I recently discovered a new service called trial pay. Trial Pay is considered by some an alternate payment system, but is actually much more than that. Trial Pay is actually an entire model that is easy to grasp and an important addition to any software developer or E-Book Writer. Each Merchant is given a personal account manager whom can be contacted by phone or email.

The main concept behind Trial Pay is this. A visitor to your site is presented with the option to purchase your product or alternatively receive your product for free. Why would I want to give my product away for free you might ask. This is the beauty of Trial Pay. How it works is your customers are presented with a free trial offer from Trial Pay’s list of advertisers if your customer accepts one of the free offers they receive your product for free while Trial Pay pays you your regular sale price for the product or often times more than your initial sale price.

Some of the most popular offers that Trial Pay present to your customers are Blockbuster, FTD.com and Gap.

Some of the  adopters of Trial Pay as an alternative payment method are Skype, Mcafee, Adaware, Trillian, Mirc, Trend Micro. Luckily for all of us all of us smaller retailers can join as well.

I have a client that is selling a gas savings E-Book (http://www.cheapgasbook.com) with a great conversion rate (3%), He signed up with Trial Pay  about a month ago and to everyone surprise his sales increased by an additional 3%. The strategy behind his Trial Pay method is quite simple, he presents the offer to all of his exit traffic.

Statistically 80% of internet visitors to any web page leave within a few seconds never to return. By capturing these elusive tire kickers he was able to tap into an audience that is most often unreachable. Whereas these type of users do not read an entire offer and leave your site very quickly. Stopping these customers with an offer to receive your product for free. This causes this traffic to pause for a second and reconsider your offer.

Since they are not presented with a sub par product (free chapter) but instead the entire product, the take things a bit more seriously and consider this new possibility of two free products (yours and whatever offer they choose from Trial Pay)

Are you an E Publisher, or do you create or market digital product? If so I encourage you to give Trial Pay a look.

Trial Pay Tips and Tricks

Trial Pay offers merchants the choice between two widgets that you can install on your site, these are JavaScript and easy to install even for the layman.

Page Abandonment Widget:
This widget once installed allows you to specify specific pages on your site that if visited and abandoned (left by the user) present the visitor with your free product offer. This is done with in browser JavaScript which is much more reliable than a popup as many browsers and third party programs block new window popups. This widget is extremely powerful if you would like to present this offer to a user upon leaving your purchase page, or maybe a faq page.

Site Abandonment Widget:
This widget allows you to present your visitors with an offer when they leave your domain, whether they are closing a tab in their browser, or hitting the back button to return to some page prior to visiting your site. This widget is my favorite as I was always interested in somehow capturing the traffic that was leaving my site. This is achieved through a popunder that monitors the visitors status on your site. This popup/under stays in the background until a user leaves your site.

Tweaks:
One issue with the site abandonment widget is that it uses popup/under to achieve the alert to your exit traffic. Most browsers will block these popup windows. To get around this blocking issue Trial Pay has modified this widget to only popup after the visitors visit to a second page on your site.

This was an issue for my client as he specifically wanted to capture the traffic that leaves from the homepage.  I spoke with Trial Pay and their engineers told me that there was no way to get around this and the popup can ONLY popup after a user visits a second page. I being a website designer and internet marketer did not accept this answer.

With a nifty trick that I will share with you I am  now able to get this popup to popup on the first page a user visits.

I added a 1px by 1px iframe at the bottom of my entry pages (homepage) The source for this iframe is a page I called pop.php on pop.php I have my JavaScript for the widget. Coupled with the Widget code in my home page I fulfill all the requirements for browsers to allow popups/unders and am able to present this offer to those visitors who only visit one of my pages.

Strategies

With this huge success I have seen with my clients I have begun to develop some new models to work with Trial Pay. I can now create products from the beginning to be free, Free E-books, Free Software, Free Reports, Free Services. specifically designed to be monetized using Trial Pay.

One other popular use for trial pay that is becoming very popular is bundling the offer into your trial versions of software. Instead of the usual nag screen when a user opens or closes your trial or shareware application they are presented with an option to receive this product for free.

Please comment below if you have had success or failures with Trial Pay. Do you have any creative strategies that were not mentioned here?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 5:51 am and is filed under Marketing, SEO, Software, Software Releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.