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It’s every company’s goal to get as many conversions as possible when they launch a free trial. After all, the whole point is to pique a lead’s interest and demonstrate your offering’s value, so that you can sign on another paying customer.
Of course, the success of any free trial is greatly impacted by the marketing behind it.
In this guide, we’ll help you set up a highly converting free trial marketing strategy and explain how to track metrics using your tool of choice.
If you’d like to see what Baremetrics can do, start your 14-day free trial today.
How Many Free Trial Users Will Convert?
If you spend any amount of time coming up with a free trial marketing strategy, you’ll be quick to run across a couple of statistics regarding their efficacy.
One of the most-quoted studies on the topic is credited to Totango, who found that about 15% of users for opt-in free trials converted to paying customers.
Meanwhile, roughly 50% of opt-out trial users converted. Reports from individual companies peg the number anywhere between 10% and 25%.
1. Plan Your Approach
The first step to creating a great free trial is to plan out your approach. This requires you to answer questions like the following.
- Will you ask for credit card details at the start of the trial? You can see as many as 10% more sign-ups if you don’t, but conversion rates tend to be higher when you do.
- What information will you ask for during sign-up? Keeping the process as simple as possible will result in more sign-ups. It’s best to use progressive profiling instead of asking a bunch of questions in the registration form.
- How long will your trial last? Most SaaS companies default to 30 days, but no one takes that long to make a decision.
Knowing your customer base and niche will be very helpful as you answer these questions and begin to design your free trial offering (and how you’ll market it).
Experts suggest a trial of no more than 14 days. Try the 14-day free trial of Baremetrics and receive insights into what’s powering your growth most!
If you’re curious about how your churn stacks up with similar companies, our Open Benchmarks show you average churn rates based on average revenue per user.
2. Identify Your Free Trial’s Perks
Whether you’re offering an “all-access” free trial or one that simply unlocks the core features of your offering, it’s important to go ahead and list out all the perks of your free trial.
These are all details you might look to include in your marketing copy when pushing your trial to new users.
Examples include:
- No credit card required.
- Unlimited access for X days.
- Dedicated onboarding specialist.
- 60-second sign-up process.
Some or all of these examples may apply, but this list is just a basic one. Spend some time thinking about what makes your trial (and service in general) unique so that you can push these details when marketing it.
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3. Write a Roadmap for Communication & Follow-Up
Getting people to sign up for a free trial usually isn’t too difficult. In fact, with “freebie chasers,” it can be far too easy. What matters to you is qualifying new users so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the ones who might convert.
A major part of that is using the right communication to see who’s engaging and then keeping them engaged.
- Design and personalize your email sequence to give tips and make your service team readily available.
- Time follow-up emails, to complement a user’s progressive engagement as they explore the free trial and get to know your platform.
- Make one-to-one outreach part of the plan, having your service reps target the most engaged users directly.
Throughout the trial, customer service should be readily available to support users and answer their questions.
Read more:Emails We Send to Engage Customers
4. Track The Right Metrics to Gain Insight
Part of ensuring a high number of conversions is monitoring your trial insights so that you know exactly if a person is using the features, what they’re doing with them, and signs that may mean they need help or they’re losing interest.
Trial insights from Baremetrics are powerful in doing all of that for you.
Interested in learning more about Baremetrics and how it can help you ensure successful free trials?
Click here to start your free trial and start testing the platform for yourself.
