Free Trial or Pay Up Front? My Experience!
In mid-April 2020 I gave new members to my language community a one-week free trial. This increased my workload a lot - more new members, a lot of queries and questions and following up. After a couple of weeks I ended the trial.
In total 41 people started the trial with 15 people becoming members, giving me a conversation rate of 37%.
Over the timeframe of 15 days a similar number of members ended up paying compared to pre-trial, and the workload didn’t justify it.
Instead, I switched to a pay-up-front model, but the member can get their money back within 7 days if they don't like it. I use this model to this day, and it is now totally self-serve.
I might still switch back to the trial one day.
Has anyone else tried both? What has your experience been?
I'll throw in my experience here doing something similar for Metronome - a podcast landing page service. The short, 1-minute version of it:
So this is about a 10% effective conversion rate: 3 out of 36 signups became active users who I can effectively learn from to continue improving Metronome.
The key lessons, at least for me:
Thanks for sharing.
It's a good point about the types of users it may attract. I've just started a "free lifetime membership" experiment myself for the first cohort of a different group. It will be interesting to see how engaged they are in a month.
I think it's worth running an Earlybird experiment, as you have done, at the start. You may not gain a huge amount, but I really think there is little to loose.
Further down the line though trial or free users can become burdensome.
Pricing is difficult as I am finding out!
You have lovely website BTW!
@mags Thank you for visiting, and best of luck in your journey!
thanks, you too!