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What is a good marketing service to provide?

What are the best examples of a service being sold as a product?

  • We provide email marketing 'services', not a self-service product (a'la MailChimp). We don't charge per hour or project, but have monthly  plans for a set usage allowance. Although this is good in principle, I don't think our service (what we do for what we charge) is 100% clear, maybe it is. Feedback welcome - http:/http://mailninja.co.uk/ However, what are some great examples of service businesses selling their service as if it were a product?

  • Answer:

    Seems to me that any professional services type business sold on a retainer or subscription basis fits your description of a Service Sold as a Product.  Legal services are a great example.  Commonly offered on a retainer basis and as a subscription plan through employers. The downside of this type of subscription for a consumer or business is you pay whether you use the service or not a opposed to a retainer.  An example mentioned in this article about how 37Signals changed from a Service Business to a Product business is how John Warrillow, the author, changed his market research company - Warrillow & Co - from a project based research business to a product based research business by charging on a subscription basis for their research.  http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/11/how-to-turn-a-service-business-into-a-product-business.html As far as clarity.  You definitely have some mixed messages (IMHO).  "So, if you're looking for the experts in email marketing to work on your email marketing strategy, email design, email newsletter content, inbox placement...:"  This sounds like a "service." "... or take on your outsourced email marketing operations – then talk to us" This is your product.  Unless...advice on "email marketing strategy" is somehow included in the subscription and creating a Responsive HTML Email Template constitutes "email design". Another problem is logical flow.  I was on your "How it works" page first  but couldn't figure out the benefit.  The "Why Us?" page, of course, talks about benefits but still mixes metaphors.  For example on Item 1 you mention you write great copy but great copy is an add on and not included with the base subscription.  I'd consider re-writing Item 1 to something like - 1. Our emails get 10% more opens and 15% more clickthroughs because... Our system times delivery to moments when your customers are most likely to engage. And, if you add our copy writing service, we get another 10% improvement in clickthroughs!!! Use our 15 years of experience to get these benefits today because more opens and more clickthroughs = more $.  And we all want that, right! Or something along those lines. Personally I think combining these two pages, condensing them, and starting with the benefits might be a better approach.  Just my two cents. PS - looking at how other great sites like 37Signals do things is always a great approach.

Steve De Long at Quora Visit the source

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Take a look at the professional and self-development coaching programs are sold this way. A few examples: http://www.tonyrobbins.com http://tomferry.com/ http://www.strategiccoach.com/home.html These companies use technology to reuse content, giving them a more scalable (but not entirely) sales model. The large seminars are one-to-many, then they have videos, recorded calls, books, and mobile apps to create a hybrid learning experience for their customers. You might think about how you develop a similar learning program for your power users willing to spend more for super duper content outside of your normal customer success approach.

Scott Sambucci

Generally speaking, any service that makes it easy for the customer to define that service by virtue of 3-4 core experiences is similar to a great product. Usually, the following experiences help define your service as cohesively as a great product the acquisition experience, the onboarding experience, the intuitiveness of the usage experience. the handling of the exception event experience. the simplicity of how a 'change of mind' experience is dealt with. Some examples of services that have been well productized in terms of the experience they provide are Southwest Airlines and Virgin Atlantic are unique air transport products. American Express has a unique model for credit card service. Nordstrom, Costco and Target have a distinguishable in the shopping experience. Amazon web services has made it easier for the average technical team to deliver software as a service. AOL did a great job with internet access bundling access with browser and content. There aren't as many great examples of software as service firms that can claim to have excelled in most of these experiences - sure, some have taken the lead by being early starters or using a pricing model. Some of the typical problems with many software service as a product vendors are Too much focus on the revenue model( subscription etc) as a differentiator. When designing the product, putting the technical architecture and its breakup into components ahead of a good user scenario. Not defining a core value proposition and a core demographic and then doing everything to excite that demographic - being all things to everyone.

Deepak Alse

Bloomberg. Or check out http://www.sitecompli.com

Jonathan Sandor Goldman

Just about any cloud software is doing this - the "product" is their software package, but in a way it's a service that is running that software.

Ed Wheeler

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