Increase your free trial conversion: Reduce friction and build a growth loop

This is what I’ve learned or leveraged during my self-imposed challenge to improve free trial conversion, as part of improving the overall onboarding experience and spearheading the grassroots product-led growth initiative at a SaaS company. One of the things I’ve found helpful in my career is to take something that no one else cares about, then create or gather the data to tell the story of why that thing is important, plan how I’m going to improve it, report on the progress and give thanks to everyone (even those not involved). I learned this at a French company and it also works well in US companies. As you share the growth story over time and make everyone feel like your success is their success, you will absolutely gain cross-functional adherents and supporters. When you do, make sure to share the baby that you’ve created — as your initiative will almost always benefit from more top-down support and budget!

Building on my knowledge of cognitive psychology from grad school, I knew that:
1) people don’t like to lose something that they already have
2) people are more likely to finish a task that they have started than that they haven’t

The first item plays on the principle of loss aversion; the second on the desire to fulfill a commitment someone has made to themselves and not leave something unfinished. If you haven’t read Dr. Robert Cialdini’s, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, I highly recommend that you go get a copy now!

Here are some common problems you may find once you begin digging into the data. You may also find that you don’t have all the data you need; that’s okay and very common. Figure out what you have and what you don’t have. How can you get what you don’t have yet? Why is it important? What questions will it help you to answer? I’ll write another article on this topic, as getting started improving a process with incomplete data is better than never improving the process at all!

Low number of new signups

Provide as many ways as you can to reduce the friction of your sign up and sign in process. Reducing friction can encompass many things, including:

• Reduce the number of fields on your sign up form to just the bare essentials. You can use a tool such as Clearbit to automatically gather information such as role, title, industry. Or you can do manual discovery on customers via LinkedIn, provided you require a business email to determine which company they are with.
• Make account activation almost instantaneous. If you require them to interact with an account activation email, the email should arrive within a few seconds.
• Make sure that your account activation and access emails follow best practices. I’ll write another article on this, so stay tuned! :). For now, make sure that you provide a branded email without too much chrome, and make sure that you have a clear CTA (call-to-action button). The email wording should be concise and professional, assuaging any security concerns.
• Provide fast ways to sign up, if possible. This includes Google or LinkedIn for SaaS business products or Facebook or LinkedIn for consumer products. The more methods you provide for people to get started with your product immediately, the less roadblocks you’re providing to get them to change their mind, the more users will actually get started. Is it really worth getting that important user information now or can you get it later in the process, once they’ve started engaging with your product? Is the chance that a competitor could explore your product that big of a deal? (Remember, your company or other users have probably already released youtube videos showing your product features in depth!). Okay, you’ve got them! Now, it’s up to you to activate them and to convert them to paying users! We’ll get into that in a few minutes…
• Provide a seamless sign up / sign in process. Ideally, the forms would be on the same page, but definitely don’t orphan any of the pages in this journey, as that creates a disconnected experience, which leads to a lack of trust. Provide as many get started immediately sign up processes as you can, as afore-mentioned.
• Make creating and resetting their password a snap. This includes making sure that they can see what they’re typing when they are entering a password. I’m always amazed and dismayed when I encounter a product that 1) does not optimize for mobile and requires me to create a password, then type it again to confirm it — this causes more errors than it solves. Our goal should be to prevent errors, so on to the next item! 2) does not provide an eye icon for me to show the password, but then requires me to accurately type the password twice, then delights at telling me I made a typo and that the two don’t match. The solution here is so simple — just provide one password field when creating the password, making sure to add an eye icon. If for some reason, the person types in the password quickly and makes a typo (unlikely, since most people are very careful about creating passwords), then guess what? They can always reset their password again, thanks to your instantaneous access recovery process you’ve provided!

Low conversions to start an unlimited free trial from a free plan

This is a catch-22 for startups, because you often need to provide both a free plan and a free trial while you are figuring out the critical challenges of determining who is your target audience and trying to achieve product-market fit. Compare the number and percentage of users starting free trials with onboarding vs without. Ideally, you would start people on the free trial by default. There are many problems inherent in starting people on a free plan and just expecting them to decide that they like your product enough to start paying. Case in point, I use Spotify, but I’ve been on the free plan for years, and if they took away the free plan, I am enough of an occasional user that I would just go back to the old-school methodology of building my own mix tapes! ;-D

• Start people in an unlimited free trial by default. Depending on your product, you may want to make this just 14 days. For more complex products with longer learning curves, it would be good to use a 30-day free trial. If your product is not easy to use, you will understandably be hesitant to do this, but this change will likely create the biggest impact. If your product needs more UX TLC, put your in-house team on it or hire an agency. Make sure that you have a plan to quickly prioritize and implement these changes, particularly around the sign up / sign in process and critical onboarding tasks that get people to that Aha! moment, as I discuss further in this article.
• If at all possible, don’t force people to provide a credit card for a free trial. This forces people to give something valuable to you (their money, their name, their credit card info), but at this point, you still haven’t convinced them that your product/service is worth their trust. Nor have you convinced them of the security of providing this PII (Personally Identifiable information).
• Provide in-product onboarding and email campaigns to get them to start the free trial. These should highlight popular use cases, show how other customers were successful with those use cases, provide resources for the user to get started or get help quickly, such as using your help center, asking a question on the community, or taking advantage of live or self-paced learning if your company provides that.
• Look at your user retention charts, then filter for a control group vs an experimental group. Depending on your tool, you may have to crunch the numbers yourself. I’ll add another article on that, so stay tuned :). If your onboarding is making an impact, you’ll see the number and percentage of users retained over the first few weeks increase. This means that your users are playing longer in your product and that they have likely discovered the value in your product.
• If users can start on a free plan or a free trial, but can always downgrade to a free plan, make sure that you let them know that. Leveraging the principle of loss aversion, people are less likely to want to put a lot of time and effort into building or creating something in your product/service if they are going to lose access to it at the end of the free trial. Case in point, I’m an amateur genealogist. I worked for several years to amass information on my family tree, and renewed that focus during the pandemic. But I eventually got to the point where I had traced the roots back as far as I could for some branches and the other branches were just blocked dead-ends — the ROI for me was drastically reduced, so I cancelled my ancestry.com membership. A few weeks later, one of my teens brought up something about their heritage, which is listed as Polish on their dad’s side, but which is actually Latvian (which was part of Russia at the time that ancestor came over). Since I’d worked on thousands of profiles, I couldn’t remember the exact specifics. I logged into the account, expecting that I would still be able to access the records I had already added to profiles. Lo and behold, I was not. Ancestry had locked down access to their records. Had I had any inkling that that would have happened, I would have downloaded files and added them manually, which would have been a tremendous amount of work, so I definitely would have avoided getting to this point in the first place, by making sure everything I added was actually “mine”. They may have been hoping that they would entice me back with this underhanded business practice, but in actuality, they made it so that I will likely never go back, so they greatly reduced the chance of resurrecting me (as well as a UX champion for how to improve their service), at least without a major discount.
• Show all premium features in the product by default, enabling them to explore what they’re interested in. If you don’t show them the premium features, they’ll likely never even bother to figure out whether they exist.
• If your product has different roles, make sure that people who have fewer permissions in the account can still request the account owner or administrator to start the free trial.
• Let your users know that they can trust your company with their critical information, such as data or intellectual property or, hopefully in the not-so-distant future, credit card information.

Low conversions to convert to a paid customer from a free trial.

This is often caused because you’ve failed to get people to their Aha! moment, their moment where they see the value in your tool or service. There are many contributing factors that could be at play here, including:

• You’re not providing sufficient onboarding to get them performing key tasks during a free trial.
• You’re not deepening users’ engagement with your product by getting them to use and realize the value of more premium features. Remember, they are less likely to want to lose something they already “have”. Try creating dummy instances of the premium features and encourage them to play. Measure usage of your premium features — who is using them? Is the person more technical? More business-focused?
• You may be leaving your user with questions about where to go and what to do. These are called empty states — they are pages in your product where the user is left hanging, asking questions like “What should I do next?”. Identify these places in your product by doing a cognitive walkthrough of your product as a technical or business persona. Talk out loud through the process. Where are you experiencing confusion? How do you feel during the process? If you’re feeling uncertain, it’s a sure bet that your users are too. Instead of empty pages, provide actions in those pages, “You haven’t created any <objects> yet. Create one now!”
• Users are not getting to the Aha! moment with your product. In order to get them there, you have to do a good job setting them up for success — something known as the setup moment. If your tool services both Line of Business (LOB) and developer users, you will likely hide the more technical features from your non-developers. Is it clear to your technical users how to unlock these free features, such as providing an easily findable developer mode or better yet, asking them to self-identify whether they are an LOB or developer. Or, even better, collect that role/title information from their LinkedIn profile during sign up! ;-D
• Users are running into problems that they can’t resolve quickly. Make sure that you are providing system status at all times. When a user performs an action, make sure that your product/service communicates success or failure. If the action has failed, make sure that the error message provides as many potential solutions as possible to resolve the error. For products that work with third-party application APIs, such as data integration platforms, this ideally would also include common errors that users might run into when trying to perform actions using these APIs.
• Users cannot get help quickly. There are many things you could do to resolve this problem, such as providing a Help center, providing a community where they can ask questions. In my last few jobs, I’ve worked closely with support (in fact, one head of support called me her work wife!) to improve users’ ability to either self-service (find answers themselves), open support tickets quickly (we added an automatic mechanism wherein our third-party bot automatically converted issue feedback into tickets, then as this particular company matured and there was more budget available, added a live support bot).
• If you do add a live support bot, or if you rely on a more manual process of emailing support or creating a support ticket, the faster your support agents can help your free trial users, the more likely they will be to convert. To that end, reduce friction and streamline the process wherein the user can grant support access to their account. It’s equally critical that the user be able to clearly distinguish what actions they’ve performed in the product vs those that a support agent has performed. If your product/service is mission-critical, you should already have an audit log. Make sure that your company is covering themselves from a legal and security perspective so that a customer can’t claim that your agent made a breaking change when it actually was something the customer did. The amount of time it can take users from their first touch with one of your support agents to the support agent actually being able to troubleshoot in the customer’s account can be quite lengthy. In my analysis of data at various companies, it could take at least a day, even a whole business week, depending on how many times the customer and support agent had to email back-and-forth for the customer to figure out how to provide access. To this end, it’s important to have a very quick way for customers to do this. Ideally, you would provide levels of access (read-only, write, etc.), as well as the number of days the customer wanted your company to have access to their account. For complex products such as data integration, it would ideally be at least a week. To assuage security concerns and to put the control in the hands of the customer, they should be able to revoke access at any time.
• Users are not getting to the habit moment. What actions do you want them to keep performing in your product? There may be some actions that are critical during the activation stage, but that lessen over time. For example, users might get something set up in your product so that the process is running smoothly, but only sign back in when there is a problem.
• Ideally, make sure that your free trial users have a fast-track to get their questions answered, such as a community post response within 24 hours for self-service. For live service, you’ll need to set a time limit that works for you, given the size and experience level of your support team and the number of free trial users you have.
• Look at what customers who are converting to paid are doing differently from those who are not. Is there a particular type of user — or persona — who tends to convert to paid? Is your tool more geared towards business users or technical users? Who is converting? What tasks are they performing in your product before conversion? Are your non-paying users also performing those tasks? If so, your product may suffer from usability issues that preclude people wanting to pay for your services. Or, you may not be targeting the right users. You may look at your user base and realize that, although they may have been helpful in growing your business, as your company prepares for enterprise-level customers, they may actually be hindering your company rather than helping it.
• Worse case, you may find that starting users in the free trial by default does not result in more conversions. That could mean that your users either aren’t finding the value quickly enough or your product isn’t providing the value that they want, which likely means that you’re not targeting the right audience. Although it could also mean that you need to hone the ease-of-use of your product/service. Another thing to add to my agenda of things to write about next!

What’s the impact of having too many free users?

Think about what your CpA (Cost per Acquisition) is — that’s the cost that your company pays just to get someone to sign up for your product as a non-paying, or free, user. Then look at your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), or how much it costs to get your non-paying user to convert to a paid account. What is the average number of days that these free users remain non-paying? How much does it cost your company per day per free, non-paying user? What is the average lifespan of a paying customer — this is your Lifetime Value (LTV)? Make sure that your ratio of CAC:LTV is higher than 1. If it’s lower than 1, you’re losing money.

Figure out what your growth loop is for free trials

I was surprised at how hard it was to find a good free trial growth loop out there. Here’s one I devised:

1. Start free trial automatically
2. Get users to invite other users. Make sure you provide a call-out to let them know that they can invite people and how (reiterate this via an email campaign). Let users in any roles invite others users to assess your product/service. The more users they invite, the more people will be spending time and effort working to see if your product will meet their business needs. Statistically, the more people you have at this step of the funnel, the more you’ll have actually converting from free trial users to paid. Remember the principle of loss aversion? If several people at a company are putting time in to your product, you’ll either end up with a product champion who will insist that their company start using your product or you’ll end up with some good feedback as to what the potential customer’s needs are and why your product doesn’t meet them. Even if you lose this customer, at least you’ve gathered feedback to inform your feature roadmap!
3. Create a nurture campaign via email and in-app product call-outs/guides/tours, such as a walkthrough of the product, call-outs for particular features. Ideally, you’ll have an onboarding process that allows your users to actually start creating in the product, such as a button to start creating.
4. If your product is complex, create whatever it is that you want your users to be creating, then walk them through the actual thing, so that they can play and interact with it.
5. Show a progress indicator that shows a percentage completed or a number of tasks already crossed off. Remember the principle of loss aversion? Get them to perform the next action on your onboarding checklist to success (and conversion!)
6. Make sure that they can get support quickly, as afore-mentioned. One of the important part of growth loops is to determine how a particular input can lead to output that can be reinvested to generate more input. In this case, you could solicit feedback from support on user FAQs, then you could add those to your help center or community posts, enabling more users to self-service, thus freeing your support agents to spend their time on more difficult questions. The users’ participation in the community — either through sharing issues that they are running into or identifying bugs or providing feedback — will help assuage other free trial users’ worry that they won’t be able to get responses via your community experts (both internal and external).
7. Display time-based reminders that your trial only has X days left. Remind them what they’ve accomplished and what they’ll lose. If possible, provide a discount if they convert early before the free trial is up.
8. If they don’t convert when the trial is over, switch to another email campaign. If you allow them to gracefully downgrade to just a free plan, keep displaying premium features in your UI. This will enable companies, as they grow, to stay aware of your premium offerings. Perhaps the team was just a team of one in the beginning, and that person was unable to sufficiently leverage the free trial, didn’t have need of the premium features at that time, or didn’t have the budget to pay for a subscription. But they may be building up their own business and may have invited more users in the meantime. These users wouldn’t even know about your premium features, so this ensures that you’re reminding the earlier users, while also raising awareness of premium offerings to new users. If new users are invited, make sure that you provide call-outs or a walk-through of these premium offerings they’re not currently taking advantage of!

Have some great ideas to increase free trial conversion that I haven’t included? Please let me know and I’ll update this article accordingly. Thank you so much for your help. I hope this article was helpful for you. If there are articles that you’d like me to write, please let me know. I’ve also come up with a lot of ideas on other things I’ve learned and could share while writing this article. Good luck with building your own growth loop and I’d love to hear from you if this article helps you in your efforts to increase conversion!