With the increasing amount of competition online service providers have today, everyone is trying to introduce free trials for customers so as to improve their customer relationships. Most online service providers, especially online streaming websites nowadays provide a one month free trial before the first purchase is made. With customer relationships being the strife amongst competitors today, most SaaS (Software as a Service) companies have started to give out a 14 day or a month’s free trial before charging them to attract customers to their service.
Free trials could be a game changer for businesses, they work very well in increasing converting trials to real time customers and hence increasing revenues. The concept of free trial works well in making customers get used to the pattern of the service and retaining them. In the beginning customers need to register with their Email IDs, phone numbers and other vital information along with including their card, the free trial goes on for a month or half of it and after the free trial ends, the customers are given the choice of continuing the service or ending the subscription. Usually customers get accustomed to the service which makes them hold on to the service and continue.
How could this go bad?
When a 30-day free trial period can give a customer all the free downloads he wants without spending a dime on it, it’s very much possible that he would opt getting another free trial instead of paying for the service and using it. Why pay for it when you could get it for free?
All the free trial registration needs is a valid email ID and a credit card to go with it, customers are given the choice to end the subscription or continue the subscription. When dear Mark feels that he could get another free trial instead of paying for it, he would obviously discontinue his subscription on the last day of the free trial and make another email ID to get another free trial. There’s really no end to how many times he could do that!
Mark could just add a “+” to his email ID, making it mark+@Xmail.com from mark@Xmail.com , this sort of email spoofing is called “email tumbling”. Email tumbling is a weapon online fraudsters use to commit crimes, in this case get another free trial and become an abusive customer to the company.
Such abuse has a lot of negative effects on the company’s health. Starting with the increase in marketing overheads, it overburdens the company with very high marketing costs with no ROI. Secondly, the company generates no revenue through these abuses as free trials do not get converted to subscriptions and they go as bad investments, the company incurs high losses. The loss of customers through this can affect the company’s name and reputation too.
How can TrustCheckr help?
Using the right fraud management tools to stop such abuses to the business is very important, without which, the business can incur huge losses and a plunge in reputation as well. TrustCheckr provides you with the right solution to analyze the email addresses and ascertain the authenticity of the email addresses so as to prevent yourself from fraudsters. Visit https://trustcheckr.com/ to book yourself a demo!