What is one best practice for successfully converting users on a free trial to paying customers?
The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Calling Within Five Minutes
“Call new trial users within five minutes after they’ve signed up. You can quickly identify any issues, and serious users will be very impressed by the personal attention and care you demonstrate so more users will convert.”
– Steli Efti, Close.io
2. Great Customer Service
“Make sure the customer knows you’re available and willing to give them all of the attention they need during their free trial. Build their confidence in your team and company right off the bat — you could create a customer for life.”
– Brooke Bergman, Allied Business Network Inc.
3. No Barriers
“Remove all barriers by making integration easy. Make it a no-brainer to sign up by allowing them to cancel if your product isn’t meeting their needs. This approach also keeps you on your toes because you need to continually innovate to keep them happy.”
–David Sendroff, Forensiq
4. Soliciting Feedback
“Get those free trial users to communicate how your product or service is beneficial to them. Get them to verbalize or write out how their life or business is different because of your business. When someone has to voice the change, it makes it more real. Solicit feedback and use CTAs wherever possible. ”
– Maren Hogan, Red Branch Media
5. Personal Contact
“If you want to convert a free trial customer to a paid customer you need to pick up the phone and call them. Even more important is making sure they know they can pick up their phone and call you anytime. This will make them feel comfortable with your product/service and they’ll be willing to keep paying monthly. It will also build trust.”
–John Rampton, Adogy
6. Additional Incentives
“After the free trial offering, additional incentives can help convert users. For example, at Handybook we offer discounted rates for customers who join our recurring program and implement a money-back guarantee.”
– Oisin Hanrahan, Handybook
7. The Golden Motion
“This is the specific action that a prospect takes during their free trial that makes them most likely to convert into a paying customer. For us, the golden motion was people editing charts in our dashboard interface. We built a guided tour to make sure that all prospects edited a chart, and it caused an immediate lift in our conversion rate.”
– Robert J. Moore, RJMetrics
8. Automatic Conversion
“Automatic conversion will simplify this process because their billing information should already be on file and their trial will convert to a paid subscription unless they cancel. I understand some sites with aggressive growth interests may opt for short signup forms and not collect payment information, but in those cases customers need to be informed of what they will be losing after the trial.”
– Gideon Kimbrell, InList Inc
9. Proper Follow-Up
“The most successful strategy for converting customers to a paid plan is to build and refine our trial follow-up messaging sequence. The biggest problem you have to overcome is finding out what the customers apprehension is and whether you can solve that problem for them. Figure that out and everything else should fall into place.”
– Liam Martin, Staff.com
Photo Credits
USDAgov | StartupCollective
