Trial Memberships?

I was wondering what everyone thinks about offering cheap trial memberships like 2.95 for 3 days or 6.96 for 7 days? I have observed that even the allegedly best sites “corbinfisher.com “ at recurring memberships don’t really offer that option anymore. Is this whole cheap trial thing a keen to the check fiasco in that people are just taking advantage of it to get what they want and then move on? I really am thinking about removing my trials all together and have a pricing structure similar to corbin’s and many others

As a consumer, I think they are a good idea to give someone a really good idea of what they will find on your site and help them choose whether to buy a full membership. Hookup sites like Manhunt and Sex4HotMen do well with those, from what I hear. Anyone else care to weigh in?

I am beginning to believe to many people really don’t want to be real members they just want to get off fast and cheap. The only reason to offer trials it to keep members, not have a revolving door. If it was true that all people need to do was see how good your site is and they would become members other webmasters would be offering free or .99$ 3 day trials, but this is not the case they are doing the opposite, and offering really high trials like 19.95 for 7 days and monthly memberships at around 24.95. I think a few years ago most webmasters did offer these cheap trials but now days things have really changed, hell even badpuppy dose not offer a cheap 3 or 7 day trial in comparison to their monthly rate. I just wounded if people keep being so fickle how long before this will really begin to effect the size and quality of the sites they can join. :vanish:

I had a site for a small while and I offered a trial. I think 80% of the people who signed up for the trial cancelled right after signing up.
And I had a lot of content too, for a very small price, but they just went inpo cancelled right away, and downloaded everything.

Today, if I was just promoting it myself I wouldnt offer a trial, Id just offer the monthly membership.

If you have affiliates then I think you have to offer a trial because the affiliates want to see there making some kind of money, even if its just a few bucks.

Ya I think so too, it really dose not matter how much you offer the trial members 80% plan to cancel ASAP even before they join. I would really rather have 1 real member than 5 trial members any day. Hell I look to see what Lee’s condom charges but without filling out a forum first he dose not display it, but I am willing to bet he dose not have a cheap trial as well. For allot of the same reasons. Seriously if this kind of thinking keeps up with members their are going to be allot more really small sites, with only some ABEN feeds and a few pics and videos on the side.

I had asked Lisa at badpuppy about trial memberships when we wer going to try it a while back, she said they had tried ti but found that people would come in on a tril, suck as much as they possibly could down to a hard drive then cancel. so they basically got more bandwith usage and less membership money from them.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by collegeboyslive

I had asked Lisa at badpuppy about trial memberships when we wer going to try it a while back, she said they had tried ti but found that people would come in on a tril, suck as much as they possibly could down to a hard drive then cancel. so they basically got more bandwith usage and less membership money from them.

---

Ya that is my thinking as well, to bad I had to find out that on my own :( Now I am thinking about making a really cheap, really small site for the dead beats that will not allow any downloads at all. I will see I guess how that goes, anyone tried making a similarly small site?

God sometimes I wish I had a twin, all this work is to much for just one person. :hmmph:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by maxpower

Ya I think so too, it really dose not matter how much you offer the trial members 80% plan to cancel ASAP even before they join. I would really rather have 1 real member than 5 trial members any day. Hell I look to see what Lee’s condom charges but without filling out a forum first he dose not display it, but I am willing to bet he dose not have a cheap trial as well. For allot of the same reasons. Seriously if this kind of thinking keeps up with members their are going to be allot more really small sites, with only some ABEN feeds and a few pics and videos on the side.

---

We have 2 price points on Condom Cash, one month at $29.95 which the affiliate makes 50% of (unless we are running a promotion like this months) or, $89.95 for 3 months access and again, the affiliate makes 50% of that.

Im not a big fan of trials for the reason already stated, surfer join for $2.95 or whatever and immediately cancel but rip all of the content from inside the site.

Regards,

Lee

sites with truly excellent member areas often do okay with trials. by truly excellent, i mean sites that update regularly and have plenty of content in their niche. okay means 30 - 35% conversion. i haven't seen trials do over 40% conversion in quite a while except on good microniche sites.

i've found regular easy-to-find updates are key to converting trials. plugins do not help with trial to monthly conversion as most of your members have joined other sites before and have seen the same content in the same pages with the same logos.

one other way that trials can work well is if you have limited trials with an automatic upsell to full membership. naughtyamerica was doing 51% trial to membership for us using a limited trial.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by basschick

sites with truly excellent member areas often do okay with trials. by truly excellent, i mean sites that update regularly and have plenty of content in their niche. okay means 30 - 35% conversion. i haven't seen trials do over 40% conversion in quite a while except on good microniche sites.

i've found regular easy-to-find updates are key to converting trials. plugins do not help with trial to monthly conversion as most of your members have joined other sites before and have seen the same content in the same pages with the same logos.

one other way that trials can work well is if you have limited trials with an automatic upsell to full membership. naughtyamerica was doing 51% trial to membership for us using a limited trial.

---

Ya my trial was doing about 30% I jumped it up to 14.95 for 7 days and started promotion my monthly membership of 24.95 more prominently. I will give it a week and see how this works, if these cheap trials are going to have such a big over turn I think I am going to make a new site to take advantage of that.

our reps at epoch and ccbill tell me those more expensive trials lead to chargebacks, so you might wanna watch out for that. we did the most sales with the $1.95 and $2.95 prices - this did especially well with search engine traffic.

but higher priced trials - anything over $4.95 - sold less than 5% more than full month memberships for us so we made a lot more money dropping the trials.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by basschick

our reps at epoch and ccbill tell me those more expensive trials lead to chargebacks, so you might wanna watch out for that. we did the most sales with the $1.95 and $2.95 prices - this did especially well with search engine traffic.

but higher priced trials - anything over $4.95 - sold less than 5% more than full month memberships for us so we made a lot more money dropping the trials.

---

I have only had like 4 chargebacks that were not checks, and I think as I remember they said something about credit card fraud was the problem with all of that, so I am sure I will be able to spot any new problems. What do you think about me totally drooping my 14.95 7 trial and offering only 2 options, 19.95 recurring, and 29.95 non recurring instead?

i don't know your site, but i would think $24.95 for a recurring month and $54.95 for 3 months would be good. and maybe $29.95 for non recurring if you want to offer a 1 month non recurring.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by basschick

i don't know your site, but i would think $24.95 for a recurring month and $54.95 for 3 months would be good. and maybe $29.95 for non recurring if you want to offer a 1 month non recurring.

---

Well what you listed is my current price structure, Exp. the 7 day pass that is, I think I might experiment a bit with it over the next few weeks, and just see what happens Thax.

the problem is that most people will go for the cheaper option. take it away and you'll see big differences.

in my work as a consultant, we've often removed the trial and seen the site owner's income go up 50% or even 100% without any other changes.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by maxpower

Well what you listed is my current price structure, Exp. the 7 day pass that is, I think I might experiment a bit with it over the next few weeks, and just see what happens Thax.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by basschick

the problem is that most people will go for the cheaper option. take it away and you'll see big differences.

in my work as a consultant, we've often removed the trial and seen the site owner's income go up 50% or even 100% without any other changes.

---

Ya this might just be a coincidence but my sales are doing well the few hours after I have changed it, I will have to wait and see how the week works out “keeping in mind its the end of the month” , but so far I am happy, I wish I never offered a cheap trial at all. If I can really keep allot more members I really might lower my monthly price to 19.95 to be lower than most sites, after all I really don’t have that many affiliates yet so in a way with out paying them I will still end up ahead, but we will have to see how that works out.

we used to have trials on the hunkmoney sites ($2.95 for 3 days). When we removed them, there was a decline in signups by about 20% but the strange thing was that the average member ended up staying a lot longer, we saw our 2nd month rebills skyrocket. Plus chargebacks went down and refunds all but disappeared too (most chargebacks / refunds were people not cancelling before the trial ended then whinging when they got hit with a full membership). So even though there was a dip in sales the overall result was much more profit for both us and our affiliates. I urge all paysites to drop trials, there really is no use catering to that market and if all sites dropped them then overall the industry would be much more stable and profitable.

cheers,
Luke

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by maxpower

Ya this might just be a coincidence but my sales are doing well the few hours after I have changed it, I will have to wait and see how the week works out “keeping in mind its the end of the month” , but so far I am happy, I wish I never offered a cheap trial at all. If I can really keep allot more members I really might lower my monthly price to 19.95 to be lower than most sites, after all I really don’t have that many affiliates yet so in a way with out paying them I will still end up ahead, but we will have to see how that works out.

---

so why not post the URL to your affiliate program so some here can perhaps sign up? Might help improve your ratios, after all everyone here is looking for added income...:coffee:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Chilihost

we used to have trials on the hunkmoney sites ($2.95 for 3 days). When we removed them, there was a decline in signups by about 20% but the strange thing was that the average member ended up staying a lot longer, we saw our 2nd month rebills skyrocket. Plus chargebacks went down and refunds all but disappeared too (most chargebacks / refunds were people not cancelling before the trial ended then whinging when they got hit with a full membership). So even though there was a dip in sales the overall result was much more profit for both us and our affiliates. I urge all paysites to drop trials, there really is no use catering to that market and if all sites dropped them then overall the industry would be much more stable and profitable.

cheers,
Luke

---

Really this is weird but my sales are up after doing that, I don’t think I will be adding trials ever again. The weirdest thing is that what sales are really up now, its my most expensive non recurring memberships, that are 10$ more than the recurring one. It seems now that I have wasted thousands of $ on these revolving door trial memberships.

I believe strongly in the theory of "perceived value". If you offer a trial at $2.95 or $3.95 your customer is going to perceive that to be the value of your site.

We tried trial memberships years ago and dropped them within 60 days. Just recently we increased our monthly recurring from $19.95 to $24.95 and memberships are up. It's all in perceived value when getting them to join the first time. After that, retention is in the content and adding new content daily or weekly.

Years ago when I had a company producing and distributing tranportaton safety videos, we had a 90 minute training video that sold for $49.95. It was a dog of a seller. We broke it down into three 30 minutes tapes, took the price to $349.95 and it sold like hot cakes. Perceived value....go figure.

Bill

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hdkbill

I believe strongly in the theory of "perceived value". If you offer a trial at $2.95 or $3.95 your customer is going to perceive that to be the value of your site.

We tried trial memberships years ago and dropped them within 60 days. Just recently we increased our monthly recurring from $19.95 to $24.95 and memberships are up. It's all in perceived value when getting them to join the first time. After that, retention is in the content and adding new content daily or weekly.

Years ago when I had a company producing and distributing tranportaton safety videos, we had a 90 minute training video that sold for $49.95. It was a dog of a seller. We broke it down into three 30 minutes tapes, took the price to $349.95 and it sold like hot cakes. Perceived value....go figure.

Bill

---

That’s really about the most interesting and insightful comments I have ever seen on this board. My current monthly membership is at 19.95 and nonrecurring at 29.95 to try to keep more active members, I have only had this new pricing in place for a few weeks so the jury is still out on it for me. After 2 months and I am able to get a better picture of how this will work-out I will try to raise the price to see how it and if it will effect sales and retention. I totally do agree that perception is what matters most to viewers.

I think the only way for a trial to truly work is to offer a "glass wall" trial. Offer a 3-day trial for $4.95, or whatever, but only give the surfer limited access. Let's say you have 100 galleries. Give the trial surfer access to 10 galleries, but let them see through a "glass wall" all of the other stuff they're missing by not having a full membership. Perhaps all the thumbnails they can't access are greyed out or maybe you tease them with super hot preview clips.

Workin' Men Movies used to offer a trial and it sucked. I sold more of those than anything and few of them rebilled. We convince the site owner to remove it and sales skyrocketed, so did rebills.

If you give away the farm for $4.95, why should the surfer pay you $24.95.

Cheers
Michael

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dzinerbear

I think the only way for a trial to truly work is to offer a "glass wall" trial. Offer a 3-day trial for $4.95, or whatever, but only give the surfer limited access. Let's say you have 100 galleries. Give the trial surfer access to 10 galleries, but let them see through a "glass wall" all of the other stuff they're missing by not having a full membership. Perhaps all the thumbnails they can't access are greyed out or maybe you tease them with super hot preview clips.

Workin' Men Movies used to offer a trial and it sucked. I sold more of those than anything and few of them rebilled. We convince the site owner to remove it and sales skyrocketed, so did rebills.

If you give away the farm for $4.95, why should the surfer pay you $24.95.

Cheers
Michael

---

That is true, what I have observed from all this is that trials are a totally waist of time and like hdkbill and you said it creates an atmosphere of perceived worthlessness. I like your idea about offering limited access but, the weird thing is that when I dropped the trials my sale did not go down in fact they are up a bit even with only more expensive options only. Previously I would have never thought this would be a fact and, that most people would be looking for a bargain “Hell that’s still why I only charge 19.95 for monthly recurring memberships” but as I am learning more about this from my own experimenting if you say something is worth more than it is people will also believe this it true. I am still not 100% sure how far I can take this, but one thing is for sure I will never use trials again.