We know there are often times that you'd like to give students access to a free pass - maybe you offer a free trial period or are running a special promotion and want students to be able to grab a free pass online.
With Punchpass, you have options!
Creating a Free Pass
In most cases, you'll create a specific pass to be used as your free pass. If you just want to make one of your regular passes free for a while then skip to the Discount Code section below.
1. Go to Manage > Passes to set up a new pass.
2. Set the price to $0
This is an example of a pass that will be used as a free intro pass.
3. Select your Online Sales Settings
You have a couple of options here for the settings!
In the Online Sales settings, you may like to limit the pass so it can only be purchased once per customer and/or limit it to new customers only (customers will qualify if they've never bought a pass/membership/Ticket from you before).
4. Press Save and Set the Eligible Classes
After creating the pass you'll land on the pass overview page which displays a summary of the sales settings.
Do you need to limit the pass usage to specific classes or types of classes? If so, make sure to define the classes that the pass will be eligible for, you can find out how to do that here.
Customizing the Online Sales Settings
You can elect to make your free pass publicly available on the Purchase a Pass page or keep it private and share it with a limited group of customers.
Let's go through a couple of examples and their settings!
Example 1: Offering your free pass on the Purchase a Pass page
To create a public free pass that a customer can purchase online, you'll want to select the following Online Sales settings for your free pass:
Set Online in Punchpass to "on." Turning this setting on is what displays a pass on your Purchase a Pass page.
Who can view the pass: All customers. This will allow anyone, new customers included, to see the pass on your Purchase a Pass page.
Who can purchase the pass: All customers.
Sales limits:
Limit to one purchase per customer: On. It's a free pass, so it's probably best to limit the number of online purchases a customer can make! As an Admin, you can always assign the pass to customers though.
Limit to new customers only: Up to you!
This is how the pass will appear to customers:
Example 2: Offering your free pass to a select group of customers
Maybe you'd like to reward people for signing up for your mailing list or thank your best customers with a complimentary pass.
When offering a pass to a limited number of customers, you'll share the purchase link with them and adjust your settings to hide the pass from the Purchase a Pass page.
Here are the Online Sales settings you'll want for a secret offer:
Set Online in Punchpass to "off." This keeps the pass off the purchase a pass page.
Who can view the pass: All customers.
Who can purchase the pass: All customers.
Sales limits:
Limit to one purchase per customer: On. It's a free pass, so it's probably best to limit the number of online purchases a customer can make! As an Admin, you can always assign the pass to customers though.
Limit to new customers only: Up to you!
You'll then copy the purchase link and share that with customers:
And they will see this form:
Please note: You're welcome to edit your online sales settings at any time! And Admin-level users can always manually assign a free pass to customers at any time too.
Alternatives to Offering a Free Pass
Creating a 100% Off Discount Code
The basic instructions for setting up the code can be found here - you'll want to be extra sure that the 100% off code can only be applied to your selected pass or students will be able to purchase other types of passes for free 😬
You may also like to limit the number of times the discount code can be applied, that will effectively be the number of free passes that you're giving away.
Once you've created the discount code students won't be able to see it or find it unless you
share it with them.
You can see in the screenshot above that we've included the discount code in the pass description for our free intro pass - if you want the free passes to be freely available then that's a great option. But otherwise you can keep it a secret and only send the discount code out to selected students, members, teachers etc as you need to!
Create a Free Class
Do you offer free classes to build community and welcome new folks to your studio? You can mark a class as free in Punchpass. This lets you take attendance for the class without punching any customer cards. This guide will walk you through the steps of creating a free class.
Create a Free Trial Membership
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.