Comments on: How long should your “trial” period run?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:48:00 +0000

Then there are those who want to because you have their attention. You must enter your credit card information in advance. So you can start charging if you do not give up. good gifts

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:53:00 +0000

I think this is a mistake. If you do not see the value of a week or two you are doing is wrong. Get people to price their products quickly and should be designed to appear immediately. nnCustom Table Pads

By: insert1236

insert1236 — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:40:00 +0000

It is an informative post. Who believe in other people, because you have their attention, you must enter your credit card before you can start charging if you do not quit.

By: sethlevine

sethlevine — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 15:30:00 +0000

great data frank. so for you guys there’s a serious drop off after 7 days? i have to say that’s my preferred trial period for most products…

By: Frank

Frank — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 10:07:00 +0000

I also own a software company, and we too considered a shorter trial period, but most companies balked at the idea of a 3-day trial. We have used a 7-day trail period for nearly 5 years and it has worked out well for us. We only deviate on a very strict exception basis (pronounced “if the deal is big enough”).

By: Frank

Frank — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 10:03:00 +0000

Seth, I could not agree with you more. My company offers a 1 week trial period, and as part of the trial we need to do a little work from an onboarding perspective (configuration, training, minimal data, etc) in order to create a truly valuable user experience, but it has proven to be worth the effort, as most users are hooked once they have an opportunity to see and feel a configured solution. The reality of a B2B solution like ours is that a user already has a full-time job, and they don’t have the time or inclination to focus on a trial for an extended period of time. We have been tracking the trial period usage for a little over 7 years now, and it drops off dramatically after the first week anyway. People want to see that the product does exactly what they need it to do. That can usually be done in a couple of days, so a week has proven to be plenty for our trials. As far as information that is captured, our business is a bit different, so credit card information doesn’t really apply.

By: Presci3nce

Presci3nce — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:04:00 +0000

Great question re trial length. I own a software company and we provide 7-day… I found your page because I was trying to find research regarding optimal length, i was thinking of reducing to 3-day.

By: sethlevine

sethlevine — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:03:11 +0000

great data rob â thanks for adding to the conversation!

By: hunter walk

hunter walk — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:02:55 +0000

i also found a few folks using mobile # w/ SMS confirmation as a few ways to ID uniqueness during sign-up

By: Rob Woodbridge

Rob Woodbridge — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:14:39 +0000

This is a great topic! I'll add what we've been doing at RoveIT.com

At my company we've tried it all! Our original trial period was 30 days with only a name and email requirement and when a customer would ask we would extend it indefinitely. This allowed us to really seed the market with trials (good) but made it hard to sell the product and follow-up with trial users (bad).

And so the experimenting began:
1. We dropped the trial down to 15 days and forced the user to offer up a little more information that allowed us to follow up directly once they downloaded. At the same time we added email verification — sending the trial codes to a valid email address.
2. After a while, we dropped the trial down to 7 days at the behest of sales (“we’ll close the deal faster”) which was a disaster! Downloads didn’t suffer but we certainly received our fair share of people calling for extensions.

We finally settled back on 15 days with extension requests coming directly to the sales team who would extend for days, not weeks. They key for our product (EVERY product for that matter) was that we needed to make sure the end user actually had a need to USE the product during the trial and found value in it. This is a very important and often forgotten piece to this puzzle.

Whatever you do, a process for follow-up is as important as the trial itself (as has been noted in some comments already).

Hope this helps!

Rob