Thoughts on Limited Access Trial Memberships
 

About a month ago, we took trial memberships out of our membership options, and its actually worked out better for us. We don't get nearly as many cancellations. We want to bring trial memberships back, but we don't want to give away everything we have, and just have the members download everything and cancel the next day. Its doable with a broadband connection, and anyone with half a brain would do just that.

Is giving trial members access to one full video scene from each of our 4 exclusive sites enough to keep people from charging back? We do want to run an honest business, and I think limited access for trial members is the way to go, if its done right.. I'm just not sure how much to give. I do remember some discussion at the traffic panel at Internext, and a lot of people thought these types of memberships were dishonest. Our sites do have more content now then they did a month ago, and within the next month we'll have 2 more sites in our main members section, and we also use a couple plugin feeds from similar sites, so perhaps its worth testing the waters on this again without limited trials. Can anyone share their experiences in this?

Heard good things about limited trials.

Many of the larger pps programs use them too, and they do boost the trial to full ratio especially if you market the full join in the limited trial area and also show good content .. not just stuff seen all over the place.

I think if you advertised it as a full access trial or unrestricted trial etc that is dishonest, but overall I think its a good move. Thing is that trial to full joins running at 20% (as many programs are especially on tgp traffic) ... that just doesn't make a trial worth offering.

We offer full trials as an option for that harder to convert traffic, but its amazing that most affiliates go for the trial first even though their traffic is top notch and they could probably convert a full price join with little or no ratio dropoff.

IMO all trials should be limited access :)

One of the larger sponsors kept track of things for a while serverside and a pretty good percentage of people cancelled their trial before they even entered the website. I call those types habitual trialers. They will never sign up to a website for an entire month and all they want to do is get a cheap trial, cancel it, use a download accellerator to grab as much contet as possible and then move on to the next site. That segment of surfers you will never convert and they will complain if they do not have full access....but who cares about them anyways? They will never convert and chances are you are paying a webmaster for a join that never converts so good riddance to the surfer.

From my experience a small percentage will feel cheated even if you do not claim they get unlimited/unrestricted access. Some surfers have it in their heads that trials should be just like a full membership, just only a shorter period of time.

I think it would be great if there were no free trials, no unlimited access trials and a whole lot less free porn available on the Internet. The chances of all of that happening though are nil.

ya i agree to a point, I'm just worried about chargebacks.