Tips and Tricks #17: How to Programmatically Manage Trials With Zoho Subscriptions

Offering trial subscriptions has become an integral part in gaining a prospective customer's trust, especially in SaaS based businesses. In this post, we'll be taking a look at how you can take control of this using Zoho Subscriptions.

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This article is part of a series of tips and tricks that we post every week. Go ahead and check out last week's post about charging a late fee to your subscribers, in case you missed it.

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Trial subscriptions can help boost your sales

Zoho Subscriptions provides two methods through which you can sign users up for a trial--hosted payment pages and via the API.

Hosted payment pages let you sign users up for a trial subscription easily. These pages require users to enter their payment details along with some other basic information.

In case you want to allow your users to sign up for a trial without asking for their payment information upfront, you can go for the API route. This can increase potential sign-ups from users that want to try your product with no strings attached. It also gives them the freedom to provide their payment details only after they're satisfied with your product.

If you have a web application where your customers can sign up for a trial, you can setup Zoho Subscriptions in such a way, where one of the APIs programmatically creates a new trial subscription every time a new user signs up from your website. This enables you to track and manage your trial subscriptions with in-depth reports, email notifications for your subscribers and also allows you to collect your subscribers' payment information via secure hosted pages when they're ready to move to a paid plan.

Here's how to set it up:

We'll be using one of our powerful REST APIs to create subscriptions automatically in Zoho Subscriptions.

When your users sign up for a trial from your web application, you can programmatically call the create subscription API to enter them as a customer in Zoho Subscriptions and create a trial subscription for them with a selected plan automatically.

Once this is done, you can configure email notifications in Zoho Subscriptions to remind your customers about their trial subscription's expiry date and other information.

You can also use Zoho Subscriptions' reports, which can help you gain important business insights. Reports like Subscription Details can be customized to view the details of your trial subscriptions with ease.

For added convenience, our trial-specific default view filters let you quickly view your trial subscriptions right from the Subscriptions list page.

Stay tuned for next week's post, where we'll be taking a look at how you can collect your customer's payment information, extend their trials if needed and move their subscription from the Trial status to the Live status in Zoho Subscriptions.

Cheers,

Varun Steven

The Zoho Subscriptions Team

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