So how do you do that? Well, a free trial is a great way to convert prospects into users. Let’s talk about how to manage free trials to be able to do this.
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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is managing the process of getting people to access your product. Tested out, especially in the beginning through things like free trials, for example, and how in particular to organize that. So most users these days are familiar with being able to access products and try them out, especially on the earlier side, especially if they’re going to be low touch micro SaaS type applications.
And most are looking for opportunities to kind of try before they buy, so to speak. So I would say a good rule of thumb is the more low touch your product is, the more likely users want to try to actually experience it before they ultimately pay for it. Now, that’s not always the case. That’s not a hard and fast rule, it’s just a guide.
In this case, the product I’m working on for podcasters is something that I think people are looking for more of an opportunity to try out with a free trial. And the reason why I know that. When I launched version one, I knew I wanted to incorporate something like that, but once version one was out there, it was paid.
Essentially it was pay walled in order to gain access, and I had some people going to it but not converting right away. So that gave me a little bit of an indication. I did a few other things to learn a little bit more, but I wanted to implement a free. Set up regardless. So that’s what I’ve done. Now, when it comes to your free trial and how you manage that, there’s a couple different options to consider.
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There’s, do I just let people gain access to the product seemingly immediately, and then if so, do I take any payment information and or when do I try to convert them? So these are related to those activation points that we’ve talked about a little bit before as well. Also, you’re gonna want to get to know.
Where these are and how to design them so that you can create the optimal effective conversion experience that you’re looking for for your B2B SaaS application. So for me, in this case, what I set up is I gave them a couple of days free trial to essentially have un un. Obstructed access to the application so they can use it as much as they’d like for a fixed period of time.
And I didn’t ask for any type of payment info. And that should also lower the barrier to getting people into the product, which again, at the moment is my primary objective. I want people using it so that I can measure how much value they’re getting out of it. How sticky it is, things like this, and I’m gonna lower the bar as much as I can within reason, in order to get users to that point in the experience so that I can start measuring that now after I’ve gotten people into the product via that mechanism.
Then it’s gonna be a matter of measuring how many people ultimately convert. And depending on where you land, as in, do you capture payment information up front or do you not? When you begin a free trial, if you’re considering adding one, the percentages are likely to be different, as in more people, I believe percentage wise, are typically likely to convert if you take payment information up front.
But that also might lead to a lower volume of people using your product. So the barrier to entry is going to be higher. Regardless, I wanted to go into some of these options for you so that you can consider what those might be and what might make the most sense for you. But when you are launching your product, one of the key objectives here that I want you to focus on is we need to get people into that experience so that we can measure how valuable it is for them.
We wanna be able to measure the relative strength of your value proposition so that we know whether or not you’re on the right track.