Do you own a program that has gone from paid trials to no trials?
 

I've never been a fan of trials but decided to set some up based on affiliate requests. After testing this out, I find that I was correct and that trial members are the cheap bastards that I thought they were.

So.....I'm considering dropping the paid trials altogether.

Have you done this with your program and if so, how did it effect signups overall?

What about offering both and let affiliates decide which they prefer? Just a thought...
WG

Trials is cool if you have a membersarea that update at least once during the time a trialmember is member... If not - drop it!

Just my view of it

We dropped the lower priced trials, and went with a discounted second chance offer. The signup numbers dropped a bit after ditching $7.99 trials, but overall our income has risen.

The best converting sponsor I've ever used didn't offer trials Aaron.

Just good, exclusive content that surfers couldn't see somewhere else. :2 cents:

Trials, if done the right way, will make you more money.

My experience has been that you do 1/3 of the signups with no trial that you will do with trials. (less if the monthly price of the site is higher than $30)

If 1/3 of your trials convert to monthly, then you end up with the same net number of monthly members....plus you also have the $3-5 that the people paid for the trial.
Plus you have 3 times as many email addresses and 3 times as many chances to upsell in your members area.

Anyways, that was a little off topic.....dropping trials from the program shouldn't be a problem as long as you let affiliates know ahead of time in case they have ads that state the price of the site.

:2 cents:

trials suck.. Some have luck with it some dont. There are many factors involved.
We have a trial as a last ditch effort and it works ok. The 7.95 initial is high enough that we dont have to convert trials at 40% or higher to make a profit. I feel much better giving away my stuff at 7.95 after they rejected all my other pricing options rather than having the trial as the default. Fuck, if I had the trial as default i'd be doing 400 sales by 6:30 pm :)
Duke

just do exit pop-up trials, sell them to surfers who were going to leave already

true, sites like yours and single girl sites shod not have trials.

I have trials only on one site where Im desperat :)
(site was built with photogreggs content) :winkwink:

I used to offer normal trials, but several years ago I switched over to a trial offer that was 2 months for the price of 1. works out better then the typical 2 or 3 day trial because the customer is not i a big hurry to cancel before rebilled, they can take their time and forget to cancel sometimes and the affiliate makes more, the customer likes it because he thinks he is getting something cheap so it sells well.

BUT .. I do not offer this on the join page, I do not offer any trials on the join page, my goal is to sell full memberships first, then trials if they dont take the full one.

ive noticed that the only way sponsors can usually pay on trials is upsells, exit consoles, etc. simply because they usually just dont convert good enough. if you have a quality site you shouldnt have trouble only selling full memberships. i only promote quality sites and i always make more $ on revshare with full memberships.

no need to offer trials on a revshare...All it will do is piss off both the sponsor and the affiliate in the long run.

We dropped trials last year and it resulted in much higher earnings for us and our affiliates.

dropped trials and do better since then - sold a lot more "3 months for the price of 2" than ever before and even more recurring memberships. :2 cents:

When I started out over five years ago, I thought Trials seemed like a good idea, so I had a $2.95 for 3-day Trial offer on a solo model hardcore site. I thought I had pretty good sign-ups on it. In fact, most people signed up that way.

As an experiment, with my second site I did not offer a Trial, this was for a solo model softcore site. My monthly sales were much better.

With my current main site (multi-model, mixed soft and hardcore), I started with a small delta (difference) between the one-month and recurring Memberships.

Later I increased the delta. My number of sales went down for one-time, but the profit remained steady since I increased the price substantially. I did however see a significant rise in the number of recurring Memberships and this resulted in significant growth in this, the best earning area of my site.

For me, no Trials and big delta between One-Time and Recurring seems to work best.

ADG Webmaster

Damn, this thread is not only sticking to the target, but all offering many great alternatives. :)

I personally kept rasing my 3 day trial price, and still haven't seen less people signup for the trials (which is basically telling me to get rid of them). It's at $9.99 right now. I was thinking of raising it to $14.99 for the 3 days, and only popping it as they leave, but I'm kinda leaning towards the 2 months for the price of one idea.

i fucking hate offering trials

i was happy the day nscash gave affiliates the option of trial/notrial

limited trial members area seems to be working for many people

Yeah, we of course have our own opinion on it, but let the affiliate pick whether he/she/they want to have them or not. Different strokes for different folks.

Yeah, neat little set up there...

Aaron, like we briefly discussed, I think you should drop them. Bare minimum, offer it as an option to the affiliate. I would rather send traffic to a no-trial tour, especially when the site is quality exclusive content.

i do however like the scripts that let the members only see a small amount of content if they sign up for trials....then when they upgrade they get the full deal

I believe Smashbucks used to have trials, and now do not, and still do very good sales... let's see if they contribute anything to the thread...