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Can I offer a free trial for memberships?
Can I offer a free trial for memberships?

A free trial period lets your customers try before they buy, and reduces the risk of starting a new membership with your business.

Chris avatar
Written by Chris
Updated over a week ago

Punchpass allows you to create a free trial for your memberships, which is a great way to entice customers to 'try before they buy.'  Here's how to set them up, and some important points to understand about how they work.

Setting up a Free Trial

To enable a free trial you can create a new membership, or edit an existing one.  You'll see an option near the bottom of the form:

Chooses the number of days you want to offer a free trial (so 1 week choose 7, 2 weeks choose 14, etc.) . 

When a customer purchases the membership (or is assigned it by you), Punchpass issues them a pass that is good for the length of the free trial, and stores their payment information in your Stripe account. That pass DOES NOT count against the # of renewals for a membership. Once the free trial is over, the membership renews and the customer's credit card is charged.

A couple of important points to keep in mind

  1. You cannot override the free trial for specific customers. Instead you'll have to define a new membership that does not have a free trial.

  2. You can edit the free trial settings for the membership, here's how!

  3. You can define a free trial period up to 30 days in length. Because this cannot be overridden, we recommend you keep the free trial period short.

  4. The free trial starts when the membership 'starts'.  For example, if you assign a membership to start at the beginning of next month, that is when the free trial period will start.

  5. The membership's RENEWAL date, will be determined by the date after the free trial ends, because most likely the free trial period will not match the length of the membership's renewal periods.

Recurring memberships are a great tool to provide your business with a steady, predictable cashflow.  

Adding a free trial is a way to reduce the risk for customers who are interested in what you offer!

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