Marketing Experiments discusses how to increase paid subscription sign-ups and online orders with free trial offers.

Before the web, offering a free trial of any kind of publication was an expensive undertaking.

As a result, magazine publishers invested heavily in testing and soon came up with the "negative option" approach. That is to say... they took your credit card information and began charging for your subscription unless you canceled before the end of the free trial period.
The exact same approach appears to work online as well.

Recently we conducted a test for a large company selling an online version of its newspaper.

We tested two pages, both of them identical except that on one page we attempted to make a direct and immediate sale, while on the other we still collected their credit card information, but offered a free trial, at the end of which we would bill their card.

Here are the results:

The free trial offer, with credit card information collected up front, resulted in a 542 percent increase in orders.

The fact that the free trial offer did better is no great surprise. But keep in mind that we did ask for complete credit card information before the start of the trial. And also consider the impact on revenues of an increase of this order.

You'll find a full archive of our test results, and analysis within the MarketingExperiments.com Research Archives.

The Marketing Experiments Journal publishes primary test results from work with our research partners once every two weeks. Subscription to the Journal is free and gives you full access to both our archives and teleconference calls. Subscribe here.