The biggest problem with requiring a credit card with a free trial is that unscrupulous people also use the same tactic. Rightly or wrongly, the pattern "requires credit card for trial == scam" is etched into some people's minds. In order to overcome this, the company would have to be well known and well respected, at least within their niche.
Kill your credit card-less free trial.
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you're not the target market. If you have no credit card, it's very, very hard as a global website (i.e. not localized to the Netherlands) to accept money from you. So if that's the case, then they don't even want you as a customer, because you have no way of paying them.Giving you a free trial is then counterproductive.
It's actually really easy.... ( http://bitpay.com )
No it's not, that just moves the difficulty from merchant to client. Actually getting bitcoins is not easy, takes a long time, etc. It adds friction, support overhead, risk, latency, for very little pay-off.
We're talking about subscriptions here, so the customer would have to send bitcoins every month. He would have to first get bitcoins, then those few days later actually remember wanting to use the service, send the service the coins he paid for a few days back, wait half an hour, again. All that, for those maybe 1 out of 10K leads that would even know what bitcoin is.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#43You can make a lot of money if you bill people who are no longer interested in your product and forgot about it a month ago. Sometimes they'll pay you for years without realizing that you provide no useful or necessary service of any kind!
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#44You can make a lot of money if you bill people who are no longer interested in your product and forgot about it a month ago. Sometimes they'll pay you for years without realizing that you provide no useful or necessary service of any kind!
Maybe I'm just not ruthless enough for business, but this does not seem like a great way to make money. I'd rather make less through honest customers who like my product, then screw over those who don't.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#45To me, this more or less sounds like "I'm having trouble converting, so let's focus on the really, really, really interested users". In some occations this might be the right choice to make (the service you're providing have very low margins or it's a very complex service, so overhead from support becomes costly, or time is very limited), but in general it seems like very bad recommendation.
More likely it's your value proposition that is weak – either your customers don't understand what (value and/or service) you're providing, or your onboarding is just not good enough.
If you fail to tell your visitor what you're actually offering (before they signup) you might end up with a lot of users that sign up, just to learn what service you're actually providing. This is obviously much more likely if you're not requiring a credit card at signup. Try to have people understand WHY they're signing up before they actually do. They should be convinced that you're the right choice before entering their email.
Second: Your onboarding process is not over when the user has created their account. Guide your users. Give them examples, feedback and inspiration. Still having trouble getting started? Email them a week later and ask if you can help. Keep giving them reasons to come back and eventually convert.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#46What you're basically saying to prospective new users is this:
"I don't trust you enough to spend bandwidth and server-resources on you without getting your ID and credit card info. On the other hand, I expect you trust me with your personal identification and credit card information right off the bat."
I've had to deal with credit-card fraud in the past, so I simply don't deal with companies that do this. I suppose the question is whether or not you're saving enough on costs to offset losing clients who are cautious with their CC and ID info.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in exchange for a free trial So I pay for the trial by being spammed? What kind of logic is that? You're telling your users "buy this product to get spammed even more!". Are you sure you want your users' money? They aren't, at this point. Marketing must always be opt-in. > I actually really enjoy a good series of marketing communications from a product I'm evaluating I suspect you are in a small minority.
I suspect there are still a few users out there that consider receiving four emails in exchange for a free month of a $50/month product to be a fair exchange. Or at least not unfair enough to get this upset about. Over the years, I imagine I must have sent out something like twenty thousand of those mails for S3stat alone. Some people do indeed click the Unsubscribe link on those mails. I've never had anybody complai…
Almost everything I sign up for these days ends up sending me several emails reminding me that I have done so. Yes, I did sign up. No, I don't want to be reminded of it all the time.
It is becoming annoying enough that I avoid signing up for things in the first place, or at least give them an email address I can easily filter.
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#48For those requiring a credit card for trials, how are you tracking metrics/conversions? Since the conversion happens when the trial ends, which is an event disconnected from your customer's browsers session, none of the JavaScript/cookie-based 3rd party software will be able to be capture that event. Some do have a backend API you can call if you can identify the user (e.g., KissMetrics & MixPanel both have this), but others do not (e.g., AdWords and Optimizely).
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#49Does anyone know any good articles about trial vs. non-trial for premium subscriptions?
Re: Kill your credit card-less free trial.
#50Here's the thing: when there are a lot of services that do something similar, I sign up to the free trials of lots of them at once to evaluate them. If you require a credit card, I probably won't include your program in the initial evaluation.
So yes, if you require a credit card, you're getting fewer people with a higher likelihood of conversion, but you're also missing out on a lot of people who are doing comparisons of services. How many of those people you convert is likely to be a function of how good you are compared to the other options.
If you are offering something unique or have amazing word of mouth, this probably won't matter. If on the other hand you think your product is one of the best solutions to the problem out there, you're probably losing more customers than you want by demanding credit card details.
In the case of the OP, doing something that on the face of it anyone who needed that service could hack together a script to do roughly the same thing within a relatively short period of time, I would have thought that it would be very important to remove as many barriers to trying the thing as possible (but yes, there's no need to let the free user have access to checking more than 2 sites).