How to Get Replies from Trial Users

4 min readJul 20, 2015

Hi, I noticed you clicked a link to get here. I'm Greg, user acquisition consultant and author of this post. Any questions or feedback so far? Can we schedule a time to chat about this?Thanks,Greg

Confused?

That’s how your users feel when they sign up for your product trial and, within minutes, get an email like that from you.

The Familiar Scenario

One of my clients was sending an email like this to new users, just like many other SaaS companies do. The objective is sensible: Start a conversation, ensure the user has a good trial experience, and—if it’s a good fit—make a sale.

The Challenge

New trial users aren’t committing to the product the moment they sign up. At that moment they’ve just gone from sorta curious to a bit more curious. They’re “just browsing.”

What it’s like when trial users don’t respond to your emails…

The problem is that many trial users, at the moment of signing up, are “just browsing.”

When I’m “just browsing” at a store, I feel a tinge of discomfort when a salesperson asks if I have any questions. Some thoughts I’ve had in those moments:

I can probably find answers to my basic questions if I browse more.
I don’t want to string anyone along as though I’m ready to buy.
I don’t want to feel pressured to buy.
I can decide on my own.
I don’t feel like talking to anyone.
I’m in a hurry; just taking a glance.

After conducting usability tests with scores of SaaS users, I learned that many of them feel similarly when they sign up for a trial and get asked to chat.

Which is why—despite a healthy rate of trial signups—my client’s welcome email wasn’t working; the response rate was near zero.

The Experiment and Solution

If the goal is to start a conversation, why does it have to be a sales call? What if, instead, we ask a simple question:

“What would make this a successful trial for you?”

Hypothesis: For a new user, it’s easy and noncommittal to say what would make their trial successful.

To validate this, we ran an A/B test between the two emails. The new email looked like this:

Hi,
I’m Greg, founder of $company. I saw you signed up for a trial… Can you tell me what would make this a successful trial for you?
Thanks,
Greg

The Result and Benefits

Here are the results:

Original personal introductory email, asking to chat and offering help: 46% open rate, 0% response rate. Not counting negative responses, like “No thanks.”
New personal introductory email, asking what would make the trial successful: 67% open rate, 11.2% response rate. The responses were positive, informative (for both sides), and started productive conversations.

Changing one sentence in the personal introductory email resulted in 47% more opens, infinitely more responses, and significantly better responses.

It’s not just about numbers. The new email has other benefits:

It tells the new user you’re interested in their success, not just that of your sales team. This can lead to a sales conversation where the trial user doesn’t feel pushed or cornered.
It makes trial users think about their goals, which makes them more invested in their trial of your product.
It starts a conversation and a relationship, lowering the barrier for future and deeper conversations.
It tells you about your trial users’ use cases, evaluation criteria, assumptions, pain points, and expectations. This is information your sales, marketing, and product teams would kill for. (Phew, now they won’t have to…)
Most importantly, it helps you ensure the user has a productive and successful trial of your product.

Is it Repeatable?

I used this same tactic for another SaaS company, with great results again.

The original email was sent sporadically, without tracking, and received few responses (practically none). The new email, very similar to the example above, has a 54% open rate and a 7% response rate. Many of those responses either lead to a sale or inform the product and marketing teams how to improve the trial experience.

Can you benefit from an email like this? Probably. If your first email to trial users asks for feedback or a chat, there’s a good chance that changing it to ask about their trial success would result in more and better responses. Test it and you’ll know for sure.

Originally published at www.gkogan.co on July 20, 2015.