One-off packages for recurring productized services?

I think you're asking about two separate things:

1. Should you offer one-off services (as an alternate or in addition to a subscription offering)?
2. Should you offer a low-cost, introductory rate for people to try the service?

At PodReacher, we offer both. Subscriptions are helpful and makes sense for certain kinds of businesses. But for one reason or another, subscriptions might not make sense for other kinds of customers. The decision is then: serve these customers or exclude them. One-off offerings and packages add thousands of $ in revenue each month and don't disrupt our workflow, which is why we offer these options. If you decide to go in this direction, you can always structure the subscriptions to be more enticing for a business that can afford it.

As far as the introductory offer, it can be a way for customers to understand the deliverable and learn about your service without committing upfront. Like dating before marriage.

Depends very much on the service and the cost/effort to deliver the one off project.

For your specific case I can see it making sense as long as you can run the planning side in an efficient and effective way.

• You convert some previously lost leads into revenue, by reducing client risk
• Customers may not get the full value of content marketing from 1 article, but they see the quality of your output and how you work (make sure to wow on these, not treat them as 2nd class work)
• Economies of scale may reduce your overall writing/management costs
• You gain extra feedback, reviews and word of mouth

In essence it is similar to the tried and tested models of freemium or free trials, which again work well in majority of cases, depending on the fine details.

Also if you can optimize your planning strategy to make this approach cost effective, it should also improve the results or reduce your costs for your regular customers.

Hi Nicolas,

From my experience, a one-off mini-project  might not be a good idea because of the following reasons:

1. You will attract the wrong kind of customers. These people often don't understand that you have to do content marketing for an extensive period of time until you see results. Do you really want to have a client who can't even commit to a single month?
2. If they don't have the money to pay for your monthly retainer, they won't stay with you for long anyway.
3. Often, you end up having more stress with these one-off clients than with the committed ones.

On the other hand, you should test everything. 😉

If one blog post has no impact how many does it take to have an impact? Sell a package that will have an impact they can measure.

If the value is in the strategy and the planning, why not break that out and sell a strategy or planning session?