How To Prevent Repeat Free Trials?
Almost everyone I work with in the real estate business who offers a free trial membership to their online service is skittish or against offering free, full access trials to their service WITHOUT requiring a credit card up front. In other words, they will provide free, unrestricted access to their service for X days but the prospect must provide a credit card up front to get this trial access. Once the trial period expires they start getting charged on their credit card the regular rate for the service.
All of these online real estate service providers think if they offer the trial without a credit card requirement up front that people will find a way of cheating the system: when the free trial expires they will just sign up for another free trial and keep doing this indefinitely and never pay anything.
Yet I think loads of people who are interested in trying a given service balk at providing a credit card up front. Consequently, such prospects are lost. Losing them can be as simple as that one factor.
Software providers solved this cheating problem long ago. Unless you're a techie you won't know how to get repeat free trials with most any software. Even if you uninstall the software after the trial period ends and re-install it you still can't another free trial. So you almost never see software providers asking for a credit card up front for trying their software.
I think not requiring a credit card up front is removing a major barrier to getting conversions.
For online services I think the simplest way of blocking people from signing up for repeat free trials is identifying and recording their IP address when they signup for the free trial. You then block any subsequent free trials from that IP address. The reason I think this will work is home/office broadband providers don't regularly change the IP address of their clients. Of course there are ways of getting a new IP address, but virtually no real estate agents would even know what their IP address is, let alone how to change it.
So does anyone know of a service that will record the IP address of someone registering for a free trial on a web page and then block any attempts from that IP for signing up for repeat free trials?
All of these online real estate service providers think if they offer the trial without a credit card requirement up front that people will find a way of cheating the system: when the free trial expires they will just sign up for another free trial and keep doing this indefinitely and never pay anything.
Yet I think loads of people who are interested in trying a given service balk at providing a credit card up front. Consequently, such prospects are lost. Losing them can be as simple as that one factor.
Software providers solved this cheating problem long ago. Unless you're a techie you won't know how to get repeat free trials with most any software. Even if you uninstall the software after the trial period ends and re-install it you still can't another free trial. So you almost never see software providers asking for a credit card up front for trying their software.
I think not requiring a credit card up front is removing a major barrier to getting conversions.
For online services I think the simplest way of blocking people from signing up for repeat free trials is identifying and recording their IP address when they signup for the free trial. You then block any subsequent free trials from that IP address. The reason I think this will work is home/office broadband providers don't regularly change the IP address of their clients. Of course there are ways of getting a new IP address, but virtually no real estate agents would even know what their IP address is, let alone how to change it.
So does anyone know of a service that will record the IP address of someone registering for a free trial on a web page and then block any attempts from that IP for signing up for repeat free trials?