Offering Trial With One-Time Memberships

MemberPress recurring memberships come with a trial feature where you can easily add paid or free trials to each membership. At the same time, this feature is not available with one-time memberships. 

The workaround, in this case, would be to use two separate memberships. This document will show you how to set this up so you can offer a trial with your one-time memberships also.

The Workaround

This workaround can be used to add paid or free trials with one-time memberships. In this document, we will show you how to add a free trial to your existing one-time membership.

The first step would be to create your main one-time membership. You can create this membership with any terms you need.

Next, you should create a second one-time membership that will serve as a free trial membership. To set up this membership please follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Dashboard > MemberPress > Memberships > Add New;
2. Name the trial membership in a way that is relatable to your main membership, e.g. Main Membership (7-day trial);
3. The price will be 0.00 by default. Leave this set to zero to make this membership free. Free memberships will automatically be set as one-time memberships;

4. Click on the Access dropdown and select the “Expire” option. This will open additional Expire After settings;
5. Now, under the Expire After settings select the trial period by choosing the time unit (days, weeks, months, or years) and adding the duration. In our example, we set the trial duration to 7 days;

6. Leave the Allow Early Renewals option unchecked;
7. Click on the “Publish” button to create your trial membership.

Allow Only One Trial

Most often, you will want to prevent users from registering for your trial multiple times, so they would purchase your membership once the trial ends.

To do this, please add the following additional settings to your trial membership:

1. Scroll down to Membership Options and click on the Permissions tab;
2. Under the Who can purchase this Membership option choose “Guests”. This will allow new users to purchase this trial membership;
3. Next, click on the “+” icon and add the additional rule for “Members who had NOT subscribed to this membership before”. This will prevent any member who previously registered for this trial membership to purchase it again.

4. Click on the “Update” button to save changes. 

The important thing to mention is that your trial membership and your main membership are still two separate memberships and that there is no actual connection between them. 

Once the trial membership expires, your members will need to register for your main membership and add their payment details through the main membership registration page. 

Thus, you could provide your users with instructions on how to register for your main membership using the “Before subscription expires” or “After subscription expires” reminder. By creating these reminders your users will automatically receive emails notifying users when their trial membership is close to expiry or expired, and providing instructions on how to register for the main membership.

Also, you can further create desired user flow through your design and navigate these users to your main membership.

If you have a recurring membership, and you would like to allow your users with a trial without the need for them to add their payment details straight away, you can use this workaround, and create the free trial membership that you would relate to your recurring membership.