If you are a business offering a free trial to your customers, you are eyeing for a conversion. But how do you increase free trial conversions in such cases? Let’s find out!
For any organization, it is crucial to get a high conversion rate from the free trial users. This serves as a low-risk entry point for potential customers where they can evaluate benefits and understand functionality. With successful conversions, companies get a broader user base and increased revenue.
Moreover, free trial-related activities offer valuable insights into user behavior that companies can utilize to improve marketing strategies. Overall, it influences long-term customer relationships and enables competitive positioning in the market.
However, it is not easy to convert free trial users into customers. Companies face challenges like being unable to communicate the value proposition to the customers and offering a free trial for a short time. During the trial period, it becomes difficult to effectively nurture these leads.
These challenges should not stop you from offering a free trial for your products. The following strategies can easily eliminate these challenges.
Strategies to Increase Free Trial Conversion Rate
Understanding Your Audience
If you want more free trial users to purchase your product, you must identify your ideal customer and explain how your product can resolve their problem. Thus, you can attract more of them to the free trial program and increase your chance of conversion.
Who is Your Ideal Customer?
Knowing the attributes of your products and services, you can easily identify your target audience. Try to bring in more of the ideal customers for the free trial. After identifying the demographic and other attributes of this customer base, promote the free trial to them using engaging content and promotions.
What Motivates Your Users?
A free trial user must have at least one reason to buy your products, and you need to highlight that to them. You can also use surveys and polls on your converted customers to find out the most useful features of each product.
For example, if freelancers purchase your product for unlimited email campaigns, you must highlight that feature to every freelancer opting in for the free trial.
Optimizing the Trial Experience
The decision to purchase your product depends largely on the experience of using the free trials. For that, you must clearly communicate the problems your product can resolve. To make the trial more relevant to the users, make sure they can onboard easily, get support from your customer care when needed, and have educational resources handy.
Tips for a User-Friendly Onboarding Experience
- Simplify the registration process with minimum information
- Minimize onboarding steps to prevent drop-offs
- Provide interactive product walkthroughs and tutorials
- Incorporate progress indicators for user guidance
- Offer contextual help and tips
- Actively collect feedback during and after onboarding
- Always experiment with A/B testing for optimization
- Use email sequences to complement in-app onboarding
Strategies for Keeping Users Active and Interested
Send Personalized Emails With Tips and Best Practices
If you can send personalized emails to the free trial users, it will keep them interested in your product and brand. Include best practices and tips regarding their problems so that they find the emails useful.
Implement Time-Sensitive Discounts for Conversion
You need to show the users the urgency of buying your product. If you offer them a discount deal that ends in a few days or hours, they might opt for it.
Offer Limited-Time Access to Premium Features
If you are offering your prime features for a long time, users might get the job done within the trial period. So, you should offer those features for a short time so that they become interested in buying the product.
Provide Relevant Content Through Tutorials and Webinars
Another way to encourage customers to purchase is to make them watch your tutorials and websites. This will make them aware of the advantages of your products or services and work as a booster in your marketing strategy.
Have a Progress Tracking System To Showcase Their Achievements
During the trial period, it is better to have a progress-tracking system in place. This will enable the free trial users to learn what they have achieved using the product. Companies can also make it more interesting through gamification.
Offer Prompt Customer Support To Address Queries
Customer service plays a great role in attracting your prospects to become customers. During the trial period, the customers should have their queries resolved quickly. It will give them a positive impression of your company’s support service.
Effective Communication and Support
Every customer wants to have a business relationship with a company that can offer them timely support. So, organizations have to prove their worth by having an efficient support team in place. Also, the help should be available to the customers through different channels.
Effective Communication Channels
When someone is using your product’s free trial, they may want to communicate with the company with technical and general queries. You should establish robust communication channels, including emails, notifications, and support, for them.
During the trial period, you must continuously contact customers through email campaigns to deliver pertinent information. These emails should also contain call-to-action buttons for instant conversion. Here is a list of top CTAs to boost conversions that you can use for different scenarios.
There should also be timely notifications to remind users of the free trial length, which will encourage them to make positive decisions.
Companies should also set up support channels that offer quick and responsive assistance to the users. By facilitating clear, concise, and effective communication across these channels, businesses can ensure that users understand the product’s functionalities and do not have any confusion.
Offer Exceptional Customer Support
Free trial users should be able to reach your customer service without fail and get their queries addressed for a frictionless conversion process. This also helps to build trust and encourages users to convert to a paid plan.
Apart from offering help to the users, your support team can initiate communication to offer assistance and ensure they are making the most of the trial. With such proactive engagement, companies can show that they care about the user experience.
Tracking the User Behavior and Feedback
This data-driven approach allows you to increase free trial conversion through tracking user behavior and feedback. You can use different analytical tools to track the usage patterns of the users and identify potential bottlenecks.
Another way to do it is to use an in-app tracking system. This will help you understand feature engagement and drop-off points. You can analyze the data to optimize the process and address customers’ pain points.
Additionally, you may gather their feedback about their experience through surveys, polls, in-app prompts, or even direct communication. Based on the collected data, you can customize your strategy and align the product more closely with user expectations.
Implementing Free Trial Conversion Strategies
There are many things you can do to increase your conversion rate from the free trial for your business. Take a look at the strategies you need to implement for more conversion.
Incentivizing Conversion
You can implement strategic incentivization to convert more free trial users into customers. This strategy includes exclusive content drops, tiered trial access, and personalized rewards. Thus, you can perform conversion rate optimization for your business.
Transparent Pricing
Complex pricing often stops customers from purchasing your product. If you want more free trial users to get converted into customers, your subscription plans should be straightforward and transparent.
Value Proposition
Instead of mentioning the features, you should be able to convey the impact your product will have on the customer’s problem. Demonstrate the problem-solving ability of your product so that they know that subscription is not going to be a mere financial transaction but rather an investment in success.
Identifying Common Conversion Activities
This means figuring out which common action most converted customers did during their trial period. While this varies from person to person, identifying these activities lets you prioritize the customers from the funnel.
Promote Limited-Time Deals
Companies can offer limited-time special deals to the free trial users. This will create a sense of urgency among the leads, and they will purchase to grab the opportunity.
Case Studies
#1: Groove HQ
Groove HQ, custom support software, did some experiments with their pricing and got the result. They tested with various pricing models and added a page for pricing comparison. However, this was not enough for their business goals.
Hence, they asked for customer feedback and chose to add some unique features to their pricing model accordingly. They opted for a freemium offering with per-agent pricing, along with the facility to have part-time agents. Their highly flexible strategy increased their revenue by 25%.
#2: BigCommerce
BigCommerce platform tracked the trial performance to gather granular metrics and analytics for persona-specific conversion rates. It focused on targeted marketing to the highest-value audience.
It also set up a custom free-trial dashboard on Salesforce to make better decisions about the pipeline. Moreover, Bigcommerce shifted its focus to potential customers with higher lifetime value. The result is a 14% increase in the paid conversion rates.
FAQs
A good conversion rate depends on your industry and product. Generally, a free trial conversion rate between 15% to 30% is considered good for all industries.
Here is the formula to calculate free trial conversion:
(Number of paid users/Number of free trial users) x 100
To convert your customers to opt for free trials, you need to create an attractive landing page, highlight product benefits, offer a clear value proposition, and create engaging content with CTA.
Final Words
Free trials allow users to confirm whether your product is capable of meeting their requirements. Hence, with a useful product, a free trial takes you one step closer to turning prospects into customers or clients. But, you should not stop by creating a feature-rich product.
In this article, I have discussed some crucial actions you must take to make more free trial users purchase your product.