Try It, You’ll Like It—Or Will You? The Perils of Early Free-Trial Promotions for High-Tech Service Adoption

Bram Foubert
Corresponding Author
Bram Foubert
[email protected]
Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands
Search for more papers by this author
,
Els Gijsbrechts
Els Gijsbrechts
[email protected]
Department of Marketing, Tilburg School of Economics and Management, Tilburg University, 5000 LE Tilburg, Netherlands
Search for more papers by this author

Corresponding Author

Bram Foubert

Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands

Search for more papers by this author

Els Gijsbrechts

[email protected]

Department of Marketing, Tilburg School of Economics and Management, Tilburg University, 5000 LE Tilburg, Netherlands

Search for more papers by this author

Published Online:31 May 2016https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2015.0973

Supplemental Material

mksc.2015.0973-sm.pdf

The replication files for this article are available HERE.

Cited by
- Free versus paid over-the-top video streaming services and the influence of social media
  Journal of Business Research, Vol. 214
- Where did you receive the free sample? Sustained impact of new product sample distribution on customer purchase journey
  8 January 2026 | Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 54, No. 1
- From Growth to Monetization: Managing Freemium Services
  9 July 2025 | Production and Operations Management, Vol. 35, No. 2
- Donor migration to contractual relationships and the impact on charity income
  International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 51
- When will online free product trials contribute to product sales? The impacts of trial periods
  Information & Management, Vol. 62, No. 8
- Turning free trials into treasures: the effect of perceived control on psychological ownership of digital products
  4 August 2025 | Current Psychology, Vol. 44, No. 18
- Longer or shorter? A large-scale randomized field experiment on the impact of free trial duration on sustainable user conversion in the Freemium model
  18 June 2025 | Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 16
- Adoption of Virtual Reality Headsets: The Role of Metaverse Trials for Consumers’ Usage and Purchase Intentions
  22 August 2024 | Journal of Interactive Marketing, Vol. 60, No. 2
- Young consumers' online experiential consumption behavior of foreign contemporary music: generational and gender differences in the refined stimulus-organism-response theory
  28 August 2024 | Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, Vol. 37, No. 3
- Free Sampling, Bundling, and Digital Formatting: Exploring Strategy Effects of Digital Goods Retailers
  13 January 2025 | Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, Vol. 20, No. 1
- Moving to subscriptions: service growth through business model innovation in consumer and business markets
  21 June 2024 | Journal of Service Management, Vol. 35, No. 6
- Precision marketing for newly-launched products: How to offer free trials to consumers?
  Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Vol. 81
- Online Retailing Operations: Is It Wise to Offer Free Sample Trial and Money-Back Guarantee Together?
  4 November 2024 | Production and Operations Management, Vol. 33, No. 11
- Network effects, word of mouth, and entry performance: A study of digital freemium products
  Journal of World Business, Vol. 59, No. 6
- Influentials, early adopters, or random targets? Optimal seeding strategies under vertical differentiations
  Decision Support Systems, Vol. 183
- Free trial or no free trial: Optimal policy of electronic products with positive and negative network effects
  Omega, Vol. 125
- Subscription offers in business-to-business markets: Conceptualization, taxonomy, and framework for growth
  Industrial Marketing Management, Vol. 117
- An empirical study on the effect of user engagement on personalized free-content promotion based on a causal machine learning model
  JUSTC, Vol. 54, No. 10
- Time-locked free trial strategy in duopoly markets with switching costs
  9 February 2023 | 4OR, Vol. 21, No. 4
- Analysis of Online Platforms’ Free Trial Strategies for Digital Content Subscription
  20 November 2023 | Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, Vol. 18, No. 4
- Spillover Effects and Freemium Strategy in the Mobile App Market
  Yiting Deng,
  Anja Lambrecht,
  Yongdong Liu
  30 November 2022 | Management Science, Vol. 69, No. 9
- Incentivising ‘pirates’ to pay – An experiment with comic book readers
  Information Economics and Policy, Vol. 64
- Paywall Suspensions and Digital News Subscriptions
  Inyoung Chae,
  Jihyeon Ha,
  David A. Schweidel
  26 September 2022 | Marketing Science, Vol. 42, No. 4
- Design and Evaluation of Optimal Free Trials
  Hema Yoganarasimhan,
  Ebrahim Barzegary,
  Abhishek Pani
  10 August 2022 | Management Science, Vol. 69, No. 6
- Optimizing Free-to-Play Multiplayer Games with Premium Subscription
  Yunke Mai,
  Bin Hu
  23 August 2022 | Management Science, Vol. 69, No. 6
- Social free sampling: engaging consumer through product trial reports
  15 July 2022 | Information Technology & People, Vol. 36, No. 4
- Free-baiting: policy applications for freeness removal and the zero price effect
  17 November 2020 | Behavioural Public Policy, Vol. 7, No. 2
- Who are the Best Adopters? User Selection Model for Free Trial Item Promotion
  IEEE Transactions on Big Data, Vol. 9, No. 2
- Cooperation or Co-Opetition? Optimal Offline Showroom Partnership for an Online Manufacturer Under Information Asymmetry
  7 February 2023 | International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Vol. 27, No. 1
- From Growth to Monetization: Managing Freemium Services
  1 January 2023 | SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 37
- The dark side of innovation: How new SKUs affect brand choice in the presence of consumer uncertainty and learning
  International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 39, No. 4
- Product sampling on reward-based crowdfunding platforms
  Information & Management, Vol. 59, No. 8
- Converting free users to paid subscribers in the SaaS context: The impact of marketing touchpoints, message content, and usage
  1 May 2022 | Production and Operations Management, Vol. 31, No. 5
- Heart or Mind? The Impact of Power Distance Belief on the Persuasiveness of Cognitive Versus Affective Appeals in Education Marketing Messages
  3 September 2021 | Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 59, No. 1
- Factors Influencing Over-the-Top Services Adoption: Focusing on Differences between Non-Adopters, Free Service Adopters, and Paid Service Adopters
  SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 103
- Free Lunch? Vendor Offers during COVID-19
  18 October 2021 | Ticker: The Academic Business Librarianship Review, Vol. 6, No. 1
- Online reviews generated through product testing: can more favorable reviews be enticed with free products?
  11 March 2021 | Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 49, No. 4
- Customer reactions to self-checkout discontinuance
  Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Vol. 61
- Experience Effect in the Impact of Free Trial Promotions
  Sadat Reza,
  Hillbun Ho,
  Rich Ling,
  Hongyan Shi
  18 May 2020 | Management Science, Vol. 67, No. 3
- Customer inertia marketing
  3 September 2020 | Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 49, No. 2
- Study on free trial decision-making of IT products and services from an IT company's perspective
  29 September 2020 | Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 34, No. 1
- What Is The Value Of A Star When Choosing A Provider For Total Joint Replacement? A Discrete Choice Experiment
  Health Affairs, Vol. 40, No. 1
- Optimizing Free-to-Play Multiplayer Games with Premium Subscription
  SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 37
- The Effect of Binge-Watching on the Subscription of Video on Demand: Results from Randomized Experiments
  Miguel Godinho de Matos,
  Pedro Ferreira
  15 September 2020 | Information Systems Research, Vol. 31, No. 4
- Understanding users’ dynamic behavior in a free trial of IT services: A three-stage model
  Information & Management, Vol. 57, No. 6
- On the monetization of mobile apps
  International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 37, No. 1
- Do the pieces fit? Assessing the configuration effects of promotion attributes
  Journal of Business Research, Vol. 109
- Optimal Release Strategy for the Competing Software Vendors Based on Word-of-Mouth Effect
  1 January 2020 | International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Vol. 24, No. 1
- Free-Baiting: A Public Policy Application for the Discouraging Effects of Freeness Removal
  SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 11
- When Seeing Helps Believing: The Interactive Effects of Previews and Reviews on E-Book Purchases
  Angela Aerry Choi,
  Daegon Cho,
  Dobin Yim,
  Jae Yun Moon,
  Wonseok Oh
  6 December 2019 | Information Systems Research, Vol. 30, No. 4
- Why pay? An empirical study of paid-for SQA sites in China
  Online Information Review, Vol. 43, No. 7
- Optimal Length of Free Trial for Online Service Considering User's Learning Effect
  IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. 66, No. 4
- Optimal sequential releasing strategy for software products in the presence of word-of-mouth and requirements uncertainty
  14 December 2018 | Information Technology and Management, Vol. 20, No. 3
- 7. Quel est le coût des applications gratuites ?
  Regards croisés sur l'économie, Vol. n° 23, No. 2
- Speaking for “Free”: Word of Mouth in Free- and Paid-Product Settings
  30 January 2019 | Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 56, No. 2
- Study on the Free Trial of IT Services from Users’ Decision Perspective: A Conceptual Framework
  24 July 2018
- The Influence Study of Online Free Trail Activities on Product Sales Volume
  19 May 2019
- Impact of free sampling on product diffusion based on Bass model
  10 July 2017 | Electronic Commerce Research, Vol. 18, No. 1
- A trial engagement? Innovative free and other service trials
  9 January 2018 | Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 32, No. 1
- Spillover Effects and Freemium Strategy in Mobile App Market
  SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 41
- The Implications of Offering Free Versions for the Performance of Paid Mobile Apps
  1 November 2017 | Journal of Marketing, Vol. 81, No. 6
- Renew or cancel? Drivers of customer renewal decisions for IT-based service contracts
  Journal of Business Research, Vol. 79
- Binge Yourself Out the Effect of Binge Watching on the Subscription of Video on Demand
  SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 29
- What Would Make a Free Product an Even Better Deal? Zero Price Effects on End User Choice
  SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 17

Volume 35, Issue 5

September-October 2016

Pages 693-829

Article Information

Supplemental Material

Metrics

Information

Received:May 08, 2013
Accepted:September 13, 2015
Published Online:May 31, 2016

Cite as

Bram Foubert, Els Gijsbrechts (2016) Try It, You’ll Like It—Or Will You? The Perils of Early Free-Trial Promotions for High-Tech Service Adoption. Marketing Science 35(5):810-826.

https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2015.0973

Keywords

PDF download

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Available Issues

Try It, You’ll Like It—Or Will You? The Perils of Early Free-Trial Promotions for High-Tech Service Adoption

Supplemental Material

Volume 35, Issue 5

Article Information

Supplemental Material

Metrics

Information

Cite as

Keywords

Sign Up for INFORMS Publications Updates and News