How to Offer Free Trial Membership & Subscription Plans in WordPress

Rifat WordPress Tutorials Aug 16, 2023

One of the widely used methods to acquire customers for membership sites is to provide them with the option of free trial memberships and subscription plans.

By offering free trials, you can entice a larger number of individuals to experience your subscription plan and provide them with a preview of the valuable features available in the premium subscription plan. Moreover, it instills a sense of assurance among potential customers and contributes to the development of brand reliability.

In the following article, we will guide you on how to effectively implement free trial membership and subscription plans within the WordPress platform.

Why Offer Subscriptions With Free Trials?

Before we delve into the process of setting up a free trial subscription in WordPress, it's crucial to comprehend the underlying reasons behind offering subscriptions with free trials.

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Here are some key motivations for considering this approach:

  • Boost Subscription Numbers: Everyone appreciates complimentary offerings. By incorporating a free trial into your subscription plan, you can attract a larger audience and witness an increase in subscriptions. Furthermore, this tactic encourages users to extend their subscriptions beyond the trial period.
  • Establish Brand Trust: By allowing customers to experience the essence of your subscription plan, you facilitate trust-building. This enables users to place confidence in your content and brand, leading to higher sales and the acquisition of new subscribers to your membership plans.
  • Enhance Customer Retention: Once users gain insight into the functionality and value of your membership subscription, they are more likely to continue their subscriptions and become paying customers. This serves as an effective strategy to improve customer retention while maximizing the number of subscriptions on your membership site.

In essence, incorporating free trials into your membership and subscription offerings is a commendable approach. For example, you can provide a 7-day free trial with your membership plan or offer an initial month free when users subscribe to any membership plan. Such tactics allow you to maximize subscriptions, build your email list, and generate substantial revenue for your business in the long run.

Introduction To Paid Member Subscriptions

The Paid Member Subscriptions plugin provides a comprehensive solution to effortlessly create and manage personalized subscription plans for your WordPress membership website.

This user-friendly tool equips you with all the necessary features to establish a thriving membership site. With its help, you can easily craft tailored subscription plans and control access to content based on each user's specific subscription. The plugin offers an array of options to restrict unauthorized user access to posts, pages, or categories on your WordPress site, ensuring the utmost content security.

Create Free Trial Membership & Subscription Plans

We'll teach you how to use the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin to establish free trial membership and subscription plans in WordPress.

Once you've decided on a membership site strategy, you can create either a free trial membership or a subscription plan by following the procedures mentioned below. To generate subscriptions with free trials, you'll need a WordPress site and the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin.

Get The Plugin

Begin by downloading and installing the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin on your WordPress site. After installing the plugin, go to Paid Member Subscriptions Register Version and enter the license key you received at the time of purchase.

To proceed, click the Save Changes option.

Create a Subscription Plan

Navigate to Paid Member Subscriptions Subscription Plans and press the Add New button.

After giving your subscription plan a new name and description, use the term area to specify the total term of your subscription plan. Then, in the Price text field, add a price for your membership plan. You may even charge users a tiny price in the Sign-up price area to discourage trolls and spam from joining up for the free trial.

Set Up The Free Trial

Now that we've covered the fundamentals, we can set up the free trial utilizing the Free Trial option.

You can select an exact amount of time before users are paid for their subscription plan when they subscribe for the first time, based on your strategy. For example, you may provide users with a 7-day free trial to test out the subscription plan before they have to pay the monthly subscription charge.

Furthermore, you can provide consumers the opportunity to automatically renew their subscription once the free trial time expires by using the Renewal dropdown menu.

When you're finished, make sure you click the Save Subscription button to proceed.

Create a Registration Page

After you've set up a free trial subscription, you'll need to construct a new registration page where users may sign up for the free trial membership. To do so, go to Pages Add New in the WordPress admin panel and create a new page.

Set page information and put [pms-register] into the Shortcode area.

To proceed, click the Publish button.

And you're ready! Users can now enter all of their information on the newly built membership registration page and subscribe to the free trial subscription plan.

Users can also select the Automatically renew subscription button to have their subscription renewed automatically at the end of the free trial period or every month.

Wrapping Up

Providing complimentary trial memberships and subscription options within WordPress presents a wonderful opportunity to entice additional subscriptions and optimize user registrations. The Paid Member Subscription plugin helps to approach in a ideal way allowing users to experience a "test drive" of your content and subscription plan, enabling them to make an informed decision before committing wholeheartedly.

Moreover, this strategy fosters trust among new users toward your brand. By allowing them to explore your subscription plan through a free trial period prior to making any financial commitments, you establish a sense of reliability. Consequently, you enhance the likelihood of acquiring new subscriptions and generating a steady stream of recurring revenue for your business.

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