How did a free Trial affect your business?

Hello everyone,

This is a question for you who offering a free-trial for your products. Did it affect your business or, if yes, how was the before and after conversions? Did it benefit you?

Please share your thoughts.

I personally will probably never use free trials. I only use low cost trials, like $1. I want to know they can and are willing to spend money, even it's only a buck. Believe they tend to be a little more serious?

Guess the exception is pay pal free trials with recurring. Though still, does that person even have any money in their account.

Would be a good thing to test though.

Hopefully others will share some experience.

I have several products which were not doing so hot when I first launched them. I feel
I described them very well, even had videos put together to demonstrate the functions
and benefits, but, no one bought. On many of those, I in turn started offering free trials
and as soon as the user had the chance to actually use the app and see the benefits
first hand, my sales would skyrocket.

I guess the real answer to your question is that it all depends on the product, the product
type and the need and/or desire for the product in question.

I, as Ron pointed out, want to make sure I am not just attracting "FREEBIE SEEKERS",
so, whenever I create a product (and I create software, ebooks and video tutorials),
I always make sure to ONLY offer a free TRIAL when I KNOW that the user will HAVE
to pay to continue using the product.

For example, with a few of my software apps, free trials would not be effective because
the user will use the software today and may not need it again for a few more weeks. Of
course, not ALL my software is like that, but some are, so I would never offer a free trial
for those particular apps.

However, if the software is one that the user will definitely WANT or NEED to use everyday,
I have NO problem offering a 3, 5 or even 10 day trial because I know once they use it, they
will WANT to continue using it.

In MY opinion, free trials should ONLY ever be used when you are 100% certain that the
product is good enough, or needed/wanted enough, to ensure the customer will end up
buying it.

We do not provide Free-Trail Services, but clients may infect the server network and resources and may take misuse of them and affects the performance of other users' hosting present in same server. Which leads to loss in business.