Letter #90: 7 years and my bookstore doesn’t even care about me

A lesson in using content to retain users

This Sunday, as I added Sabaa Tahir’s All The Rage to my cart, I realized it’s been 7 years since I’ve been shopping with my bookstore.

Every time, they ask me for my phone number and other details.

And every time, they treat me like they’d a new customer.

It’s really a shame I don’t get any special discounts 😕

But it made me wonder: how about using content to retain paying users/customers? 🙌

We talk about using content to drive results and bring in leads.

But once that conversion is sealed, there’s little we think about in terms of using content to engage and retain those users.

So how can you: 

Retain paying users with content

Two ways: 

1. Educate about product features

Partner with your customer-facing teams to find out:

• Who are your champion customers 

• Which features do they use the most

• And, how exactly do they use it and when 

Then make webinar content featuring those users, features, and use cases.

Make sure you repurpose the webinars into a series of short newsletters — short video clips with text-based newsletters are an ideal combo.

Instead of mass-blasting those letters to your entire email list though, send them to your active users.

The result?

You’ll give them ideas for more ways to use your product. In turn, retaining them better as they use more of the tool.

2. Share in-product guides

Within your tool, strategically share content pop-ups.

Set them to trigger specifically when users are a few minutes into exploring a specific feature.

Within the guide itself, share ideas for ways other customers use the feature (remember to marry use case education with social proof here).

Alternate idea, share feature use case carousels with the product.

If you’ve a dedicated customer community — say a Facebook group — share both these content types there as well.

Now for:

Content for retaining traffic/leads

We’ve three ways here: 

3. Say no to nothingburger content

This is thin, generic content.

Think of it as candy bars — high in calories but zero in nutritional value. 

Such content does little to get people to come and convert them into your content loyalists.

The solution?

Define your content USP (what makes it worth readers’ time)

And think hard about the angle you want to take for each piece of content you make.

Because you win half the content game if your angle is unique. 

4. Reach your audience on channels they use

And nope, this doesn’t mean you’ve to make new content from scratch.

It just means you repurpose blog content for specific channels.

This way, those leads see you everywhere = more touch points which eventually lead to conversions. 

5. Make episodic content

Make part 2 and part 3 for content pieces doing well.

Link them to each other to get people to stay with you.

A lot many will also come back — remembering you’ve the answer to their next set of questions in the next part.

That’s all for this week, fellas.

See you next Tuesday,

Masooma