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It’s time to dedicate a little blog space to another Mountain View, CA internet startup that has some relevance to both web marketers and consumers alike. That company is TrialPay. Their focus is customer acquisition for primarily subscription-based web services (that’s where the trial comes in). They currently have $15 million in hard earned venture capital and their gearing up for a significant change in the way the consumer bargains with your checkout process.

In my last post, I talked about Fetchback and their retargeting, so we’ve covered the process of getting quality traffic and repeat customers. TrialPay is the other half of the puzzle, because it’s sole focus is sealing the deal. Getting people to visit your site is a challenge, but turning those visitors into customers is an even higher mountain to climb. With TrialPay your transaction flow is better equipped to reel in a visitor once they bite. The secret is to entice the user with a better offer to save them from changing their mind. It’s essentially like programming your order form to haggle with a customer who finds themselves on the fence. How does it do this? By presenting them with a free trial to your website in exchange for taking part in another program TrialPay is offering.

Here’s a scenario, say you’re looking for market statistics on a company so you turn to Vault.com for some data. In order to get the data you are looking for, you need a gold membership which costs $45 for 3 months of access. You don’t really need 3 months of access for something that takes 20 minutes and $45 is a lot of money. You sit on the site’s checkout page where you deliberate and stew over whether or not to just sign up until you finally come to your senses and slide your mouse over to that “X” of freedom. Instead of closing, a popup from TrialPay presents you with an offer to sweeten the deal. A free trial at Vault on them if you sign up for Netflix today. It’s the holiday season and your aunt needs a present, so you scoop her up a year of Netflix and your Vault info is on the house!

The “buy something, get something else” offer is far from a new tactic. The concept is simple, we’ll cut our profits by offering you something extra because its better than getting nothing. The innovative part of TrialPay is two-fold, it is automated and it is conditional. It allows you to automatically give incentives to customers that need the extra push for conversion, while not affecting people who already find your offerings compelling enough to participate. It’s a step towards catering your offer to suit the client needs, without any intervention or “selling” on your part. Feel free to check out the TrialPay site, they have information for buyers and sellers. Who knows, you may be able to pick yourself a little something extra.