How to approach users who crossed the soft limits of the free-tier?
Hi,
I'd be happy to get your opinion on what is the best way to approach users who are using the free tier of my service and crossed the free-tier limits.
The free tier allows 100 form submissions/month. I didn't put hard limits because I don't wish to stop my customers' business.
The next tier cost $5/month.
For many of them, there are tens or even hundreds of spam-bots submissions, and a small number of real submissions. So they may not even be aware of the issue.
Some are on the border-line with one month over and the next below the limit.
What would you write in the email?
Thanks in advance!
Here is what I do:
Good idea, thanks.
Best of both worlds.
I think there’s three parts to this, Dan.
On the one hand, if a person is getting value from a product it’s natural that they should pay for it. $5 for any product seems like a fairly low price. Did you ask your customers about their pricing expectations yet?
The second thing I would say is that if their account allowance at any stage is being taken up by spam submissions they’re probably never going to see value. So that might be something to work on for you.
Finally, my experience is that when you ask people to pay, they do. Or at least a segment of them do. Those are the people to focus on but also ask why more people don’t convert to paid when you ask them to.
My experience says that the wording of messaging is rarely the problem. It’s usually the just that it’s not clear enough that a person needs to upgrade.
On top of what @iammarcthomas said - we were using jotform with my previous company and I remember an hr person coming over to the ceo saying that there's applicants e-mailing us directly that they couldn't apply due to form being locked out since it hit its limits. Your customer's customers might help you get that slight nudge towards making a decision.
Definitely get that captcha running! ;)
Thanks @gallinio, for the time being I think I will stick with soft quota and see how the conversion goes. I will start following more closely on users that cross quota, which I haven't done till now too much.
If I see that this doesn't work, I might consider moving to hard limits.
Hi @iammarcthomas, thanks for the insights.
Regarding not seeing value from spam - I am providing them with the backend for their forms, not the frontend. I would argue that the fact that they get so much spam only raises the value of the product since it being filtered for them and doesn't trigger email notifications, etc.
Without my product they'd have to read all this spam just to filter it out.
Is that also what your customers have told you?
Currently they are likely not even aware of this.
What I meant was that I should present this as a value that they get rather than apologizing for it when I ask them to pay.
I don't know how they'd react to this.
Ah! I see. I'd definitely add it as a value – but working out how to pitch it so it doesn't feel like they're getting spam counted against their account allowance would be a good step.