Does your SaaS enterprise have a free trial advertising technique? Are you struggling to transform free customers into paid ones?
In line with current analysis, 51.2% of free trial customers don’t convert into paying prospects on common.
In the event you provide free trials to get individuals to purchase your product, it’s necessary to ensure your free-to-paid conversion technique is working. In any other case, you’ll waste your money and time on customers who gained’t purchase from you.
However what’s a great benchmark totally free trial conversions? In line with RevenueCat’s benchmark examine:
- Apps with the 4-day (or fewer) trials have a 30% conversion fee.
- Apps with 5-9-day trials have a forty five% conversion fee.
- Apps with 10-16-day trials have a 44% conversion fee.
- Apps with 17-32-day trials have a forty five% conversion fee.
Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures warns that something lower than a 25% free-to-paid conversion fee means your advertising isn’t working. The excellent news is that even a small enhance in your free-to-paid conversion fee can result in an enormous income increase.
On this submit, we’re going to share 19 greatest ideas that you should use to enhance your free trial advertising technique. Listed here are the methods that we’ll cowl on this submit:
- Use Urgency in Your Advertising and marketing
- Supply Incentives to Improve
- Use Value Anchors
- Shorten the Free Trial Interval
- Leverage Welcome Emails
- Nurture New Customers with E mail Advertising and marketing
- Embrace Cancellations in Your Supply
- Observe Engagement Metrics
- Phase Your E mail Listing
- Set off Conduct-Based mostly Emails
- Ship ‘Aha’ Moments Quicker
- Be Aware About Asking for Credit score Card Particulars
- Use Progressive Profiling
- Personalize Your Advertising and marketing
- Use Compelling CTAs
- Embrace the Proper Options In Your Free Trial
- Break up Check Your Campaigns
- Clarify the Product Advantages to Customers
- Assist Customers Uncover Your Greatest Options
1. Use Urgency in Your Advertising and marketing
The shortage precept states that limiting the provision of a product will increase its demand. As an illustration, limited-time gives can enhance conversions by as much as 33%.
Utilizing urgency in your advertising can skyrocket your conversions as a result of it triggers concern of lacking out (FOMO). To make use of urgency in your SaaS free trial advertising technique, you may apply one of many following concepts:
Ship emails to customers reminding them that their free trial is about to run out.
Set off popups with limited-time gives to encourage individuals to improve.
Use a social notification device to indicate different prospects are shopping for from you.
Set off a countdown timer or a web site notification banner on the app dashboard to speak that their free trial is ending. You should use OptinMonster’s on-site retargeting for this.
2. Supply Incentives to Improve
Providing individuals a reward to improve improves your free-to-paid advertising technique drastically. Listed here are a couple of tricks to make your incentives extra interesting to customers:
- Supply new customers a bonus for upgrading to a paid model.
- Presents reductions to on-the-fence customers. For greatest outcomes, construct urgency to your provide.
- Supply unengaged customers a trial extension.
You’ll be able to simply use OptinMonster to indicate the suitable provide to every group of customers. In the event you’ve segmented your e mail checklist, you may ship totally different emails to totally different person teams.
In every e mail, embody a hyperlink that subscribers can comply with to take up your provide. Subsequent, use OptinMonster’s referrer detection characteristic to indicate a focused popup coupon marketing campaign relying on which hyperlink they comply with.
We’ll speak extra about segmenting your emails in only a bit.
3. Use Value Anchors
Value anchoring is a psychological tactic that you should use in a few other ways.
You’ll be able to present the best subscription plan first to attract a distinction with different, lesser-priced plans. By introducing the best plan first, you give customers an anchor for reference.
In case your highest plan prices $55/month and the second-highest plan prices $25/month, the latter will appear extra affordable by comparability.
One other strategy to apply value anchoring is to position your greatest paid subscription plan between the free model and the highest-priced plan. You’ll be able to see this on a whole lot of SaaS web sites that sandwich their best-selling plans between different plans.
Right here’s an instance from Apollo.io:
Lusha goes a step additional. It anchors its pricing towards its closest, costlier opponents:
Making use of value anchoring makes one plan look extra engaging than others. It may possibly additionally make it easier to underline the worth of the paid variations, particularly in case you additionally embody a characteristic checklist.
4. Shorten the Free Trial Interval
Bear in mind RevenueCat’s benchmark examine that we mentioned earlier? The size of your trial interval impacts your free-to-paid conversion technique. Different research additionally again up this discovering.
Totango’s knowledge reveals that 41% of corporations provide free trials beneath the 30-day vary. Nevertheless, that doesn’t imply you must comply with the norm.
That’s as a result of nearly all of customers don’t take 30 days to determine in the event that they want a product. Most individuals make up their minds in about 3 days, says CrazyEgg.
Shut.io recommends that 99% of B2B SaaS corporations ought to provide a 14-day free trial or much less. That’s loads of time for customers to check your product a number of instances over.
5. Leverage Welcome Emails
Utilizing welcome emails in your free trial advertising technique generally is a game-changer. Think about these mind-blowing statistics about welcome emails:
Sending a welcome e mail is an effective way to construct relationships together with your trial customers. Listed here are 3 examples of actually good welcome emails that have interaction first-time customers:
Savee sends a minimalistic welcome e mail for customers to decide on what they wish to do subsequent:
Delicate Providers encourages its customers to decide in to different content material:
Aeropress features a low cost code of their welcome e mail:
Wish to get extra concepts on tips on how to use welcome emails nicely? Listed here are 3 ideas to enhance product adoption and engagement:
- Ship sources new customers can use to get began together with your SaaS product.
- Let customers know what to anticipate from you (and ensure you ship on that).
- Ask them why they signed as much as enhance your free trial advertising technique.
Professional-tip: For greatest outcomes, don’t upsell your paid plans within the very first e mail customers obtain. That’ll most definitely annoy them. As an alternative, ship an e mail addressed by an actual human to foster a relationship with prospects from day one.
For extra concepts, learn our posts on tips on how to write excellent welcome emails and the perfect welcome e mail examples.
6. Nurture New Customers with E mail Advertising and marketing
E mail advertising is a superb device to onboard new customers, have interaction with them, and convert them into paid prospects. Listed here are some findings to remind you simply how highly effective e mail advertising is:
- E mail advertising has an ROI of 3800%.
- Consumers changing via e mail spend 138% greater than those that don’t obtain e mail gives.
- The typical order worth of an e mail sale is at the least 3 instances larger than that of social media.
The welcome emails that we mentioned earlier ought to ideally be the primary sequence in your e mail advertising workflow. WPForms runs a lead nurturing marketing campaign providing one thing of worth to new customers with every e mail.
You should use OptinMonster’s checklist segmentation characteristic to personalize your e mail communication and increase app conversions.
7. Embrace Cancellations in Your Supply
Assuring customers that they will cancel their subscription at any time is yet one more strategy to enhance your free-trial-to-paid conversion fee.
This technique wants you to consider in your product. You’ll be able to confidently provide cancellations in case your present customers aren’t churning at a excessive fee.
However in case you have an up-and-coming product and also you’re nervous about churn, you must in all probability check this technique earlier than making use of it. Churn is inevitable in SaaS enterprise, and so long as it’s throughout the 2-8% vary, you don’t have to fret.
GetResponse talks about canceling a subscription anytime the customers need proper on their homepage:
To keep away from churn by way of cancellations, ask prospects to fill out a buyer suggestions survey as a part of their exit. It’ll make it easier to perceive what went incorrect of their person expertise as a way to repair these points.
There’s one other aspect to providing no-risk cancellations. You should use e mail checklist segmentation to nurture misplaced customers via win-back campaigns. Groove used this technique to win again the two% of customers it had misplaced earlier.
8. Observe Engagement Metrics
Solely 15-20% of free trial customers will convert to precise customers. These are the customers your free trial advertising technique must give attention to.
To do that successfully, you could know the way they’re utilizing your product. It’ll make it easier to provide them the instruments and expertise they should succeed together with your product.
However how can we get the product utilization knowledge? Listed here are 3 instruments that may make it easier to with it:
Mixpanel and Amplitude provide free plans so that you can check the product earlier than deciding which one you want greatest.
9. Phase Your E mail Listing
E mail checklist segmentation permits you to nurture the 80% free trial customers who don’t convert instantly. Analysis reveals that:
- Segmented campaigns common 46% larger open charges.
- Segmented and customized emails additionally generate 58% of all income.
- Segmented campaigns can enhance e mail income by as much as 760%.
With segmented lists, you may convert potential prospects via customized e mail advertising campaigns. You simply should make your product extra related to their use circumstances and design separate campaigns on your most engaged, semi-engaged, and unengaged customers.
Listed here are a couple of tips about tips on how to run these campaigns:
- For many engaged customers: Ship emails with superior ideas to assist them get essentially the most out of your product.
- For semi-engaged customers: Give attention to enhancing product adoption. Embrace how-to ideas and map them to the advantages they will relate to.
- For unengaged customers: Run win-back e mail campaigns. Supply low cost codes to enhance conversions.
Professional-tip: If you wish to study extra about e mail checklist segmentation, right here 2 nice sources:
10. Set off Conduct-Based mostly Emails
One of the best ways to make individuals work together together with your emails is to make them related. An effective way to do this is to ship triggered emails somewhat than timed ones.
What’s the distinction? Timed emails are scheduled with the assistance of e mail advertising automation software program. You’ll be able to ship these emails after particular occasions just like the day customers enroll, 3 days after the signup, or proper earlier than their trial expires.
Triggered emails are mapped to person conduct. You probably have picture modifying software program, you may ship one e mail after customers full their account setup. You’ll be able to ship one other one after they’ve created their first design. The third one can go after they obtain a design. And so forth.
This makes the person expertise really feel private and will help individuals use your product higher. It may possibly lead you to enhance your buyer acquisition.
You’ll be able to ship triggered emails with the assistance of your e mail advertising software program, lead technology software program, or buyer relationship administration (CRM) software program.
11. Ship ‘Aha’ Moments Quicker
‘Aha’ moments are the experiences when customers understand simply how helpful your product is. Listed here are a couple of ‘aha’ moments examples that you could have skilled personally:
- With Airbnb, it was making your first reserving in an unique vacation spot.
- With ChatGPT, it was getting articulate solutions in return for a 1-line immediate.
- With Zoom, it may need been scheduling distant conferences through the pandemic.
A great free trial mannequin will make such moments arrive sooner. Let’s go over a couple of tricks to ship ‘aha’ moments to your trial customers.
Use in-app messages to indicate the worth of your product. Begin as quickly because the customers log in and information them to success. Right here’s an instance from Stencil.
Supply video demos, product excursions, templates, and webinars for brand spanking new customers. These assist customers velocity up their onboarding course of. Grammarly sends an e mail invitation for a webinar to customers a couple of days after they enroll.
Assist new customers with content material advertising. At OptinMonster, we provide new customers case research, in-depth guides, tutorials, and documentation to assist them get essentially the most from our software program.
Supply customers a self-serve person expertise via a searchable data base or dwell chat. Asana has a assist widget on its net app to assist its new prospects use Asana effectively.
12. Be Aware About Asking for Credit score Card Particulars
Some SaaS corporations ask for bank card info on their optout free trial signup web page. Many others don’t. So what’s the suitable means to enhance your free-to-paid conversion technique?
Totango’s benchmark knowledge reveals that:
- While you don’t ask for bank card particulars, the visitor-to-trial signups enhance by 2-10%.
- The free-to-paid account conversion fee is 50% while you ask for bank card particulars.
- However the end-to-end conversion fee (which incorporates the paid buyer retention 90 days after the free-to-paid conversion) doubles while you don’t ask for fee info.
Based mostly on these knowledge factors, it’s higher to not ask for bank card particulars. Nevertheless, we recommend utilizing A/B testing to find out what works greatest for you.
No matter what you do, ensure you let the customers know what your product prices on the finish of the trial interval. Relating to value, no one likes surprises.
Listed here are a couple of concepts to tug this off:
- Embrace the pricing web page hyperlink in your prime navigation menu.
- Embrace all the value info on the optin free trial signup web page.
- Let your free trial customers know concerning the pricing in your e mail nurture marketing campaign.
13. Use Progressive Profiling
The extra info you ask upfront, the extra you’ll flip off your guests, and so they may by no means join a free trial. A greater different is to make the signup course of easy and accumulate extra info later.
Progressive profiling is an onboarding technique that allows you to just do that. Right here’s the way it works:
- Let customers enter their identify and e mail handle to join a free trial.
- Subsequent time they log in to their account, ask for one more piece of data, corresponding to their job title or the staff measurement.
- On a later go to, provide them incentives to fill out extra data, corresponding to their cellphone quantity, location, and group identify.
With progressive profiling, you may collect all of the person info you want over time. Freshsales has mastered this tactic in its free trial advertising technique. They provide a simple signup for his or her free trial customers:
They accumulate extra info after you create an account:
You’ll be able to entry your Freshsales dashboard inside 1 minute of making an account:
They ship you an e mail afterward to get extra info from you, like your organization data, CRM knowledge, or staff measurement.
In case your web site is constructed on WordPress, you should use OptinMonster’s OnSite Retargeting™ with WPForms to place progressive profiling into apply.
Comply with the tutorial on making a person registration kind to create a free trial signup kind simply. Then use OptinMonster’s OnSite Retargeting to set off totally different varieties to customers throughout every new go to.
14. Personalize Your Advertising and marketing
Personalization goes a good distance in advertising. In line with analysis by Phase, 56% of consumers say they like shopping for from the identical manufacturers that provide customized experiences.
Whether or not it’s a welcome e mail or an in-app notification, use prospects’ names in your advertising communications.
Bear in mind OptinMonster’s welcome e mail that we mentioned earlier? It’s additionally an instance of a personalised e mail signed by our President and Co-Founder, Thomas Griffin, after first-time customers signed up with OptinMonster.
One other strategy to personalize is to indicate customers details about their exercise in your web site. For instance, you may spotlight options they’re not utilizing that would assist them use your product extra successfully.
Right here’s one such instance from Grammarly:
You can too use OptinMonster’s page-level concentrating on to indicate related info primarily based on the place customers are in your web site. If customers have efficiently began to make use of your product, you may pop up a hyperlink to a tutorial to assist them take the following step.
15. Use Compelling CTAs
The decision to motion (CTA) is a very powerful side of your advertising marketing campaign and is the distinction between shedding a sale versus changing an informal customer. A great CTA drives larger conversions and helps you obtain different advertising objectives.
Usually, a fantastic CTA:
- Is brief however descriptive.
- Creates urgency in individuals.
- Reveals clear advantages of taking motion.
Utilizing engaging CTAs in emails and different advertising campaigns can persuade free trial customers to take the following step of their person journey. Evernote highlights the benefit of enhancing productiveness together with a 40% low cost provide as a CTA of their e mail:
HubSpot reminds the customers of the worth of accelerating the lead insights of their e mail headline:
Professional-tip: Wish to dive deeper into the nuances of crafting nice CTAs? Obtain the cheat sheet on tips on how to create the proper name to motion and find out about the perfect CTA button colours to get extra clicks.
16. Embrace the Proper Options In Your Free Trial
Take note of what options you wish to provide in your free trial advertising technique.
As an illustration, many SaaS merchandise restrict their free trial expertise to supply extraordinarily fundamental functionalities. But when your free trial is restricted, customers gained’t know the way highly effective your product is.
And in the event that they don’t know the way good your paid options are, there’s no incentive for them to transform.
Yocale recommends that you simply make your freemium product full-featured and embody even the most recent product releases within the trial model. Nevertheless, Good Firm suggests you allow in a couple of ache factors in order that there’s an incentive for customers to improve.
In fact, there’s a center floor. You may give your trial customers a glimpse of your premium options however set a utilization restrict. ConvertKit has lots of its greatest options accessible totally free, however solely in case you have beneath 1,000 subscribers.
17. Break up Check Your Campaigns
One of the best ways to know in case your free trial advertising technique is working is to get knowledge. And A/B break up testing is an effective way to get that knowledge.
Break up testing helps you:
- Eradicate guesswork about your free trial advertising technique.
- Create a greater and simpler onboarding expertise for brand spanking new customers.
- Establish which varieties of messages your customers reply to.
We’ve constructed break up testing proper into OptinMonster so you may simply check your campaigns with out shopping for a Third-party device. And it’s very easy to make use of OptionMonster’s A/B testing characteristic.
Right here’s a 2-minute video that explains tips on how to create A/B testing in OptinMonster in lower than 2 minutes:
18. Clarify the Product Advantages to Customers
Speaking your product’s worth proposition to potential prospects is an efficient means to enhance your free-to-paid conversion technique. Listed here are a couple of methods to do that:
- Use language that reveals why your product is the suitable match for the customers.
- Present prospects what their life will seem like after the improve.
- Use the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework to grasp customers’ wants. Set up how your product helps them meet their wants.
- Use social proof, corresponding to buyer testimonials, to focus on why paid customers love your product.
Right here’s an instance from Athletic Greens that sends this to their e mail subscribers:
The e-mail additionally gives extra perks to make subscribers convert shortly:
And it ends with a testimonial from an present subscriber:
You’ll be able to apply the identical technique in your web site copy or product dashboard to enhance your free-to-paid conversion technique.
19. Assist Customers Uncover Your Greatest Options
Monitoring engagement metrics tells you when customers usually are not adopting key options that may assist them fall in love together with your product.
After you have this info, you may tweak your e mail and in-app advertising campaigns to focus on these options. Right here’s an instance from Asana highlighting totally different points of process monitoring:
Professional-tip: Wish to know what your customers assume are your greatest options? Attempt gathering suggestions out of your present customers. You don’t want a product analytics device like MixPanel or Amplitude for it. Use OptinMonster to create survey popups to study extra about your customers’ preferences.
Put these Free-to-Paid Conversion Methods to Check
And that’s it! Apply these free-to-paid conversion methods to interrupt down the limitations which might be stopping your free customers from changing into paid customers.
If you wish to study extra about tips on how to leverage free trials to develop your small business, listed here are a couple of sources:
Wish to check if a web site popup can increase your free trial advertising technique? Be part of OptinMonster in the present day and launch your first marketing campaign inside minutes.
Hello, I am a author and content material marketer with 10+ years of expertise. Through the years, I’ve helped a number of B2B SaaS manufacturers develop their on-line presence and get extra prospects. At OptinMonster, I write about all issues advertising — starting from how-to guides to the best-of instruments that can assist you enhance your e mail advertising, lead technology, and web site conversion campaigns.
