MemberPress-Client Case Study: John Deulloa and GmailHelp.com

If you’re in the business world of technology, John Deulloa is a name you’ll recognize. As one of the founders of GmailHelp.com, Deulloa is recognized by many in the business as the father of Internet marketing. And here’s why: Mr. Deulloa established one of the first web-design and web-hosting companies in the world—in 1991!

Deulloa says one of the biggest challenges at the time was trying to get companies to understand what the Internet was and why having a website was—and would eventually be—so important. The company was eventually dissolved, but Deulloa continued to maintain that websites were vital to business, and he wrote one of the first books on Internet marketing and SEO (in fact, he coined the term SEO).

Although his book became outdated as the rest of the world started to catch on to this whole Internet thing, Deulloa continued his career by starting an Internet-marketing consulting company and, later, a domain-registration company, RegiSTAR. Whether providing consulting services to big-name businesses such as Microsoft and Yahoo or to smaller businesses just starting out, Deulloa’s expertise and experience are some of the most highly regarded in the industry. It’s been over 25 years, and Deulloa is still one of the leading experts in Internet marketing.

I had the opportunity to visit with Mr. Deulloa over the phone about his experience with using the MemberPress plugin. Needless to say, his excitement for the plugin we create here at MemberPress is only matched by our excitement for his stamp of approval.

G Suite Premier Partner

When RegiSTAR’s clients were setting up their domain name and needed an email address, the company pointed them to Google email, and in time RegiSTAR became a G Suite Premier Partner. But RegiSTAR noticed something: Google, with over a billion customers, didn’t have a technical support service—and so RegiSTAR created GmailHelp.com. If you go to Google and type in “help with Gmail,” aside from Google, GmailHelp.com ranks number one as the natural search result.

The premise of GmailHelp.com is to let customers know that there’s much more to their Google account than composing and sending emails. From Google Drive and Google Docs to Google+ and managing contacts, GmailHelp.com shows its clients how to make the most of their account. What’s more, it helps customers troubleshoot any problems they may encounter—including (and most often) losing their passwords.

GmailHelp.com’s market is for anyone who uses Google (and with over a billion customers, it’s more than likely you do). Although its services are currently only available in the United States and Canada, the company is actively pursuing opportunities worldwide. Deulloa, current vice president of RegiSTAR, states that the biggest hurdle is finding engineers fluent enough in other languages to provide the high-quality support currently offered in English. From the Fortune 500 company to the mom-and-pop shop on the corner, GmailHelp.com provides the same level of excellent customer service to all its clients, its products equally available to long-standing businesses as well as those just starting out.

Searching for the Right Plugin

GmailHelp.com has three products: a monthly membership where members can call in and speak to an engineer to get help troubleshooting problems with their account, and two subscription services (either monthly or yearly) that allow members to access helpful video-tutorial content demonstrating how to use their Google account. With all these great services, GmailHelp.com knew it needed the best plugin on the market to maintain its membership levels and access.

In shopping around, the company knew it wanted a plugin that would not only protect its gated content but be Google friendly (because it’s “location, location, location” with brick-and-mortar stores but “Google, Google, Google” for online businesses and business sites). MemberPress’s plugin allows Google’s indexing system—known as “spiders,” which visit your website every eight to ten days to check if your site is still viable and if it has new content—to see past the gates, allowing a site to be properly reindexed based on new content. That, Deulloa says, is one of the strengths of MemberPress—it protects valuable content from nonmembers but is “smart enough” to allow Google to see the protected content and index it. And if you want more traffic coming to your site, Google is where most of that traffic flows from.

Thinking Outside the Box

In addition to the all-important Google-friendliness of the plugin, GmailHelp.com wanted one that was easy to use and, more importantly, provided outstanding customer service. Deulloa believes that “to be successful, you simply need to treat people the way you want to be treated.” That’s another thing MemberPress does, he says. Blair Williams (founder of MemberPress) and his team “are always there,” always open to new ideas, and always willing to listen to their customers.

For example, GmailHelp.com wanted its users to experience a certain way of checking out on their site and consequently needed to collect certain information from customers. At the time, the plugin was incapable of running the process the way GmailHelp.com had envisioned. Rather than telling GmailHelp.com that the plugin simply didn’t work that way, MemberPress thought outside the box and came up with a solution that allowed GmailHelp.com to run their checkout process as they wanted.

Another service GmailHelp.com wanted to provide to clients was the ability to have a trial period for viewing video tutorials. Troubleshooting engineers quickly realized that many of the issues clients were calling in about could easily be solved if the client were more aware of how to use their Google account—which is exactly what the video tutorials are designed for. With MemberPress’s plugin, GmailHelp.com’s engineers can give their clients trial access to video tutorials, easily “flipping a switch,” so to speak, for a sneak peek into gated content.

Always Moving Forward

One of Deulloa’s favorite things (of many!) about MemberPress is that the company doesn’t let the plugin stagnate—it keeps things fresh and moving forward. This echoes one of Deulloa’s own mantras in running a business. He says that “what brings [him] a lot of joy is to take . . . companies that are stagnant or not getting the results they’re expecting” and help them to grow, removing barriers and hurdles, and effectively “chang[ing] their world.” And while it may seem cliché to say that’s what MemberPress does—change one membership site at a time—it’s made a huge difference in the way GmailHelp.com and John Deulloa run their business, allowing them to give their customers the best experience possible.

Lindsay Flanagan

Lindsay Flanagan is a senior editor and project and social media manager. She earned her Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing and spent over a decade working in higher education before joining the Eschler team. She and her husband are the proud parents of two brilliant daughters and make their home in Heber, Utah.

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