “MemberPress” section and finally the “Rules” area. Here you only need to select “Drip/Expiration”, adjust a few settings, and you’re done!
These settings give you a greater degree of control and include:
- The pages you want to be made available.
- Which membership tier gets access.
- The exact time after which the content becomes available, tailored around a specific user action or a set date.
Can You Use Drip Content In MemberMouse?
This is yet another impressive and comprehensive WordPress plugin that we have recommended to our clients and helped them implement. MemberMouse drip content is very easy to set up. In the “MemberMouse Dashboard”, go to “Product Settings”, then to “Drip Content Schedule”. Here you can efficiently decide what content will be visible to which membership tier and at which date.
Note that in both of these plugins the day somebody registers is considered “Day 0” so if you wanted to schedule a piece of content to be delivered on somebody’s seventh day, you would enter “Day 6”.
Final Words On Using Drip Content
We sincerely hope we’ve used our considerable experience and knowledge of membership websites to give you a clear idea of whether you should set up drip content for your business. We believe that this method takes full advantage of the capabilities of modern-day technology to offer you a greater degree of control in providing a curated experience to your customers. If you wish to get a helping hand with implementing this or any other tactic/tool in our wheelhouse, we would be more than happy to extend you one!
Simply contact us right here, and we will schedule a call right away to discuss all the ways we can help you scale your business! We hope to hear from you soon!
