Develop A Successful Freemium Conversion Strategy — This is how!

Every company marketing in the B2B SaaS space is looking for new, creative ways to grow and scale their business. Nowadays, many of them are choosing the Freemium Business Model to present their solution to the B2B world. Due to its many benefits, according to a survey by Techcrunch, this business model brings conversion rates up to 10%.

While many companies that choose the Freemium model succeed in creating easy-to-use products that easily convert users into customers, they often struggle with the Sales and Marketing efforts in order to best present the Freemium business model to their organizations because their efforts aren’t able to leverage all the momentum that comes with a Freemium model.

Unless you connect your product to your Sales & Marketing tools, your sales and marketing team will be blind to everything that happens in your Freemium. This means they have no context to reach out. Before investing resources in tools, teams and data in creating a Freemium Business Model , make sure that your sales and marketing efforts are heading in the right direction.

You can try segmenting your audience based on:

• Geographic segmentation (location)
• Demographic segmentation ( company size, industry, role, company working hours, etc.)
• Psychographic segmentation (lifestyle, values, social class, and personality)
• Behavioral segmentation (usage, loyalties, awareness, occasions, knowledge, liking, and purchase patterns)

If you are stuck with slow or manual data, your teams won’t be able to keep up with your leads. Outdated data is almost as bad as no data. Try syncing your product data to your sales and marketing tools in real-time. A clean and consistent tracking plan over your key activation events is core to spot the buying intent.

Implementing a Freemium business model can be very time-consuming. Thus, one of the best practices is to have at least one person who will monitor the whole process from a sales and marketing perspective. This person will be responsible for leading the sourcing of data, building segments, templates and workflows, and bringing this product-led growth system to life.

With the Freemium model, your sales & marketing tools need to adapt to the new buying journey:

1. Website visitor (inbound lead)
2. Freemium sign up
3. User successfully starts using the platform
4. User makes a subscription (or sets up a meeting with a sales rep)

Now, that you can identify how your Freemium beta users are moving down the buying experience, you need to design the best content experience for them too. Segmentation enables you to group similar leads at different stages of your customer journey, and nurture them based on the stage they’re in by using multiple channels.

Finally, you need to tie all your tools, teams and data together in order to optimize your Freemium experience.

• Capture your product data as events
• Use your key activation events to create segments
• Use segments to map the free trial buying process

At Sales.Rocks, after implementing the Freemium business model , we noticed that more and more accounts are engaging (and re-engaging) with the Sales.Rocks’ brand and product as a result.

At the end of the day, all teams’ strategies can help a free user become a paying customer, but if the product doesn’t deliver a great user experience with the initial promised value, all efforts will be lost. Practice shows that if a free service doesn’t convert enough free users into paying customers, it won’t succeed on the long run.

Originally published at https://blog.sales.rocks on June 5, 2019.