Offering users a free trial of your membership is a very effective way to increase your sales…
And engineer what Jay Abraham refers to as “risk reversal”…
Meaning you can prove that your membership delivers on your promises without any risk to the end user.
Offering a trial can move someone from feeling like they're not quite ready to sign up to your membership…
To taking a test drive of your site…
It gets them over the hurdle of signing up and into the habit of logging into your website, consuming your content, and getting exposure to the quality and value of your membership.
Sounds good doesn't?…
Especially when there's no risk for them!
Once they're engaging in your site, it’s often easier to convert them to paying members.
So we’ve covered the basics of trial periods and risk reversal before…
But now it's time to share more advanced tips and tactics for offering an effective membership trial that not only attracts more people to your site…
But makes them want to stick around as paying members once the trial period is over.
So let's dive in…
Coordinate and align your onboarding process with your trial period
First thing's first…
Every membership site needs to have a good onboarding process…
This will help welcome your members in the right way and get them off to the best possible start inside your site.
Give your members the welcome they deserve…
Assuming you're already onboarding your members…
(If you're not then you really need to get on top of that…)
Then the first thing to do when it comes to trial members is to ensure that each step of your onboarding process is fully aligned and timed with the period you're offering your membership trial.
This could be anything from 7 days up to 30 days…
So if your membership trial period is 14 days, you should make sure that in you're onboarding sequence you're showcasing your membership in it's best possible light during that time…
That everything you want to say and all the actions you want members to take are being encouraged via support emails…
Essentially you want to put your best foot forward so when it comes to the end of the trial period, your new members are as best informed as they can be.
Here's how to do that…
- Don't hold back on highlighting key features or recommended content
- Have specific activities that are centred around the end of the trial period, such as automations that remind people how much time is left on their trial and that they need to act if they want to continue to access your site
- Be transparent with billing. If you automatically bill trialists at the end of their trial, you need to make it crystal clear that they need to cancel if they don’t want to be charged. Taking $50 out of someone’s bank account without them realizing it’s going to happen is a guaranteed way to burn bridges
- Be sales focused. If you bill manually and require trialists to commit to signing up, you need to make sure that as soon as the trial ends, they know exactly what action they need to take to become a full member
Speaking of automatic vs. manual billing…
Be transparent in your billing, whether it’s automatic or manual
Some membership site owners fear that automatic billing will reduce sales…
That it “tricks” people to pay for something they might not want, and that you’re going to have to deal with lots of refund requests.
This is not the case.
Don’t assume that everyone signing up for a membership trial is only looking to stick around for that free period.
You need to have confidence in your product.
Sure, there might be a few people who do that…
But 99% of the time people start a trial because they are qualified leads who have a genuine interest in your product.
There's definitely an element whereby if you're looking at a sales page and see a trial that will automatically bill you at the end of that period that there's a greater sense of risk reversal…
Versus manual billing where the member will need to take action to cancel at the end of the trial…
But you can mitigate some of these issues easily by:
- Directly addressing the question of “What if I don’t want to progress my trial?” on your checkout, sales page, and FAQs. Explain that anyone can take the site for a test run for 14 days and if you decide it’s not for you, simply cancel before the 14 days are up and you won’t be charged a penny
- Taking the approach of honesty, openness, and clear communication take the potential sting of automatic billing
- Getting creative to explain the outcomes. We’ve personally been involved in projects in which we’ve increased conversions by not just mentioning cancellations at the checkout, but by recording a GIF which shows a mouse pointer clicking on the cancel button in the membership
Consider a nominal fee for your trial
Now, a free trial is as low-risk as you can get…
However, there is an argument to be made for charging a nominal fee – as low as $1 – for your trial…
First of all it encourages a mindset shift because someone has to willingly part with their money, even if it is a single dollar…
And because they have to pay, the way they perceive your membership and what they’re signing up for changes and this can lead to much higher conversion rates.
Taking that dollar in payment also gets people’s payment details in your system and verified that they work, reducing chances of failed billing.
And on a purely technological note, almost all WordPress membership plugins need to take card details – even for free trials.
There's no way around it.
But seeing that a free trial requires credit card details can feel like a red flag to some people.
Obviously, you’re not trying to rip them off or trick them, but they won’t know or understand that!
So charging a nominal fee would mitigate this.
Just something to consider.
Signpost to future value post-trial
If you’re offering a membership trial, you need to think beyond the trial period itself…
So as it comes to a close, you should use your onboarding process to highlight the future value of your membership…
By letting people know what’s coming up…
Any new features, content, courses, training and so on…
You should always be setting that future pace.
This guy knows the future…
Doing this changes the decision as to whether someone stays on as a full member or whether they let their trial expire…
So by highlighting future value, you can:
- Influence trial members decision whether or not to convert because it creates a pain of disconnect and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
- Take it up a notch by offering one-on-one welcome calls- but make them an exclusive post-trial, post-signup feature. Let people book a date during their trial using a service like Calendly and set a buffer window of two weeks, so that they can’t book a call until after their trial is over and they’ve signed up.
Utilize countdown timers and onsite prompts
Using messages like… “You have X days left to complete this course”, or “you have X hours of access left to this” across your site to ramp up the urgency, highlight features, and also continue that push for transparency mentioned earlier.
This can be especially useful if you are using a manual billing system when offering your membership trial, because their access is quite literally going to run out.
You can still use a countdown timer for rebilling but you might want to take a softer approach…
Because you’re not pushing people towards a decision, you’re letting them know that there’s a timer on their indecision.
Whatever billing system you use, it’s important to communicate and be transparent.
Keeping your trialists onside and treating them well will do more to sell your membership than any sneaky tactic or hack.
Offer an endless trial with the freemium model
A time-limited trial gives people unrestricted access to your membership…
But what if you flipped that around and offered an unlimited trial that gives people restricted access to your site?
This is like creating a basic or entry-level tier to your membership and operating a ‘freemium’ model, where people have to upgrade to get full access…
But can go on forever with an incomplete version of your membership.
The freemium model gives users a degree of value and gets them in your ecosystem.
Once someone is in your ecosystem and inside your membership consuming the basic level of content, it becomes so much easier to prompt them to upgrade to full membership.
Copyblogger makes great use of this freemium model.
Track trial usage and behavior
What if someone signs up to your trial but doesn't actually login to make use of it?
This happens… and probably more than you realize!
And none of the steps we've outlined will matter if this is the case.
Not every person taking part in your member trial will be this enthusiastic…
A strategy to tackle this is to find a way to track whether or not people log in and actually use your membership during their trial…
And if they don't, find a way to offer it to them again.
There could be a million different reasons why someone has not logged in…
And it’s rarely going to be buyer’s remorse.
It’s more likely to be that time got away from them.
You can address this in a few ways:
- If someone hasn’t used their trial, give them the chance to restart it! Right at the end of their 14 days, send them a message that acknowledges they didn’t get the chance to use it and a button to press if they want to start that timer again
- Alternatively, you can offer them the chance to extend a few days before their trial is up – maybe around day 12 or 13
- You don’t have to re-approach them immediately, you can give it some time to let whatever interruptions there might be clear and contact them a month or so later
There are plenty of options for tracking this kind of behavior:
- Systems like Intercom can monitor member activity and identify members who aren’t logging in and automatically send emails if they haven’t logged in during their trial period
- You can create automations in Active Campaign that do the same thing, but they are a little more technical to set up
- You don’t even necessarily need software to do this – most membership plugins will show you the last login dates and you or an employee can check them off manually, sending a template email to the ones who haven’t logged in
We highly recommended changing the length of a user’s second trial, creating a separate onboarding sequence and communicating in new ways…
Even if they haven't logged in they will have received your emails and you don’t want them to feel like it’s Groundhog Day!
What’s your experience of trials?
Trials are not a silver bullet…
They're more effective for some memberships than they are for others.
You need to test all of these ideas for yourself to find out what works for you and your membership…
There's no one-size-fits-all strategy.
If you haven’t offered trials before and want to test it out at a small scale, try offering a trial period as an exclusive to your email list as a back end offer…
Maybe to webinar guests, or even as a one-time offer on-site to people checking your sales page in a 7-day period, rather than doing a full public launch.
Hopefully after reading this article you'll find that your member trials are going to far more effective and deliver better results for your membership.
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