S8E1 | Risks Running 30-Day Membership
Episode Description:
Sandra describes the risks and issues that come with running a 30-day membership trial.
Show notes
“If you’ve got a friend who’s offering a 30 day membership trial, please don’t let your friend do that.”
A while ago I posted on Facebook saying, “friends don’t let friends offer 30-day membership trials,” and this brought up a lot of discussion. Some people agreed, others didn’t, so I wanted to dig into the topic.
If you offer a free 30-day trial of your membership, how do you think this will make your current members, who are already loyal, paying customers, feel? It’s not fair to them, because they’ve been paying for access to your content month after month, and now someone who’s never given you a dollar gets to come in for free. So, consider that you might lose some members if you do this trial.
You might also have people who come in for 30 days, download everything, and leave. When they want more information or content from you, they could sign up for another free trial using a different username.
30 days is also a long time, and your free trial members might put off actually exploring your membership. Then they’ll have gotten nothing out of their 30 days with you, and they’ll have no reason to sign up and pay. Some people even reach out to ask to extend their free trial because they didn’t remember to log in and try it out, which is really unfair to your current members.
There’s also the option to do a paid 30-day trial where the cost is significantly lowered. Again, this can put a bad taste in your current member’s mouths.
So, what can you do instead of a 30-day trial of your membership? The sweet spot is anywhere between a 7-14 week trial, although I’ve seen some successful 3-day trials as well. This way, prospective members have a lot less time, and will feel more urgency to log in and check out the membership.
The bottom line is this: friends don’t let friends run 30-day membership trials!