Free Trial, Paid Trial or No Trials at all. - What would you do?

hitmeasap Level X⁵

1

December 12, 2016, 8:24 pm

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Free Trial, Paid Trial or No Trials at all. - What would you do?

Hey Freelancers!

I have a simple, yet very important question to ask you, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this one.

Here's the thing:
Within the nearest future (at least I hope so), I will have a product ready for sale. And I could obviously just sell the full version of it, like I first thought I would do..

But, then it hit me.. Wouldn't it be great to offer a trial?

That way, I would probably decrease the refund rate, but not only that, it also gives the potential buyers a fair chance of trying the product, before they purchase it.

However, even if I provide a trial, it would still involve time and effort from my side, so I was thinking.. - Would it be better to charge people for a trial? - And obviously just let them pay 10%-15% of the price, for a 7 day trial version or something like that.


What do you think? - What would be the best solution, for both me and my clients?


Best Regards,
hitmeasap

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TommyCarey

In all honesty, anything under a 2 week free trial is pretty pointless. I don't even like the "30 day money back guarantee" websites because half of them never honor their own words and won't refund you grrrr

Depending on your service, a 7 day free trial may not be long enough. I have a friend who set up a pretty awesome service for amazon merch and he gave out a 3 day free trial. But after you registered it took a little while to figure out out to set up your account to pull information form amazon merch in order for everything to run smoothly. I took 2 days to set everything up, and I'm familiar with Amazon Merch lol For the people who weren't familiar with it, I'm sure they burned through their free trial just setting up their accounts and they never came back after that because they were discouraged. Now my friend has a simple step by step process and video tutorials on how to easily set everything up within 15 minutes, so I'm sure his conversions are a bit better

A 7 day free trial is good, but a 14 day free trial is always better Whenever I see a 7 day free trial I think "Well, I better get to know the system pretty well and decide if I like it or not. I don't even know if I'll have enough free time within the 7 days". But when I see a 14 day free trial I think "Ok, I can work with this because I know I'll have enough time within 2 weeks to figure everything out and do my research." And I also have the feeling that a website offering a 14 day free trial isn't exactly money hungry because they want you to use their system free of charge for 2 weeks

Hopefully that makes sense

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hitmeasap

Haha yeah, it did make sense Razzy and I agree with you. More for less, is usually better in scenarios like this. And I can totally see your point with 14 days instead of 7, and 7 instead of 3 etc.

But.. What do you think about having a paid trial then?
Something like:

7 days for free.
14 days for 10% of the original price.

And perhaps even add 3 months for 50% of the original price..

And at the end, offer them the whole deal for whatever price you ask for?

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anwebservices

Depend of what kind of product we talking here. But here is my honest opinion.

Free trials surely attract more people to try your product and lead them to buy from you after trial period is ended. It's nice marketing idea and i believe it does make more sales then no trials products...

However, i decided to not offer free trials on software i sell here on Seoclerks for few reasons. Couple of main reasons are that your product could fall into hands of everyone and not everyone is honest or interested buyer. Unfortunately, there is too many hackers interested in your product later then honest buyers. They use free trial to download your product, trying to hack it and keep it for free for ever, and not just that, but also letting other people download free and hacked version of your hard work, killing your sales and reputation of your product. So... Yeah i decided to go with less sales to avoid hacker attacks as much is possible. Maybe not best decision, but that's me...

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hitmeasap

I can totally see your point here Abid, and I do agree with what you've said. It sure seems like it's a better option to decrease the risk of hackers etc, by not offering a free trial at all. - However, from my understanding, if someone actually do share your product on a blackhat forum for instance, they'll remove it from their site, if you tell them to do so. - I can't say why or anything like that, but I've seen this several times.

Someone shares a "superb product" and the author of the product replies in the thread, with some "proof", and the product is usually gone within a few minutes.

I do understand that you'll have to be active in multiple discussions and forums to find your product too, IF someone will eventually share it for free because they've hacked it.. Just to have it removed. (In case it's that easy). - But wouldn't that be worth it in the long run? - Don't you think?

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anwebservices

Well it worth it in long run, yes. However it's hard work and time consuming if you work on your own. For team work it would be easier...

Again i say, depend on which type of product we talking about. I was related to software. And if it's software, then it may be better idea to make separate software with some kind of limitations for trials, then after purchase they could get full version...

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hitmeasap

Thank you anwebservices, that's a great idea actually. I appreciate it!

You said that it could be worth it, if I had a team.. Right? - So let's say that I hire one person to do this, or in fact, split the revenue with one person for this entire project. - Do you think I could get one person to both promote this product & make sure there's no illegal shares of it in multiple blackhat forums etc, and split the revenue with that person? - Would that be a fair deal? In your opinion I mean.

It seems like a pretty decent deal in my personal opinion, but I might be biased, as it's my product.

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EliteWriter

I agree with a free trial because it gives the potential customer a little push towards making the buying decision. I think that a free trial, even if for a short period gives them the opportunity to see what it is all about, and helps them decide whether to buy it or not. It also helps to reduce the possibility of disgruntled customers and refunds, as well as improves your sales, popularity and how professional you look.

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hitmeasap

Yeah, I totally agree with you, but Abid had some great points too. About the risk of Hackers etc. So I guess it's literally like a double-edged sword somehow.. Even though I can see why it would be awesome to offer a free trial, I can still see the risks by doing that at the same time.. - And how would you be able to eliminate the risks, or in fact, decide which alternative that would bring you the best results?

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Lynne

For me personally I love free trials. I like to be able to try something before I buy it. Very often I won't bother trying something if there is no free trial available.

I am not interested in money back guarantees or a paid trial. That's just me, I like to be able to see what I am getting first.

On that note will you be having an affiliate program for your products? If that's the case then offering a free trial so marketers can try out your product in order to market it will be an awesome idea.

I never considered hackers, like the other members have spoken about. That is certainly something to consider.

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hitmeasap

Thank you Lynne, I appreciate your reply. I can totally see why you wouldn't want to pay for a trial, and I wouldn't like to offer a paid trial either actually. The only reason I had to name it in the first place, was due to the hackers for instance. I don't want this to go into the wrong hands before I've even launched it properly.. Even though it's always a risk.

Regarding the affiliate program.. Well yeah. I'd like to offer this specific thing exclusively on SEOClerks, so SEOClerks Affiliate Program will be used automatically.. And I've thought about anything between 25% and 50% affiliate commission. - That should make it easier to get "great affiliates" on board, and it should eventually pay off by quantity of sales. - I mean, there's literally no point in asking for 100% of the money, if I do something 1 time and can earn on that 1 thing for years basically. - In my opinion, I'm better off with 50% or 75% of the money, and let affiliates earn the remaining percentages by advertising my product.

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CryptoGuru

I think you should offer a trial but you have to only offer it to people who are serious about buying your product. You should require a credit card or the trial mention that nothing will be charged unless they don't cancel after 7 days. 7 days is more than enough time to test something anything more than that is not needed. The purpose of a trial is to let someone sample your product in 7 days they may be just beginning to get to know and like the product then they will have to pay. I would always recommend needing a credit card for the trial this way they are automatically charged after 7 days. The best way to sell something is to give it away for free first and if you can do that without losing to much time then its totally worth it.

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hitmeasap

Thank you jkeyz, I totally understand your point. However, let's say I'll sell this specific thing on SEOClerks. How would you do it in that case? - I can't ask for credit cards etc, on SEOClerks marketplace, so that option is not really an option on here. - Would you just go with a paid version, and within the service description let people know that they can get a test run for it, free of charge, if they go to my personal website or something like that, and input the necessary details I want from them? - On the other hand.. I don't even know if something like that would be allowed actually. - However, the most important thing, is that I want to sell the specific thing on SEOClerks and not anywhere else at all actually. It's a SEOClerks exclusive thing.

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Cristian

I never experienced paid trials and I don't recommend you go with paid trials. The whole point of a trial is to offer people the experience of your services and to get them "hooked".

So do a free trial, depends on what you are offering, 2 weeks is good enough time, notice how things are going and if anyone buys a full version. Keep in mind your service has to be good enough for you to have returning customers if they don't return and resolves all their problems in the trial period, well don't offer one at all.

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hitmeasap

Thank you Cristian. The trial would work perfectly for the product I have in mind actually. No matter if it's a free or paid trial. The clients will be able to use the product and do everything they should be able to do, and when the trial ends, I just want it to stop. So they'll have to decide if they want to buy it or not. And I have to say, most people, or all people actually, would definitely want to continue with this, if they got interested in the first place. As they'll be able to use it for a long period of time, or even for life. So they won't have to look elsewhere to get something similar.

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Corzhens

Pardon me but this is the first time that I’ve heard of a paid trial. I don’t think you should include that in your choices for I am sure no one will bite that. Anyway, the free trial would depend on the scope of usage. When we downloaded one video converter software with a free trial, we couldn’t use the output because the converted video had a text at the bottom that indicates it was converted by that software. Maybe if the result of the trial can be used then I guess that is a good trial that can probably obtain purchases.

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