5 Tips for Kids Activity Providers To Turn Free Trial Families Into Term Customers.

​Every parent has done this calculation at least once: sign a child up for a term of gymnastics, football, or dance, pay upfront, and hope they still like it by week three. Get it wrong and you're either arguing with a seven year old about finishing what they started, or emailing a provider's office asking about a refund. Get it right by letting them try first, and nobody has that conversation at all.

That instinct, try it before you commit to it, isn't unique to kids' activities. It's the same behaviour driving free trials and low cost tasters across every subscription and membership business. And the data on how well it works points to something most kids activity providers miss: the free session itself is only the opening move.

The Numbers Behind "try before you buy"

ClassPass, the fitness and wellness website, ran a simple test: offer a clear reward at the exact moment a free trial user is deciding whether to become a paying member. The result was a 62% trial to paid conversion rate, against an industry median of roughly 50% and a top quartile benchmark of around 60%. The detail worth sitting with is what actually drove that number.

It wasn't the free class. Fitness studios that have run trials for years have learned something counterintuitive: a fully free trial isn't always the best converter on its own.

As Hot House Yoga's founder John Yax put it, "Free classes literally have zero value... they don't compel people to perceive what they're getting."

“When you look around at the yoga community almost everyone does what’s called the low barrier to entry offer. When we first started, everyone who comes in gets a free class. Well free literally has zero value. And so it doesn’t compel people to stay. It doesn’t compel people to perceive what they’re getting and the value of it. They don’t increase that perceived value at all and so what’s like pervasive in the yoga industry right now is low barrier to entry offers meaning someone can come in and do 30 days of yoga for $30, or $10 for two weeks. And what ends up happening is there is this misperception of price and value. And the fact that money actually follows the value, so the answer for us is, how do you increase the value of what you’re offering and it is related to price but it’s also related to what actually adds value.”

Free trials is a nice and easy way to get people in the door, but keeping those people relies on everything built around the trial, an exceptional client experience, the timing of the ask, the follow up, the reward that landed at the right moment, the perceived value.

What This Means For Kids Activity Providers

Parents booking their own fitness class and parents booking their child into a new activity are weighing up different things, but the underlying hesitation is the same: will this actually be a good fit before I commit real money and my family’s Saturday mornings to it? A trial session, free or discounted, answers that question with almost no downside for the parent, and it gives a provider a much easier "yes" to sell than a full term commitment cold.

The providers who get the most out of this control the offer deliberately: how many trial spots per session, whether it's free or a reduced rate, and which activities are worth opening up that way in the first place. A fully booked, high demand class doesn't need a free taster to fill it. A brand-new Thursday afternoon coding club might.

This also means that its important for kids activity providers to be utilising a booking management software that offers free trials as one of their features. Having the option to turn on free trials and a deliberate workflow on how to convert free trial families is the key.

It's Not The Free Lesson That Converts, It’s Everything After It

Think about what actually happens between a first free session and a signed up family: there's the search for class nearby, checkings out reviews, cross referencing the family calendar where a parent decides this is worth a Saturday morning, how easy it is book and enrol. There's the class itself, where a coach or teacher either makes a new kid feel like they belong or lets them blend into the background. There's the follow-up, a text, an email, a "how did it go?" that either lands while the class is still fresh in a parent's mind or arrives a week later when the moment's passed. And there's the invoice, which either makes converting a one click yes or turns into three emails back and forth about dates and pricing.

None of that is about whether the trial was free or discounted. It's about whether the workflow around it is doing any work at all.

5 Ways to Superpower Your Free Trial Workflows

1. Control the offer, not just the on/off switch. A trial that's open to everyone, unlimited, forever, is a permanently discounted class wearing a trial's name. Enrolmy lets Classes & Lessons and Sports providers set the real levers: how many trial spots a session allows, whether trials are completely free or "no obligation" (charged only if the family continues), and whether trials are limited to new customers or open to existing ones too. A fully booked Tuesday class doesn't need a free taster to fill it. A brand new Thursday coding club might need every lever pulled.

2. Make the booking moment part of the pitch. The point a parent books a trial is also the point they're most receptive to what comes next. When a staff member adds a family into a class, Enrolmy gives the option to send an email confirmation at that exact moment, which is the first chance to set expectations for what happens after the trial, beyond a simple booking confirmation. Leverage the excitement that a parent or child has prior to their first free class with more information, invites to private class whatsapp groups, more information on other relevant opportunities or other moments of connection to build a stronger relationship.

3. Make sure the first class actually feels like a first class. A trial booking shows up distinctly in the roster, so whoever's running the session can see at a glance who's trying the activity for the first time, rather than reading it off the register as just another name. That's the difference between a coach who says "welcome, glad you came" and one who has no idea it's someone's first week. The system can flag it; whether a first timer feels noticed is still down to the person running the room, but at least the information is there to act on.

4. Automate the nudge instead of relying on someone remembering to send it. This is the piece most providers do worst, and it's the piece ClassPass's own data says matters most. Enrolmy sends an automatic "your free trial has ended" email the day after a trial session, but only when it makes sense to: the family attended (no email if they were marked absent), they don't already have an active booking in that activity, and they haven't been sent one before. It's a small piece of logic, but it means the follow up lands at the moment a parent is actually deciding, not three weeks later after they've forgotten which activity it even was.

5. Make saying yes a one click job, not a negotiation. When a family decides to continue, converting them from a trial into a full booking takes a few clicks on Enrolmy, select the customer, choose Convert to Full Booking, check the term dates and session pricing, and approve the invoice. Whether it's pro rata (they only pay for sessions from here on) or full price from day one is a setting decided in advance, not a conversation an office has to have with every parent individually.

Where Enrolmy Fits

This is exactly the control Enrolmy already gives providers running Classes & Lessons or Team Sports activities: a trial session that's actually free (or no-obligation), with the provider deciding what happens next, full price from the first regular session, or pro rata billing to ease the family in. The trial mechanic and discount codes are deliberately separate levers, not the same setting wearing two hats.

Discount codes: Direct Discounts (attached to a specific family), Early Bird Discount, Full Week Discount, and Prompt Payment Discount, sit alongside free trials rather than inside them. A provider who wants "10% off if you commit to the full term" reaches for a discount. A provider who wants "come try Tuesday's class before you decide" reaches for a trial. Most providers end up using both, for different moments in the same family's decision.

None of it is compulsory. A provider who's never needed a free trial to fill a class doesn't have to touch the setting. But for the ones weighing up whether "come try it first" would fill more spots than "book the full term," the capability, and the follow up workflow around it, is already there, switched on when it's wanted.

Curious whether a trial offer would move the needle on your own enrolment numbers? Book a 20-minute Enrolmy demo → and we'll show you how trial spots, the automatic follow up, and discount codes work together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do free trials actually increase sign ups, or just give away spots that would have sold anyway? The ClassPass data suggests the opposite risk is more common, trials that don't get proper attention (timing, follow up, a clear next step) underperform, not trials that exist at all. The fix is controlling how many trial spots are available and following up well, not avoiding trials altogether. This is where kids activity booking software like Enrolmy comes in, the choice for school aged childcare providers to offer free trials, multiple ways is already built into the system. Better to have the capability available and not need it.

What's the biggest challenge with free trials for kids programmes? The follow up. A free class with no structured next step relies on a parents’ memory and motivation levels to book again on their own. An automatic, well-timed "here's how to continue" message, sent only when it's actually relevant, does the work a busy office can't do manually for every family.

Should a trial be free or discounted? Both have a place. A fully free trial removes all friction but can undersell the activity's value; a low cost taster signals more commitment and, per fitness industry data, often converts at least as well. Enrolmy supports a fully free trial or a no obligation one where families are charged if they continue, worth testing which fits a given activity.

Does offering a free trial cannibalise revenue from families who'd have booked anyway? Only if every activity is open to trial regardless of demand, with no cap. Reserve trials for the activities that need new families, cap the number of trial spots, and limit eligibility to new customers if existing families are already converting on their own.

Can I run a discount code and a free trial at the same time? Yes, they solve different problems. A trial answers "will my child like this?" A discount answers "is this the right time to commit?" Providers often use both across different activities in the same term.

Does Enrolmy Software have free trials for kids activity providers? Yes, Enrolmy Software has had the capability for kids activity providers to turn on free trials for their programmes. This has been running in the system for years and is a well loved feature for our customers.