To understand SaaS free trial in the best manner, let me give you an example. Draw a picture in your mind where you are an ice-cream seller!

Bear with me for a minute. Now you know that you have the tastiest ice-cream on the planet. But how would you convince your customers The same?

That is where you offer them a free scoop of your best flavors. This is a strategy in the marketing business. You prove your customers that your ice-cream is the best and they tend to buy after the free scoop. Or sometimes if that is not the result, you might have to push a little extra, urging them to buy your tasty ice-cream.

It is when SaaS free trial comes into play. It is in your best interest to enhance your SaaS free trial conversion rates. It is easy. The more is the converted customers from free trial users, larger is the profit you make. These seven battle-tested suggestions are going to help you achieve so:

Begin with a Smaller Time Frame

You might be wondering about how long should a free trial last for? Should it be, say, a month like in the case of Netflix and Amazon prime or should it be even lesser.

Start by exploring what do people do in that time frame. Generally, people will not need a complete month to decide whether they want to go with the service or not. When you put pressure on a prospect, they are more likely to make a decision at that point.

Hence, it is your best bet to first test with your customers to figure out which works best.

Avoid Card Credentials during Sign-up

There is something you must keep in mind in a SaaS free trial. One is when you ask for the customer’s credit card information at the peak of a sign-up, there are high chances they might take a backseat. However, refraining from doing so, will mostly enable them to go ahead.

Note the larger is the customers you pull in, the higher are the chances you bag a loyal customer. That being said, getting more people is one of the SaaS trial tree best practices as it renders greater chances for conversion.

Common Conversion Activities

Simply put, the activities that paying customers do while a free trial is common conversation activity. Basically, you delve into historical data and discover how they have completed the account set up. How much time do they spend on the app?

Take as much time you need to identify what are the activities the free trial users need before they convert. Then you can use that knowledge to start tailoring your moves to convert them eventually.

Market Personalized Lifecycle

Based on where your customers stand in the sales funnel, you can market the right message to them. It centers on SaaS free trial, customer onboarding, customer engagement, conversion and finally maintenance.

To fuel retention and conversion, you might want to begin with delivering content duly designed for these areas. It not only moves them towards your ultimate target of conversion but also ensures that they stick around.

Or for the ones who have completed the free trial but did not convert, you may lure them with an email that highlights lesser-known engaging features. Who knows, that might act as a nudge?

For this, you have to identify the interest of your customers and segment them accordingly. Once you are done with that, send them enough appealing content – this is again one of the SaaS free trial best practices.  

A Little beyond the App

When you design your free trial, consider the requisites first. You will have to adapt to a rather creative way for your prospect to use your product. At the end of the day, it all comes down to how well you have engaged your customer in your application.

Think beyond the app and consider everything that turns this free trial user become a paying loyal prospect who sticks around for quite a long period of time.

Dig Reasons behind No Conversion

If you see that some of your prospects aren’t converting yet, you might as well do the easiest thing that is ask!
Ask them via an automated mail to respond to a quick survey about what caused the hindrance. It needs to be seen that at first, you might not get the direct answer or a great respond to validate, however, you can ascertain from the pattern of the responses they have chosen.

From the findings, address the objections in your teams and discuss how to boost up your SaaS free trial conversion rate. Else, you can always reach out to your customers personally, by drafting them a customized email pointing out the concern.

Experimentation is the Key

For what is worth, test and experiment everything once it goes live to your prospects. Experiment with the period of a free trial, should you take a notch down to 14 days or pep up with a 60 day period. Test whether asking credit card credentials at the beginning turns out to be a better deed. Or better yet, try a newer pricing system.

You must inculcate patience around the system. Don’t leave things if they don’t work out in a couple of days. Give it some time.

Discuss, experiment, and repeat.

Final Take

Before you market your product, answer these things first. Are you providing enough value, apparent through a lifecycle? Is your target audience the right people that you need to cater to? How much is too much?

Should you rather look into opening a subscription amount in the initial stages? Be assured that answering these questions will solve half the muddle you have in your head. Discussing this with your team will help declutter and will be the first step towards optimizing your SaaS free trial conversion rates.

And once you have successfully converted them into loyal customers, you are already halfway through the ladder of customer success.

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