How To Hook Users With A SaaS Free Trial in 2022

Offering a SaaS free trial strategy is critical to the SaaS marketing plan. If you are in the SaaS industry, you will understand that offering free trials for your products or services is a standard practice among many companies. You don’t want to be excluded from offering this package to your consumers. And you will understand that there is more than offering only free trials to consumers. You need to devise strategies that will optimize the trials to convert these trial users into paying customers.

This article will enlighten you on five solid strategies that can hook your users to these trials and reveal the value of your products to them. You will also discover how to hook your customers to your products and get them to pay after enjoying the trial. Let’s move ahead and find out!

What’s a Good SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate?

The average conversion rate after offering a SaaS free trial is between 2%-10%. However, is that good enough for your business?

The answer to this question all depends on the parameters influencing your business. By parameters, we imply your industry, target audience, product, and location. Irrespective of these parameters, you should have a goal you should aim at.

The growth specialist Lincoln Murphy asserts that a conversion rate of less than 25% implies that your marketing isn’t working. This doesn’t mean you have to gain 25%.

If you have not reached that number, don’t sweat it. Instead, take a look at your current target, and set a new goal. After setting these goals, implement these highlighted tactics to accomplish your objectives.

1. Don’t Ask For Credit Card Information

If you ask for credit card information during the SaaS free trial stage, then you are not doing it in the right way. If you wonder why this happens, here are some basic facts. According to stats, SaaS companies often get more website visitors that end up as paying customers when they do not request their credit card info during free trial sign-up.

Although this correlation doesn’t imply the causative effect, the increase in conversion may correlate with how companies do not ask for the credit card information of users. Nonetheless, you may change your sign-up process, include this feature, and try it out.

2. Come Up With a Robust Onboarding Plan

Having a potential customer sign up for a SaaS free trial is just part of the puzzle. Once this is done, you will have to onboard your users through some marketing strategies to complete the whole process.
To do this, you must figure out how your users can recognize the “aha!” moment.

The “aha!” moment is the period when your customers understand the value of your products or services. They can pinpoint how your product can solve their problem or become the answer to their questions.

For example, if your product is an AI tool that produces videos for digital marketing campaigns, your user’s “aha!” moment is to reveal how to create engaging videos using your tools. You can implement a step-by-step guide as part of your onboarding plan in order to direct them on how to create videos and reveal their aha moment to them.

In other situations, you can call your customers or even create a survey to get feedback on how to improve your products or services.

3. Segment Email Lists and Personalize Communication

Creating automated email lists for your free trial subscribers is one of the best marketing strategies. However, that isn’t enough to convert them. If you want to increase conversion, you can start by segmenting your email lists and personalizing the messages sent to each segmented audience.

There are various ways by which you can segment your audience. The best way is by segmenting them based on their interactions with your website.

Segmenting your audience can be based on these categories:

• Inactive Users – Users who signed up for a free trial but never went ahead to utilize the paid feature
• Semi-active Users – Users who log into your website once or twice a week to use your product.
• Active Users – Users who often log into your website to use your products.

For inactive users, you can let them realize what they are missing, conduct a survey, or request feedback to identify the problem. If your products seem complex to use, you can send them a product tutorial or schedule a support team to help them.

You can also make use of social proof such as reviews to let them realize what they are missing and how thousands of customers have benefitted from using your products.

For semi-active users, you can enlighten them on the features they haven’t used or enlighten them on various ways by which they can use your products.

4. Consider A/B Testing

You can get more active users to invest more in the products by sharing some tips and tricks relating to A/B testing, revealing how they can integrate your products into their daily workflow, and more. Ask For the Sale Once Your User Has Achieved Success As a SaaS company, you don’t need to wait till the end of your free trial before you upsell your products.

If you want to increase your conversion rate, it is better to upsell your products the moment your customers have their “aha!” moments or when they have achieved their success.

Think about this – you have a higher chance of having more sales when your customers are convinced that your products work. Hence, it is better to seize the opportunity and ask your customers to sign up for a paid account at that moment.

If you wait till the day your product expires, your customers may no longer be interested in your products anymore. They could have gotten a better offer from competitors, therefore, leading to more obstacles when upselling to customers.

5. Get Feedback On Why Customers Aren’t Converting

If your free-to-paid version doesn’t witness an increase in conversion rate, the best way to address the issue is to get feedback from your customers to discover the problem. You can fine-tune your products or change the strategy you use in pitching your products to consumers.

You can also utilize some marketing tools to better understand the issue. Tools such as Trak.io offer users who haven’t converted to a paid plan that allows them to enjoy the products for three days in exchange for reasons why users did not wish to pay at first.

Conclusion

Various SaaS companies lose customers after the SaaS free trial sign-up. To avoid this situation, you can utilize some of the shared tips to accomplish your goal. Hope this article helps! Stay tuned for more mind-blowing content.