Q for paysite owners about trials
 

Just curious and wanted to ask paysite owners: how much of your income is trial sign ups? I mean, how much do you made of those who only sign up for 1-2-3-5 day trials and than cancel.
Would you ever give truly free access to your site if there's chance that surfer can sign up for monthly membership.
I guess that nice ammount of trials can add up to nice summ each month.

Bump for a great biz-related thread. I wonder how popular an ebook on this topic (written by an ex revshare program owner) would be...

With our programs, probably 70% of trials sign up & leave BUT come back a fortnight for our new updates.

my program www.AmateuwrDough.com doesn't offer trials at this point, since I split the money with the models. But in other sites I run that are outside the program, I make a nice chunk just from the original sales, I'd say about 30% of the total income.

I think offering trials is not the right way to get a sale.

The public side or outside of your paysite should have all you need to entice someone into signing up for a membership. This can be done with a tour or some samples of what's inside. If they like what they see and want to see more they can pay the full price to see it all inside.

If you give them access to everything inside as a trial membership at a discount price you've given them the opportunity to see it all for far less than if they HAD to pay full price.

5 day trial for $3.95 or 30 days membership for $29.95

If their only choice was a full membership you would get top dollar but by giving them the trial offer they can see what they want and download the rest for later for a fraction of the price.

Free trials, daily updates, promo content that shows it all. Everyone raised the bar in an effort to lure members but it's got to the point where they don't need to even pay for it anymore.

I'm not speaking from experience it's just what makes sense to me. Perhaps others can speak up as to how trials have been beneficial to them.

In the end it's all about A/B testing... you may be able to get a general idea of how well they would perform for you based on other similar sites however all traffic is different, all sites are different, etc... so the only REAL way to know for sure is to do some A/B testing.

If your site doesn't have the retention power than trial signups can really bite you in the rear. It seems like people expect at least a certain amount of updates a week to stay through the trial period, and it has a direct correlation to those customers who stick around.

MRPW used to offer trials - $3.95 for 5 days - and while we did get signups we found that trials really affected membership sales. When we stopped offering them our memberships went up 30%.

I think it totally depends on the kind of paysite you're running: a 'emga-site' with gigs of content? A 'solo girl' site? A niche site? etc etc. People who join one kind of paysite won't necassarily join another type, and so on. Price points are a factor, too: what are you charging? $24.95? $19.95? $29.95? So how much should you charge for a trial then? $1? $2? And for what length of time? 1 day? 2 days? 4 days?

Many factors. LOL A-B testing is great but when it comes to trials and pricing I think you can OVER A-B test. How? If a surfer comes to your paysite and is thinking about joining, and he bookmarks your site and returns four or five times over the next couple weeks, and then sees all diff kinds of pricing and trials....you see what I mean.

But here's my overall view of "trials": The natural tendency for an industry facing either stiff competition (heh) or a shrinking customer base is to lower prices, give away tons of shit for free, panic.

DON'T PANIC!!!!!!

Keep your prices (relatively) stable and high. Why, for God's sake? Because the moment you lower prices, give shit away, offer trials, discount your shit - you are sending ONE CLEAR MESSAGE to your surfers:

"My shit USED to be worth X but now it's worth LESS, or not much at all..." So why pay for it? Why not just take it from a tube or torrent site?

So my attitude is: If I'm gonna be the last buggy-whip salesman than my fucking buggy-whip is gonna be like $2000. LOL

70% of 3 isn't really enough data to work with.