Try before you buy
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My housemate just told me about a trial she is trying at a local gym. A friend of hers received some free week long passes so they headed out this morning for a yoga class. This gym turned out to be quite the all-in-one package, offering breakfast buffet (healthy style of course, muesli, fruit and muffins), spa, clothes dry-cleaning (perfect for the busy professional) and all the usual classes and equipment. My housemate was quite impressed, but there is a catch to all of this. The gym hasn’t told them how much it costs to actually join after the free week is over. It’s a case of try before you buy AND fall in love with the features so the choice to make a purchase is that much easier. Incidentally my housemate said if it’s $100 per week, which she expects it might be, than that’s too much, but she might go as far as $50 a week, which is still a lot of money for gym membership.
I have contemplated try before you buy specials for some of my businesses as well. Another entrepreneur once suggested to me that I head to a university, find a class full of international students, offer to have BetterEdit edit all of their work and do an empirical study to see how much of a difference our editing can make. Of course the benefits for my business are that we might convert some of the students to paying customers plus we get some great data, hopefully something along the lines of “BetterEdit services have been tested and proven to improve your grades by up to 52%” or similar. The stunt itself might make a great PR piece as well.
So now that I have you thinking about trial specials – can you think of a way to offer a try before you buy promotion for your business?
Yaro Starak
Student-Marketing Specialist
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It’s a clever idea with the gym offer – but are people locked in once they sign up after the free trial? The gym would need to find a way to recoup their losses with free trials.
It’s like risk reversal so more prospects come in to try your offer… but that will up your cost and possibly lower your conversion rate – i.e. more people coming in with the freebie mindset and no intention to buy.
Rather than going in and offering your services to students – which will lower its perceived value, why not run a “draw” to offer 10 free edits a month for new customers? …tsk. tsk. also in exchange for a testimonial and a copy of their results
People will need to sign up for it, and at the same time you’re building a newsletter list.
That’s a good point about the freebie mindset Chris and I’m sure there are variables they are testing to find the best methods comparing costs vs results vs impact on perceptions.
I’ll let you know what the deal is after I find out from my housemate after the free trial. I expect it’s like most gyms with one-visit, monthly and yearly options.
You know for some reason I’m just not interested in offering free trials for BetterEdit services, and it could be because I expect we will get a lot of once offs at a high expense since editors must be paid for their work.
I prefer to provide discounts to our current clients in exchange for them referring their friends and family to the services. This I find is a much better method because the client has already been convinced of the value of the service and is interested in using it again, hence an ongoing discount is appealing. If they can bring in at least one more paying client than the discount is certainly worthwhile from the business’ point of view. If I balance things right this method doesn’t cost any money, just reduces profit margins so the impact isn’t as costly.
Of course there is no reason why I couldn’t do both.
Were I was thinking free trials might be a good marketing technique is for web hosting especially if the sign-up and set-up process is automated or nearly automated and the billing could just kick in after 30 days.
There are many hosts out there that already do this of course but perhaps those small or part time home business web hosting resellers that read this blog might consider it as an option. Offer free hosting to your friends and family, help them get a page going (to get them excited and committed) and then once they have invested some interest you can say after a month or two they will be charged or at least ask them to try and refer a paying job to you. This allows you to demonstrate your skills/services and hopefully in the long term you will be able to leverage a network effect from all the goodwill out there regarding your hosting or web design services.
The hosting market is sooo saturated that really your only option is to go local, and the best way to start is to leverage your existing friends or family network. This is a good option for the new hosts out there that are struggling for clients and need the chance to build a testimonial portfolio.
Our first project from our Art division is ‘Art Addiction.’
We’re working on placing small, collectable cards in non-traditional places for people to take. The goal is to get people interested in buying the art. On the back of each card it has contact information and simply states, “Collect the cards you like, get the prints that fit your life.”
When people visit us online, they’ll see the range of print sizes available and how affordable it can be. So even if you couldn’t afford a $40 8×10, you have a collectable card that someone else may see and inquire about.
Brett Reagan
Creative Director
Leper’s Media Holdings
USA
Hi Brett,
Thanks for the comment. That sounds like an interesting marketing method. I’ve always been a fan of collectable cards and the idea how placing them in non-traditional places intrigues me. What sort of places are you considering?
I’d be keen to see what how well this method works for you.