While there are many advantages to offering customers a free trial of your service or product, there’s also a downside. So, let’s explore six pros and cons.
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Three Pros of Offering Your Customers a Free Trial
1. A Free Trial Can Lead to More Purchases
Your main reason for offering a free trial of a product or service is to get users to purchase your service or product. And it’s undoubtedly true that a free trial can lead to more purchases than you would otherwise not achieve.
As long as you have an excellent product or service, users will come to rely on it during the free trial period, and, in turn, that means they’re likely to pay to continue using the service or product once the free trial comes to an end.
An effective free trial should leave the users feeling as though they can’t return to how they were doing things before using your product or service. But in order to achieve that, you’ll need to ensure every element of your free trial is aligned with the goals of your users.
You also need to ensure that you can create a healthy conversion rate, otherwise, offering free trials may not be worth the time, effort, and money. So, take a look at these steps for improving free trial conversion rate.
2. You Can Get Free Advertising Via User Recommendations
It may cost time and money to provide a free trial, but as long as your conversion rate is high, it can be more than worth it. Furthermore, when lots of people use your service or product’s free trial and go on to purchase it, they’re sure to recommend your service or product to people they know.
Therefore, you basically get free advertising. And word-of-mouth is one of the best marketing methods available.
3. You Can Collect Useful Feedback
Businesses of all kinds should always be looking for ways to improve products and services. In turn, that enables them to sell more. To improve your products or services, you need to listen to user feedback. Offering a free trial is a fantastic opportunity for you to collect feedback from users.
Three Cons of Offering Your Customers a Free Trial
1. People May Not Use Your Free Trial
You should definitely perform market research prior to launching a free trial of a product or service to estimate how many people are likely to use your free trial. There’s always the chance that people won’t use your free trial. If that happens, you’ll have wasted both time and money.
2. It Could Not Be Worth the Time and Money
It will take time and money to roll out a free trial. Whether you’re providing a free trial on a limited-time or permanent basis, a lot of work will need to go into producing the free trial and marketing it.
If you don’t get a good conversion rate from your free trial, you could find that you spend more than you get back. So, make sure you carefully consider all your costs and utilize ways to increase your conversion rate if you’re planning to go ahead with a free trial.
3. A Proportion of Your Users Will Have No Intention of Buying Your Service or Product
There will always be some users who use your free trial to take advantage. For instance, people could sign up multiple times under different user accounts. Sometimes, competitors sign up for rival companies’ free trials to get a better understanding of their products and business models.
And speaking of competitors, you might be interested in these social media marketing tips that will help you to outperform the competition.
People who take advantage of your free trial are not necessarily a huge problem, as long as you are ready for it. So, ensure you factor users of your free trial who have no intention of buying your product or service into your financial calculations.
