Should my free trial be without entering your credit card?
I have a service that I charge $29/mo, it's called Telemonetize and it is a service that allows you to charge a monthly subscription for access to your Telegram supergroup or channel.
It starts with a free trial, but you have to go through the checkout process of entering your credit card details.
Many people ask me about the free trial, although the call to action button says "Try Premium for free for 14 days"
Do you think I should remove the card-details-phase since my free trial signups are low? Or will I attract users that have no intention of staying?
I feel I should remove it, what do you think?
Edit: After all the great feedback, I decided and made free trials start without entering credit card information for now. I will compare the results in about a month and go from there
I'll go one step further and offer $1 -$2 trial. (Not free)
My logic is if one is not willing to spend dollar to try out your software for half a month, they probably aren't going to convert into a paying customer.
Dis I like!
For now I removed the card details as a whole to test if it is better than before.
If conversion is bad, this will be my next move
This is an interesting approach. I've been thinking about it ever since I saw how Ahrefs handle their trials. They have a "Start trial for $7" CTA.
I totally agree with this comment.
But also, you need to make a A/B test in order to be more precise.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
same
I prefer Credit Card required upfront. If a customer is willing to add their card upfront, it shows a higher level of commitment which means your software really solves a problem for them. If you don't require a cc, you may get more free trials but most of them will be useless.
But it always depends on your type of customers and price point, i think in your case it's also ok without Credit Card upfront. If they really like your service and wanna make money with a telegram channel, they will come back and pay.
Or just do a little A/B test: 1 month without cc, 1 month with cc upfront.
That's EXACTLY how I thought about it when I built it!
Now I am going to try a month without credit card details and compare the results :)
great! let us know :)
Yes.
I don't know you.
I don't know how good (or shit) your product is.
You have a good copy and got me interested but it doesn't mean I'll like/use your product.
I want to test it first. Then we'll see.
For me the 'free trial but you have to enter your CC' = 'it's free but I'll still try to charge you discreetly for that service that you used once or twice and forget about.'
A much stronger signal is 'I tried it. I loved it. Where do I put my CC infos?'
As a customer, I would agree with that. If you build something your customers need and like, they will be more than happy to pay for it (at the right price) after they had the chance to check what you and your product are all about.
We tried it with Plutio.com and the conversion rate dropped.
many will not have their cards handy and that will simply prevent them from singing up and eventually losing them as a lead.
some work for teams, and they don't have easy access to the company card.
Good point. Thanks :)
This is usually a question only an A/B test can answer, but in your case I think the issue is not the "free trial signups", I think it's more of an overall marketing issue, your pipeline/funnel is not big enough to see the results of your marketing
How about you create a short email course (5-7 lessons) for people that own telegram channels/groups to show them how to grow and then monetize their channels? Maybe some education is lacking in this space.
That way you are creating a pipeline of prospects and also priming them to use your service for when they consider charging for their groups.
Love your feedback, honestly, I will keep this very close in mind, I think I will do this very soon :)
10/10
Good luck and let me know how it works for you. Will tweet about it if you need me to. :)
Asking the card details at the free trial will hurt the conversion rate, u took a good decision to go process trial without asking a credit card info.
Think this as your sales funnel: If you ask for a credit card, you'll have a bigger gap between "landing page" to "registered user", but if you don't ask it, you'll have a bigger gap in "registered user" to "paying user".
As others have suggested, you should ab test this (maybe using easyabtest.com/?ab=ih shameless plug).
But my point of view is that when you get customer to do something very small (hey, do you want to take this quick survey), you'll be in better grounds to take them to next level too (seems like you match our target group. Would you like to get a huge discount from product X that may interest you?).
Telemonetize does take some steps to setup, right? That's a non-zero investment from the user too. I would test a hypothesis where you order the steps you want the person to take from smallest to biggest.
So instead of:
You'd try to keep the steps as small as possible:
Notice the difference? You might end up having a longer funnel, but if the funnel steps are smaller, you should get more out in the end.
I really like your train of thought here, this is the direction I am probably heading in. Thank you very much this was truly helpful and thought-provoking!