Any time somebody teaches membership sites, you always see the question come up, “Should I offer a payment plan or should I offer some kind of a trial?”
And while it seems like a lot of fun, and while it seems like you might get a lot more subscribers and customers into your funnel by offering a payment plan or a trial period, I recommend you stay away from them, for these three reasons:
You are always training your subscribers (whether you realize it or not); you are training your buyers as well; and trials just plain suck and attract the wrong kind of customer that you do NOT want to be a part of your business.
How Do You Train Your Subscribers?
Even if somebody doesn’t see everything that happens behind closed doors within your membership site; even if they have not bought a lot of things from you, they still see the way you market your stuff.
If you are always offering a payment plan, or if the reason for you offering a payment plan is because no-one is buying, you look desperate! If you are not emailing to your subscribers enough, then they get the feeling like you are not much of a marketer.
If you keep dropping the price or keep piling in more bonuses without actually marketing your product, you look like somebody who will simply pile on more “stuff” in order to get a sale; and not really marketing and not convincing people and giving real good REASONS for them to join.
And let’s say somebody does join. You are training those buyers as well. If someone is used to only paying you $1 or $5, and they have been doing it for years, it might be a little bit of a struggle to get them to the $100 or higher mark.
It might take a little bit of time – but if you can get your buyers to pay you more money to get more stuff, instead of paying you less money to get less stuff, they will be used to dedicating a larger portion of their monthly budget to getting your solutions. And that includes payment plans and membership sites.
I am totally for having a membership site where with every payment they get some new kind of concern. But too many times I see launches happen where someone is offering a product for $100, and people split it up over five payments: they pay five times but they only get one thing at the very beginning! How much sense does THAT make?
And the reason why many marketers offer payment plans like this is to claim a high number of sales. They get a lot of people to pay them $20 and then they claim that every sale was a $100 sale, when really it was only a $20 sale, and many people canceled along the way – because after all, why should somebody continue making payments if they already got the product they paid for?
Payment Plans Are Good If There Is Ongoing Content…
But they are not good if there is just a single-time delivery and you are doing it to inflate your sales numbers.
And finally, payment plans, and trials, and low barriers of entry just suck! I have tried membership sites with and without a trial – and with the trial there were lots more dropouts. There were a lot more people not logging in and not using the material because they didn’t really have any motivation to; the price was low enough that it didn’t really hurt their pocketbook, and they didn’t have a good reason to make their money back – because there was so little to make back.
Trials really do suck. The new credit card laws are moving everyone slowly away from trials. And I would definitely recommend you TRY marketing your site without a trial. If you are having difficulty, it might be because you haven’t trained your subscribers or your buyers enough. Tell them why you are not offering a trial, and turn it into a good selling point.
For example, there is no trial because you want to reduce the number of people who get access to this information; there is no trial because you want them to take action on what you show right away; maybe certain bonuses are worth a certain amount of money and a trial would cheapen that.
And that is why you should only offer a payment plan for ongoing content, not for a single-time product: because it trains your subscribers, it trains your buyers – and trials draw in the worst kinds of customers.
Do you offer a payment plan or not on your website? And what is the reason? Please comment below telling me.
