How to Offer Free Trial Membership & Subscription Plans in WordPress

Offering free trial membership and subscription plans is one of the most popular customer acquisition strategies for membership sites.

By offering free trials, you can encourage more people to try out your subscription plan and give them a glimpse of what they can expect to get from the premium subscription plan. It also gives them a sense of security and helps build brand trust.

In this post, we’ll show you how to offer free trial membership and subscription plans in WordPress.

Why Offer Subscriptions With Free Trials?

Before we begin creating a free trial subscription in WordPress, it’s important to understand why you might want to offer subscriptions with free trials in the first place.

Here are some of the main reasons why you should consider it:

• Encourage more subscriptions. Everyone likes free stuff. If you offer a free trial with your subscription plan, you will receive more subscriptions. This also encourages more users to renew their subscriptions after the free trial ends.

• Make it easier for users to trust your brand. By giving customers a feel for what your subscription plan includes, you make it easier for them to trust your content and your brand. This can help you generate more sales and encourage new users to subscribe to your membership plans.

• Improve customer retention. Once users see how your membership subscription plan works and the content they get in exchange for their money, there’s a high chance more people will be willing to renew their subscription and become paying customers. This is a great way to improve customer retention while maximizing subscriptions on your membership site.

Put simply, it’s a great idea to offer free trials for the membership and subscription offers you create. For instance, you can offer a 7-day free trial with your membership plan or offer one month free when users first subscribe to any membership plan. This way, you can maximize subscriptions, build your email list, and generate more revenue for your business in the long run.

Best Practices for Creating a Free Trial Membership

Done right, offering a free trial for membership or subscription plans can help you grow your bottom line.

Let’s dive deeper into best practices that you should follow when creating the perfect free trial membership or subscription plan:

• Deliver value. One of the most important parts of offering a free trial is to ensure you’re delivering value. Just because you’re offering something free doesn’t mean you should offer lower-quality content. Instead, the higher quality content you offer, the more likely you will receive more subscription renewal requests after the free trial period ends.

• Don’t give too much for free. While it’s important to deliver value when creating subscriptions with free trials, it’s equally important not to give too much away for free. For example, you don’t want to offer a 3 months free trial where subscribers can access a sizeable portion of the main content you have to offer. Ideally, you want to limit the time customers spend going through premium content for free, so it still keeps them interested in your content and encourages them to subscribe again.

• Charge a one-time sign-up fee. Charging a one-time sign-up fee is also important if you don’t want trolls and hackers trying to access your subscription plan. This sets apart the trolls from genuinely interested users who’re looking to test your premium content to see if it’s right for them or not.

• Think long-term. If you’re still worried about giving away premium content for free, you should take into consideration some long-term benefits such as better customer retention, brand growth, and a more satisfied subscriber base. While it may not benefit your business as much in the short term, it’s certainly an effective way to grow your brand’s outreach in the long run and helps enhance customer satisfaction.

While taking into consideration some valuable tips on how to create a free trial, it’s also important to choose the right membership plugin that lets you do this. We recommend using the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin as it comes with all the necessary features you need to create the perfect free trial subscription.

Introducing Paid Member Subscriptions

The Paid Member Subscriptions plugin offers an all-in-one solution for creating and managing custom subscription plans for your WordPress membership site.

It’s very easy to use and gives you all the tools you need to create a successful membership site. It lets you create custom subscription plans and restrict content based on the user’s subscription plan. You have extensive content restriction options that let you revoke unauthorized user access from posts, pages, or categories on your WordPress site.

How to Create Free Trial Membership & Subscription Plans in WordPress

Here, we’ll show you how to create free trial membership and subscription plans in WordPress using the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin.

Once you have a solid membership site strategy in mind, you can follow the steps outlined below to create either a free trial membership or a subscription plan. For this, you’ll need a WordPress site as well as the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin to create subscriptions with free trials.

Step #1: Get the Paid Member Subscriptions Plugin

Start off by getting the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin and installing it on your WordPress site. Once you install the plugin on your site, navigate to Paid Member Subscriptions → Register Version to enter your license key provided to you at the time of purchase.

Click on the Save Changes button to continue.

Step #2: Create a Subscription Plan

Now, navigate to Paid Member Subscriptions → Subscription Plans and click on the Add New button.

After giving your subscription plan a new name and description, set the total duration of your subscription plan using the Duration field. Next, enter a price for your subscription plan using the Price text field. You can also set the Sign-up Fee field to charge users a small fee, so it helps keep away trolls and spam from signing up for the free trial.

Step #3: Set Up The Free Trial

With the basics out of the way, we can set up the free trial using the Free Trial field.

According to your strategy, you can set an exact amount of time before users will be charged for their subscription plan when subscribing to it for the first time. For instance, you can offer a 7-day free trial for users to test out the subscription plan before they have to pay the monthly subscription fee.

In addition to this, using the Renewal dropdown menu, you can give users the option to automatically renew their subscription once the free trial period ends.

Once you’re done, make sure to click on the Save Subscription button to continue.

Step #4: Create a Registration Page

With a free trial subscription in place, you need to create a new registration page that lets users sign up for the free trial subscription. To do this, navigate to Pages → Add New from the WordPress admin panel to create a new page.

Set page details and paste the following shortcode in the Shortcode block: [pms-register].

Click on the Publish button to continue.

Step #4: Let Users Sign-up for Your Subscription Free Trial

Users can now enter all their details on the membership registration page you just created and subscribe to the free trial subscription plan.

Users can also tick the Automatically renew subscription checkbox to renew their subscription automatically after the free trial period ends or after every month.

Conclusion

Offering free trial membership and subscription plans in WordPress is a great way to encourage more subscriptions and maximize registrations. It’s perfect for letting users “test drive” your content and subscription plan before they fully commit to it.

In addition to this, it also makes it easier for new users to trust your brand. They can test out your subscription plan with a free trial before they start paying you money. As a result, you’re more likely to gain new subscriptions and generate more recurring revenue for your business.

Ready to start offering free trial membership and subscription plans in WordPress? Get Paid Member Subscriptions today!

Do you still have questions about offering a free trial with your memberships or subscriptions? Ask them in the comments section below!