8 Strategies to Increase Your SaaS Free Trial Conversions

Intro

Getting leads to convert and start using your brand’s services is hard. As the level of competition in the market grows, the process of nurturing leads and converting them into customers is even becoming harder. Research shows that SaaS brands get $30 billion in venture capital funding as the competition for SaaS customers grows.

Source: Dealroom

As a plan to build trust and get prospects to trust your business and use your services, SaaS brands opt to give customers a trial of their services before they start paying for them. However, many of these customers don’t convert even after seeing the value a brand offers.

In this article, you get insights and strategies on how you can drive more conversions from those prospects after the trial period, and get them to be consistent customers for your brand.

Types of SaaS Free Trial Models

1. Opt-in Free Trials. For this trial, the customer can sign up and start using the features for a limited time without giving any payment details. Once the time limit for the free trial is over, they are prompted to add the payment details, pay, and upgrade to the premium package of the tool. A good example of a tool that offers this package is Calendly

Source: Calendly

2. Opt-Out Free Trial. The users of this free model need to include their payment details before they start on the free trial of the SaaS tool. The brand will automatically deduct the payment from the credit card of the user once the free trial period is over. Moz is a perfect example of a SaaS brand that uses this model for its software trials.

Source: Moz

This model has a high percentage of lead conversions after the free trial. The commitments a potential customer puts in and the trust to give their credit card details for a free trial shows that they are more committed and want those features to help manage their businesses.

3. Freemium-Free Trials. In this trial model, the SaaS business offers free features of its software to customers forever. The customer can sign up for the features and keep using the features forever without paying anything. However, the customer is not given all the features of the software. If the customer wants to access more and better premium features of the tool they should upgrade their free trial to a paid version. A good example of this SaaS brand is Slack.

Source: Slack

Here is what the payment structure of this mode of trial for Slack looks like.

Source: Slack

4. Usage-Based Free Trial. Some SaaS brands give users features with limited capacity but prompt them to upgrade once they reach the threshold. For example, dropbox offers online storage space for customers who need to save their data and information. For the Dropbox tool, you are given a limited storage space to store your files but once you try to store something after your limit, they prompt you to upgrade.

Source: Dropbox

Here is what my account looks like.

Source: Dropbox

5. Reverse Free Trial. For this model, the customers get both the freemium and upgraded versions of the software. The customer can use the free trial and after the period of the trial is over they upgrade to the premium version of the software. However, when they run out of their credit, they reverse back to the freemium package with limited features. It gives customers a feel of the advanced features of the tool and how they help them solve their pains. If they want to keep on enjoying those features they need to top up their credit again. A good example of this business is Grammarly

Increasing Free Trial Conversions

1. Don’t Use a Long Free Trial Period. When you give customers a free trial, give them just enough time to know your features better and use them to see how they will help them solve their challenges. There are different free trial lengths SaaS owners give for their free trials. They can be 7 days, 14 days, or 30 days. Research by data box shows that customers who are given a trial period of 14-30 days show a higher conversion after the trial period.

Source: Databox

2. Maintain Communication Through The Trial Period. As customers use the trial features of your SaaS brand, they will need assistance from time to time. Where they don’t understand or get a challenge, your customer support team should always be ready to address the customer pain points in the shortest time possible. You can give your prospective customers a wonderful time to know the features of your tool. However, if they are not well guided in the process of using the tool, the chance to convert is very low. Most of these don’t even finish up the free trial period. One better way to maintain the conversation is to have a chatbot on the website. Here is a Hubspot chatbot example.

Source: Hubspot

You can set and send triggered emails to prospects as they use the features to guide them and provide more information so they can understand the different features of your tool and see the value of your business to solve their pains.

3. Use Lead Scoring. You can evaluate the willingness of a lead to become a customer after they try out your tool features. Study how they engage with your brand from places like social media or how they comment on your content. A potential customer willing to partner with a brand will want to know more about the brand and not only the features it offers. Talk to your sales and marketing team to see their customer engagement through the nurturing phases.
4. Collect Feedback and Act on it. As potential customers use your business, they leave their feedback about your different software features and their usefulness to solve their pains. You can also ask your prospective customers to give feedback about how they are finding the tool useful to their challenges. Use this customer feedback to improve your tool and deliver the best customer experience for the features you offer. Another best way to convince users to use your features is to include customer testimonials like this one.

Source: Ranktracker

Rank-tracking tools like the one above can greatly benefit from displaying customer testimonials and positive feedback to attract target customers. If customers have doubts about the value of the SaaS features you offer, they can see the testimonies of other customers who used the same tool and solved their challenges similar to the ones they have.

5. Create High-Quality Content. Customers keep consuming content from your brand as they use the tools you offer them. Since you understand your customer's pains better, create in-depth content your customers can consume as they try out your tool features. Use clear call-to-action in your content and show the target reader the value your brand offers.

6. Make it Easy to Use Software Features. Some SaaS product features are complex and target customers can find it difficult to understand and use the features as they try them out to see if they can help them with their challenges. It is essential to ensure the software features match the target customer's needs. Here is an example of the features of the software we offer.

Source: Ranktracker

Offer personalized product demo videos and guide your users on how each feature of your tool works so they can leverage it to solve their pains. You need to have a great onboarding experience for your customers in their trial phase. Remember, they are trying to see if this tool can solve their challenge before committing to it. If they don’t see the value in your tool or find it hard to use it, they will opt for another SaaS tool.

7. Make it Easy to Upgrade to The Paid Version. Your prospective customers can find your software features great and see value in them. After the free trial, they might want to upgrade to the paid version of the tool to get more access. It is essential to make the transition process of the customers easy when making the purchase and upgrading to the premium features of your tool. If your target customers find the upgrading process hard, they may decide to try another tool and you lose the lead after all the hard work of nurturing them.
8. Have a Well-Structured Pricing Strategy. You need to show your target customers the value they will get for each price tier package of your software. For example here are our price packages for the different features we offer to customers.

Source: Ranktracker Pricing

It is also essential to use different payment methods. Your target customers prefer to use the payment mode that they love and if they can’t find it on your website to complete the payment of their free trial, you can lose them to your competitor. Have different methods of payment so target customers can pay with the method they are comfortable with. See the different payment methods we offer.

Source: Ranktracker

9. Have a Great Website Design. Customers now use mobile devices to access software features from SaaS brands. If you have a complicated website and your users can’t navigate through it with ease or find what they want they can try other SaaS brands and you lose a potential customer. Ensure your SaaS website is optimized for mobile use and has faster loading speeds.

How to Calculate Free Trial Conversions

Here is a formula you can use to calculate your free trial conversions as you benchmark your brand growth and sales conversions.

Source: Subscription Flow

It gives the percentage of the users who crossed over from using a free version of the tool and started paying for it. For example let’s say a SaaS brand signs up 50 leads for their free trial features and after 14 days of the trial, 10 of those users convert into paying customers. The trial conversion will be:

10/50*100=20%

Need More Conversions From Your Free Trial?

Nurturing a lead through the buyer journey and failing to convert them to paid customers is disheartening. As a SaaS brand, you need the best strategies to ensure leads from your free trial of the features you offer convert into paid customers and use your software for long increasing customer lifetime value and driving more revenue. \

If you’re been getting low conversions from your free trial, use these strategies, to get users to know your brand, better, and increase conversion rates after the free trial period.