BidPrime Offers Free Trials Because Showing Beats Telling

Forbes recently published an article by BidPrime co-founder and head of operations Stephen Hetzel, in which he explained why offering free trials is an excellent marketing strategy for businesses large and small.

If you’re a BidPrime subscriber, chances are you took us up on our own free-trial offer before formally coming aboard, so you already know about our ‘try-before-you-buy’ approach.

In Stephen’s Forbes article, he talked all about that and also told the story of how we decided to make free trials a BidPrime staple. It’s an interesting read. We encourage you to click here to see the full piece. You may find Stephen’s insights useful for your marketing strategy.

Here are some of the article highlights:

Stephen made the point that free trials are a good marketing strategy, because they can actually reduce the cost of attracting new customers. The reason is it’s more efficient to show rather than tell prospective buyers about your wares.

Free trials also ensure that new customers will actually be happy with the product or service after purchase. 

“Customer satisfaction is increased if prospects can try before they buy.” Those who take a free trial do not experience unexpected surprises after conversion, since they know before becoming customers exactly what they can expect to receive once they sign on the dotted line. For us, this level of transparency effectively eliminated the possibility of unrealistic expectations (and the resulting complaints from unmet promises).

“Free trials sharply reduce the need for aggressive selling.” A product or service practically sells itself if prospective customers are able to extensively explore on their own what you’re of fering. This means your sales team will have a lighter burden to shoulder—and more time available to focus, as we did, on other vital tasks, such as uncovering and pursuing new leads.”

Stephen indicated that a parameter which must be determined, before a company can offer a free trial, is the scope of the freebie. In other words, how big a sample of the product or service will be put on the table?

By way of background, Stephen described in the article how we originally sought to market BidPrime without free trials. Spoiler: our success wasn’t notable.

He revealed that we also found it necessary to go through several iterations of a free-trial formula to find the one that worked best for us.

Stephen acknowledged that there are risks inherent to offering free trials, but contended that they are small, if the free trial is properly constituted.

The big takeaway Stephen wanted Forbes readers to gain was that free trials are a very effective mechanism for gaining new customers and building a business.

If you’re not yet a BidPrime subscriber and would like to see how our BidPrime free trial works, click here and look for the 'TRY FREE' button on the BidPrime website.