Is a Free Trial a good option?
Today I launched my new service, WhatsAppShop.
I have spent months developing and I am so excited to finally launch.
I spent over a month considering whether or not to add a free trial and I decided to do it anyway. I allowed a 7 day FREE Trial on my software, but I am concerned now that I have launched whether I made the right decision or not? I have never made a SAAS in this format before, (with a free trial) I just made the decision based on what I thought I would have personally wanted from my software, I thought thats probably the way to go with this kind of software, what is your thoughts on FREE trials? have you had experience utilising a free trial? how did it work out for you?
I feel personally, if at least you can let them try it and see how beneficial it can be for people, then at least they have more of a chance of staying on as a paid customer rather than potentially not even signing up at all.
Any advice would be extremely valuable to me. Thank you.
It depends on what you are selling. I think it is at best to know the aha moment of your user - when is the first second that your user feel fulfilled, then ask them "hey, you are happy, are you willing to pay me?"
In my case https://freehunter.io (we have really good market share in Hong Kong's freelancer market, we charge freelancer for subscription of getting potential jobs for 3 years. Basically UpWork but we don't care about commission) , we tried
We realize our user's aha moment is 14 days as they are getting replies from 2-3 potential clients so we set a 14 days free trial. We tried 7 days previously but it gives a not that good conversion. We removed freemium as it doesn't provide enough value and doesn't form the aha moment for our users, instead the free quota enables a lot of parasite.
I believe there is no definite answer, please don't hesitate to test things out as things might turn out different from your hypothesis. As Elon Musk our boy says, "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough". I would rather test more often than just thinking! Execution🧗 >>> ideas💡!
I can only speak from experience with my current SaaS, but we have a 30-day free trial and it’s been instrumental in converting customers. In general, people like to try before they buy, because it prevents their subconscious fear of buyer’s remorse from kicking in even before giving your product a try. You can always remove or alter the trial period in the future.
Hey Roy, thank you for sharing your experience and I am so happy that it is a positive one for you and that gives me some peace of mind that I made the right decision by providing a feee trial. I really appreciate you taking the time to share that with me.
I think this depends on your market but I think in general a free trial is a good way to get customers into your funnel. I think the length of the trial depends on the market and how quickly you can show value to your customers.
If you can get customers onboarded and show them value right away, a short trial period will work. If it takes a little more time for them to play around with the software, configure things, test integrations, etc then a longer trial may be needed. For me, it all comes down to showing them value and how fast you can get to it. I also think experienting with your trial length is valuable (once you have steady sign-ups).
Another positive with a free trial is it gives you time to interact with your customers, maybe you can run a drip campaign to help them along the way. This will also help you keep in touch with them throughout the trial and gives you an opportunity to do some hand holding (things that don't scale are very valuable in the early days) if needed. You can use it as an opportunity to talk to your customers as well which is most important.
Free trial is often a good way for your user to get hooked and they are always willing to pay if your SAAS is solving their problem. I agree with @tsejerome that a 14 day trial would be better. But more important is a good follow up after the free trial, so you can convert them to a paying customer.
I don't have enough users on my own product to say for sure, but from a user perspective, I'm more likely to be willing to use a trial to see what its like, then have to put my card details in and then rely on a refund policy. I'm always very dubious about entering card details for a site/company I know nothing about without first trying the product and see if it does what I am hoping it will do.
You can provide a free trial or a refund policy that allows them to cancel if they don't have a use/don't like the product. With SaaS, you have the option to easily control access, therefore it makes sense to provide a trial of some description instead of a refund policy.
The complexity of your product would determine the trial period. Coming from the open source/WordPress world where once they download your product they have the whole thing, the best we can do is provide hosted, full demos for them to try which is a LOT of overhead. This isn't an issue in the land of SaaS.
For my new SaaS products next year I will definitely be offering a free trial as it makes it easier for people to kick the tyres beforehand and ask more useful pre-sales questions.