If you offer digital products or have a membership site that provides valuable content on a regular basis, you can place access limits for your free subscribers that encourage them to eventually sign up for full access to paid content.
Even if your product or service inhabits a small industry or tiny niche, you still probably have multiple customer segments. Each segment has its own problems, needs, and preferences for a product or service like yours.
The purpose of your free trial is to help your users realize value in your product. Think about how you can show that your product is making the lives of your customers better. That way you can make sure each customer achieves whatever they find valuable. How do you break customers into segments early?
Alternatively, you can create a branching onboarding process where the first step asks the user in a straightforward way how they intend to use the product. For instance, you might add a field to your payment form that asks for their company size. Depending on their answer, you could funnel them into a different onboarding process so your free trial meets their needs.
WP Simple Pay allows you to easily add customized fields to your subscription payment forms. You can collect the information you need using dropdowns, text fields, and checkboxes. This is especially important if your product or service has a lot of features or solves a lot of problems.
Many businesses make the mistake of waiting until the very end of the free trial to ask the user to purchase the product or service. The purpose of a free trial is to deliver the user to the moment they first realize value with the product.
That moment is the best time to ask for the sale, regardless of how long it took to get there. This is the perfect time to ask them to buy. If they refuse to buy, you can ask them why before the free trial is over. Oftentimes, people forget about their trial and let the time expire.
You need to reach beyond your product and create additional touch points with your users to remind them that you exist. This could be as simple as sending a sequence of emails with deep links that push them along the onboarding process. Or, you might reach out to them with an email to introduce them to the feature personally.
In a red ocean, prospects already know how your product can help them, and a self-service model is advantageous - it can widen your funnel, decrease your CAC, and help you expand globally in a fraction of the time. Take live-chat software as an example: When it first came to market, most companies started with traditional sales- and marketing-led GTM strategies.
After the category matured, however, it became almost impossible to find a live chat application without a self-service model. For example, when we first launched an event app in , no one knew they wanted it - a self-serve product didn't make sense.
Fast forward to , and self-serve is now a valid GTM strategy, though customers still expect heavy service support. If we had launched self-serve back then, we would've failed. In my opinion, self-serve is the only distribution worth undertaking once the market is mature. Makers are people who try before they buy.
They want to understand what a product is really about and how it can solve their problems. Often, makers are individual contributors to a business. They execute on the business strategy. They are doers. Shakers are members of high-level management i.
This is known as a top-down marketing approach. As a result, shakers are often inundated with countless sales emails and privy to demo requests.
Because if you pair a top-down marketing approach with a self-service model, your demo requests will outperform the self-service arm of the business. This outcome is true even with a top-performing free-trial or freemium model.
Your marketing approach needs to sync with your self-service model. Previously, at Vidyard, we launched a freemium product known as GoVideo while keeping the main arm of the business, a top-down marketing approach.
If you target makers, leading with a free trial or freemium model may work really well. These are end-users who can experience the core value of your product and make a convincing case to shakers. Generally, a top-down marketing approach works well with a sales- or marketing-led GTM, while a bottom-up approach works best with a product-led approach.
To create a successful product-led business, you need a quick time-to-value, which will increase product adoption and activation rates. To break this down into a science, BJ Fogg from Stanford University did an incredible study that gives us a model to reduce the time-to-value in any product through motivation, ability, and triggers.
The Fogg model below helps us understand the four business scenarios that affect whether people adopt a new target behavior in a product. Reduce friction.
While we can try to motivate users, it's often easier and more cost-effective to optimize your self-service experience. Any product that significantly reduces the time-to-value and steps to complete a task will enjoy high adoption rates. This sounds obvious, but many companies unknowingly add friction to a buying process by doing things like:.
At Vidyard, we tested this strategy by launching GoVideo and refining our freemium go-to-market strategy. It was far from perfect when we launched, but we were able to improve it and acquire ,s of new users in the process.
This, in turn, helped the business prove that the model was effective and build a small in-house team that knew how to bring a self-service product to market. If you have a product with lots of features, this strategy can work great. As long as your freemium version is valuable, you can layer on free-trial upgrades within the freemium product.
HubSpot has been doing this successfully for a while now. When you sign up for the free marketing and sales tools, you get immediate value from the product. But, as you get more value from the free product, they tempt you with free-trial landing pages for blocked features.
This is great because it allows the user to experience the new feature for a limited amount of time before upgrading. This freemium product sits in Gmail and gives you information on each lead in your inbox.
There are other ways you can slice and dice hybrid models, too, but these three are the most common. If your product does something much better than your market and you charge significantly less, a dominant growth strategy might be a good fit for you.
Both freemium and free trial models support the dominant growth strategy exceptionally well; both are cost-effective customer acquisition models. Differentiated growth requires you to do a job better than the competition and charge significantly more.
Both free trials and demos work great with a differentiated approach, but due to market-size limitations, a freemium model is unlikely to work in this environment. This type of free trial allows users to try the full benefits of the paid plans for a limited time.
Once the free trial period is over, they are downgraded to the free version of the product with limited features. Offering a reverse trial is a fantastic way to show users the true value of your product.
With reverse trials, the right audience will get hooked on the product during the free trial experience. The product adoption also goes up if the trial requires users to commit their data, such as adding team members or creating workflows.
In your marketing, make sure you include language that reminds the user of what they lost. It offers a day free trial for 2 of its paid versions:. Pipedrive CRM does the same for all its paid plans:. Pro-tip: Another great way to improve free trial signups with reverse trials is to offer product tours and walkthroughs.
It can be a simple overview of your SaaS interface and all the features it offers. Or it can be a 2-minute demo video that explains your product to first-time visitors. After you figure out who your best customers are and what resonates with them the most, you can build landing pages specific to their intent.
Landing pages are great customer acquisition tools. When you optimize them properly, they can also rank in search engine results pages. It helps you attract prospects who look up search terms related to the problems your product solves. You can create separate landing pages catering to different buyer personas you want to target.
If you just have a single buyer persona, optimizing your homepage will do the job. To create a landing page aimed at increasing free trial conversions, check out the following articles:.
Make your landing page even more irresistible by including product benefits, trust seals, social proof , and customer testimonials. Here are a couple of real-life examples.
Buffer includes the names of some of its clients and their testimonials as social proof:. Freshbooks does a better job. Their free trial signup page addresses 7 major things succinctly:.
If your Saas website is built on WordPress, go with SeedProd. Marketing stands or falls on the effectiveness of your call to action, the marketing element that gets your visitors to click. CTA might seem like a small nuance in the big scheme of things. But even the smallest factor, like the color of the CTA button, impacts conversions.
Here are 6 best practices to create great CTAs :. When you apply the right principles to your CTA, you will:. You can ask people to try out your product, sign up for a demo, or other wording that might work better. For example, ActiveCampaign uses Get Started :.
Sendbird uses 3 different CTA buttons back to back, asking you to sign up, talk to sales, or request a demo:. If you use them well, popups can convert better than CTA buttons. If your landing page or exciting CTAs are failing to drive conversions, try popups.
You can get started with OptinMonster to create enticing popups for your website. That will make them leave your site and never sign up. OptinMonster lets you control that only interested people can see your free trial popup campaign.
There are several ways you can enable this with OptinMonster. You can:. As an example, Lifter LMS designed the following popup in OptinMonster. For instance, creating a long signup form is a turnoff for a lot of users. Be thoughtful about how much information you need to collect when creating a signup or demo request form.
Lead segmentation helps you offer personalized experiences to boost conversions. However, long forms can be counterproductive to the self-service user experience. If you just want to get people to sign up, you need less information from them. For example, Brevo just asks for an email address on its free trial signup page:.
Once you get users to sign up for free, you have enough time to nurture them and extract the information you want. Below are a few tips to make your new user signup form simple:. This last point is extremely important. Some companies ask for credit card details when you sign up.
Free trials offer a low-risk opportunity for customers to explore the value that your product or service has to offer. It is a great way to A free trial provides customers with a hands-on experience with your product or service, which can help them better understand its value and how A free trial lets users experience the product first-hand, understand its coupons, discounts, et cetera), and offering a smooth onboarding experience
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