$1 Trial Offers - Are the conversions good?

Anthony, I had the same question and was thinking about doing a 3 days $1 trial for a clickbank product. I thought that I'd get way more conversions, and even if a lot of people did cancel the rebill, I'd still have more people who bought it in the end anyway.

Now, the 2 issues I have with this is:

-I plan to sell my product on clickbank and I think clickbank only allows a 7 days trial

-I don't want professional refunders to spend $1 to get it and then share it all over the web, since it's a high end product.

So I really don't know. But truth to be told a 30 days trial can be good but for IMers like us it's a little too long, at least that's my opinion. It's ideal for software companies that know that after the 30 days the company trying the product will probably order thousands of licenses, so they're willing to wait that much, but for us, I think 7 days is enough. Or 30 days trial if you actually ship the product, which in that case would lower the number of refunds cause not many people are willing to send back your product to get their money back, most are too lazy to do it.

Has anyone had a good experience with selling a digital product with a free trial?


Thanks

You're not opening yourself up to any trouble if...

You remind them their 30 day trial is about up and they'll soon be charged. And of course you'll include a teaser about an unannounced bonus, updated content, etc. that makes it worth their while to continue.

Oh, and if you're not a prick and refund someone if they forget and call you the day after their rebill hits.

Not everyone is trying to steal your product. And theft is, in a way, a cost of doing business. Sure, do what you can to minimize it, but not at the expense of the decent folks who make up the majority of consumers.

If you watch your metrics, you'll know if a free trial offer is the way to go or not. Number of refund requests is only relevant when compared to, sales volume, number of customers acquired, lifetime value of a customer, etc. That is, of course, unless you want your righteous side to cannibalize your entire business just to teach a few thieves a lesson.

Before I used PayPal I had my own merchant account with a third party processor. The way I did it was call it a free trial, but when they are checking out tell them that the system will check to see if £1 exists in the account. I would then set a pre-auth for £1. This would lock £1 in their account and look like a debit but in 10 days or so the pre-auth would clear and the £1 return to the account so it was really a free trial.

Once I did a pre-auth it gave me a transaction reference so I could debit the card for whatever I like whenever I like, so I would have the next payment auto scheduled for whenever the trial ended.

PayPal is a lot easier for people to cancel the trial as they dont have to contact you, they just have to login and click a button, but I am hoping it will increase my signup rate as it is well known and people feel safe with it. I have only recently switched so I don't know yet.

No worries, just be careful how you pitch it. Remember to sell the products benefits and use the free trial as a close. From experience I know if you sell the free trial too hard you end up with higher drop out rate and people getting frustrated that they have to give credit card details for somehting that is "free".

Took me several months to get the right wording. Along the lines of saying: for people who are serious about improving <benefit> you will give no holds barred full access to £xxxx worth of content with no risk whatsoever if they decide to cancel within the 7 days.

I found I needed to soften them slightly to the idea that at the end there will be a payment without revealing it entirely before they hit the checkout.