Use THIS Free-Trial Email Sequence To Turn Your Subscribers Into Paying Customers

Do you run free trials for your membership, course, or product? If you want to know if a trial offer is a good idea and want to get your hands on a free-trial email sequence for your business, here are some of the strategies we use to sell our own membership, The League. And there's some really juicy stuff in here! Ready?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:20) Join our FREE Facebook Group. (5:00) Should you run a free trial?(8:29) Trials help with risk reversal.(11:37) A trial isn't a discount!(14:28) Should you give full or limited access?(17:38) Do you need a free-trial email campaign?(21:14) The elements to include in your free-trial email campaign.(25:54) To bill or not to bill?(28:44) Free-trial email sequence key elements.(32:13) Subject line of the week.Should you run a free trial?If you have a membership, getting people into it is probably your main focus. And trials can definitely help with that. They are exciting, and any type of trial (free or paid) will get more people into your membership.  The problem with a free trial is that many of those who join might leave afterwards. And that's because they haven't invested or overcome any sort of barrier to be there. So they're not likely to start doing the work. And without that, they can't get any results, which means there's no value for them in staying after the end of the trial. But when people invest in your membership, they'll do the work. The fact they paid money to join shows commitment because people won't want to lose the money they invested. Trials help with risk reversalOne of the big pros of running a trial is that it acts as a risk reversal strategy. In our SCORE email engine, the R stands for Risk Reversal. (And if you're wondering, the whole acronym stands for Sales, Content, Objection Handling, Risk Reversal, and Engagement). How does a trial take care of the risk reversal element?There are different ways of running a trial and lots of possibilities and combinations that go from a free trial to charging the full price of the membership. In other words, you could charge someone any amount you decide for them to join for 2 days, a week, a month, or however long you want. A trial allows people to try out the membership at a lower risk (or no risk). And how much you charge may have an impact on retention (i.e. whether people stay at the end of the trial). So you may need to play around with the duration and the price of the trial to understand what works for your business.And another decision you may want to make is around whether you give people full or limited access to your membership. The key is to find the combination that gives you the most money. If your trial is priced higher than free or $1, you're going to get fewer people signing up. But at least you get some money in your pockets. If you charge $1 or run the trial for free, then obviously you're not making much money in the process. We suggest you work out how much someone is worth to you over the lifetime of that person being a customer. And if that’s hard to calculate, try to work out on average how much someone is worth to you over a year. Look at the gross number per person.A trial isn't a discount!In our business, we currently have a $1 trial. But we've also tested offering a full-month trial as well as a 14-day trial. The idea is that you could run a trial and give access for however long you choose. What's important is the way you frame it. You want to make sure people understand they're joining for $1, for example, and that gives them access for X amount of time. But after that, they will continue staying members.Membership site owners are often reluctant to run trials because they don't want to offer discounts. But a trial isn't a discount! It's a strategy to reduce risk to help people understand whether your membership is the right choice for them. Will it work for them? Will they like it? And will they get results? By offering a low-risk trial, you help them answer these questions. So when you encourage people to take the trial, you need to use language that doesn't suggest that they'll take the trial and leave. What you do instead is to ask them to join the membership for $1 for the first month, for example, and then stay on at the full price. It sounds like the language of a discount, but the emotional trigger that makes people jump on the offer is risk reduction. Should you give full or limited access?When running trials, you also want to think about what type of access to your membership you'll give people. What we do, for example, is an access-all-areas trial for $1 for 14 days. This means we allow people to get into entire membership for 14 days for $1. It means they can join, access, implement, and run our campaigns or use our Automate Hero tools and make money during that period of time for $1. And to us, that's great. Because people who get results will want to stick around. The alternative is to run a limited-access trial. This is where you give people access to some of your content for $1 for a certain period of time. It could be that they can only consume pre-recorded content, but not the live calls, for example. Or the other way around.Another type of trial we love and run a few times a year is the Open Day. This is where someone comes along for free but with limited access. People get to attend one live group coaching call inside our membership The League and see what it's like. Do you need a free-trial email campaign? A key point to consider when running a trial is whether people should go through your standard onboarding process or whether you want a separate one that's designed to convert people so they sign up at the full price. And the answer to this question can vary. Because the job of the onboarding sequence is to get people to remain members after the trial. But if people join on a trial, you want them to understand that the membership is worth its full price. Obviously, people who sign up at the full price have already realised that your membership is worth it. But those who came in via the trial may not. So consider this - how much selling did you do upfront? Did you sell the value of the membership upfront and before people signed up for the trial? If you have, then you should be able to put people on the same onboarding sequence that you use for your new (paying) members. Where our trial offer sits in our email engineFor example, our risk reversal offer doesn't sit on the front end - it's something we offer down the line. We do this to maximise profitability by selling the membership to those people who are ready and willing to buy at full price first. And then, at some point, we make our risk reversal offer. But by then, we've already sold the value of our membership. The advantage of presenting our trial offer in that way is also to ensure we have enough things to email people about. For a period of time, day in and day out in our emails, we use loads of different angles to try and sell our membership. And when we eventually offer a trial, we do it with some urgency and for a limited period of time. That's why we use the same onboarding sequence. Because by the time we offer the trial, people have been through a full sales campaign, our content-led campaign, and an objection-handling campaign.But if you're leading with the trial offer (and haven't sold the full value of the membership upfront), then you may need a different onboarding to clarfy that the product is worth a lot more. And if everyone joins your membership via a trial, then the trial email sequence is the only onboarding you'll ever need! The key is to find the balance between reselling people and making sure you deliver a valuable onboarding experience.What to include in your free-trial email campaignRegardless of what type of trial you’re running, what should your email campaign look like?Create FOMO The first thing you want a free-trial campaign to do is to create a specific type of FOMO – the idea that they’re not in the in-crowd. For example, in our free-trial sequence, we use the same language we use inside our membership. We don't do it in a pushing or jarring way - it's very inclusive. But we might talk about our Interrogator campaign, for example, and you'd only know what that is if you're in our world because that's the terminology we created for ourselves and our clients.  Sell the outcome of the trialAnother thing you can do in your free-trial email campaign is to stack up the return on investment (or the emotional result or overall outcome) that people get during the trial. In this campaign, you're no longer selling the membership - you're telling people what can happen during the trial. We do this by sharing case...