We had an interesting knowledge sharing on Startup Study Group. About trial periods by SaaS companies.
Most SaaS companies out there are currently offering a 30-day or 14-day trial period. Honestly there’s no science behind this metric. How can you measure whether the user is converting into a paying user after 14 days if they didn’t even try out some of your important features?
For example couple of days ago, I signed up on a service which provided me a 14-day trial period. Unfortunately thanks to my limited attention span, I forgot to check out the product in detail and instead started reading interesting tweets on my timeline. Now the trial period has expired and I cannot check out the product. This means that they couldn’t convert me as paying user. That’s a lost opportunity. I would definitely not pay for the product without trying it out.
Instead of tracking the number of days a user is given a trial account, companies need to track on the minimum number of feature a user needs to try out in order to become a paying customer.
For example, if I run a site and want to do a better on-boarding for users using Webengage widgets, Webengage needs to provide me with a trial account that lets me use all of its important features at least once. Then be it that I use those converting-features at least once in one day or 10 days or five months! The time period in such cases irrelevant.
However providing a time limit brings a certain amount of urgency to check out the features, by completely removing the urgency you’re delaying the process.
The best solution to solve it is to still use time limit but to not hard close the trial account once the trial period expires. Instead, allow users to check out all the features even after the trial days are expired and track these users on features they have tried. In such cases, companies can measure half the amount of converting-features before prompting users to pay.
Let me know how your companies challenges the trial period and gets users on board.
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