Today, it is not enough just to have a great product, put it on the market, and watch your sales take off. There is so much competition that developers and service providers have to find effective ways of getting their brand and product into the hands of potential customers.
The SaaS field has opened up a huge range of service provision opportunities – from marketing automation to back-end mobile services – that allow developers to reach people in more ways than ever before.
So, how do you ensure that your product or service doesn’t get lost in the proverbial muck of the internet? Many people immediately look to the free trial as a great means of getting potential customers through the “door,” but often, these efforts fail to have the success we would like to see.
What follows are some hints and tips on the benefits of the free trial and how to leverage this tactic to turn more trial users into actual paying customers.
Benefits Of A Free Trial
A free trial is like a free sample at the supermarket. It gives the potential customer an opportunity to try something before they go all-in and buy it. This means that a free trial should be engaging and enticing. People love the word “free” and are much more likely to give marketing automation software a try if they can use it for free before they buy it.
This is how you get them in the proverbial door. Your trial is where you wow potential customers. It is important to show them the main features, but also withhold some of the unique or most useful functions for paying customers. This gives them a taste of what your product can do, but also encourages them to open their wallets for the premium version.
Turning Trial Users Into Long-term Paying Customers
One of the biggest mistakes we make when trying to sell services is a failure to spell out for the client all the varied uses that the product can have. Even if you have an amazing, easy-to-understand product with obvious features, you cannot expect all potential customers to intuit the functionality they could get from it.
In addition to a lot of quality information about the benefits and uses of similar-type products, it is often very helpful to have a demo. This could take the form of a brief promotional video or infographic that gives potential clients a clear idea of how the product is used and how it will work for them.
Knowing When To End The Trial
Another huge pitfall when offering a free trial is to keep the free trial going way too long. It seems that the industry standard for a free trial is 30 days. This is, for many services, too long. It gives the user, time to forget about your product and lose excitement.
It is recommended that you consider a shorter duration, such as a 7-day trial.
This gives adequate time to get a feel for your product and its functionality, but also keeps the product fresh enough in their minds so they will remember why they wanted it so badly.
In Conclusion
Having a great product and marketing it effectively are part and parcel to the success of any business endeavour. Whether you provide marketing automation services, cloud services, or other remote services, it is imperative that you balance the benefits of the free trial with the tools to ensure that more of your trial users actually convert into customers.
Free trials are an attractive option as they allow potential customers to try your product before they buy it. However, it takes much more than that. Your website must provide a lot of good, solid informational content so as to show people how they and their business can benefit from services such as marketing automation.
You need to know both the pros and cons so as to tailor your site and the free trial to maximise the potential gains. You need to provide a high-quality product, show users how the varied benefits they will glean from using your product, and then give them just enough of a taste that they want more.
(Note: This post is written by Sandeep Das, Senior Marketing Analyst at Agile CRM)
