A trial period allows customers access to your site for a specific amount of time. Access for a trial period generally lasts for a few days to a month and is free of charge (in most cases). Trial periods are great for enticing customers to purchase your membership if they are satisfied with the quality of your offering.
Using the Simple Membership Plugin, there are two methods of offering a trial period to your customers.
- Giving them a trial period prior to charging for their membership using a subscription/recurring payment option.
- Giving them access to a trial membership level for free.
Method 1) Offering a Free Trial Period Using a Subscription Payment
You can add a free trial option to your subscription payment button to offer a trial period for any membership that you sell.
Create A New Membership Level
Use the following steps to create a new level if you don’t have one already:
Step 1) Under the WP Membership tab, click on ‘Membership Levels’ and then ‘Add Level’.
Step 2) Give your membership level a title such as ‘Diamond Member’, leave the WordPress Role as ‘Subscriber’ and the access duration as ‘No Expiry’.
Step 3) Click the ‘Add New Membership Level’ button.
Create a New Subscription Payment Button with Trial
Step 4) Now that you have created a membership level, select the ‘Payments’ menu and then the ‘Create New Button’ tab.
Step 5) Select the option ‘PayPal Subscription’ and click next.
Step 6) Give your button a title such as ‘Diamond Membership Payment’, and select the membership level that you want to hook this payment button to. In our example, we will use the one we just created.
Step 7) Set a billing amount that will be charged after the trial period (for example: $25 per month). This is the amount that you want to charge for your membership.
Step 8) Under the ‘Trial Billing Details’ section enter an amount you wish to charge for the trial. For a free trial, you will enter ‘0’ as the trial amount. Next, select the length of the trial period (for example: 14 days).
Step 9) Hit the ‘Save’ button to save the details. Once you have saved, you can find the shortcode for this button in the ‘Manage Payment Buttons’ tab.
Paste this shortcode on your ‘Join Us’ page of the site (where you explain the various membership offers you have on the site). Customers can then choose to signup for a trial membership using this payment button.
Once a customer clicks the ‘Subscribe Now’ button they will be redirected to the payment gateway. PayPal will indicate to the customer exactly what they will be charged for along with the terms of the trial period:
Method 2) Giving Access to a Trial Membership Level for Free
You can offer your users a trial period by simply adding a membership level that expires after a set amount of time. For example you can offer a free two weeks trial. Two weeks after your user signs up for this free account, their account will expire. They can then pay for your paid membership.
Create A New Membership Level
Use the following steps to create a new trial level:
Step 1) Create a new membership level by clicking on ‘Membership Levels’ and then the ‘Add Level’ tab.
Step 2) Give your membership level a title, leave the role as ‘Subscriber’ and decide on when you would like this trial membership to expire. You may like to title it ‘Two Weeks Free Trial’ and then choose for it to expire after ‘2 weeks’. You can set the expiry to whatever you want.
Step 3) Click the ‘Add New Membership Level’ button.
Allow Users to Join This Trial Level For Free
Step 4) You can now use a shortcode on a page to allow members to sign up to this trial membership level for free (just giving them a free trial).
This documentation explains how you can create a registration form to allow users to signup to a membership level directly for free.
For this example: I have created a new page, put some description about the free trial membership, then added the following shortcode on the page:
[swpm_registration_form level=2]
Replace the level ID number (2) in the shortcode, with the actual ID of your free trial level.
Step 6) You can now advertise this free trial membership option on your ‘Join Us’ page and put a link to the trial level registration page there.
Your users will then be able to go to that page and sign up to this membership level.
