Your goal as a marketer in the SaaS industry is to drive as many SaaS trial conversions as possible. But the major obstacle is that most SaaS trial users do not convert to paying customers. According to Totango, around 15-20% of the trial users become customers and the percentage drops even further after 3 months or so. Conversion rates from visitors to free trial in SaaS hover around 2%. So, if 1000 odd visitors turn up on your website, only 20 of them may opt for the free trial and 3 of them will probably become paying customers.

With so many options out in the world, it is easy for people to lose track and get overwhelmed by everything. People don’t come back to buy a SaaS product because they didn’t enjoy the experience of the free trial, it is as simple as that. You have to make sure that before the free trial ends you should have a chance to connect with a prospect. You have to empower the user and reach out to them.

Your goal is to get free trial users to engage with your products and find out for themselves how it benefits them. You need to activate new users before they can start using them fully and you have to allow activation so that they get the best value from their trials.

Tips on How to Persuade SaaS Trial Users to Convert

1. Free Trial

To convert customers and make them use your product, offering them a free trial is the best process to do so. However, it being nothing short of brilliant also has to be an airtight idea. When you let someone use something before buying it, you give them a trial of your product. What you have to keep in mind during a trial is that you are doing nothing but promoting your product and letting your potential customer discover how it benefits them. You can keep the trial period from two weeks to a month for optimum usage and don’t limit functionality as it often hinders people from making up their minds. Chalk out subscription plans for buyers so that everyone can have a plan of their own, and it will increase the number of conversions.

2. Trust

You will have to make sure to put trust signals all over your website and your product trial so that it can help prospective customers take the big decision. Put down trust signals in landing pages, pricing pages, checkout pages, home pages, wherever a prospective customer might have to spend some time. Trust signals can be anything from testimonials to user reviews to list of companies that use your product. Anything that will allow a prospect to trust you will work in your favor.

3. Live Support

Customers always want to know everything about the product they are going to buy. Providing live support is a great way to convert more visitors. By letting trial users speak to someone from your company always helps to take that big decision. Most people being social creatures, tend to get a feeling of assurance once a human connection has been established prior to making a big purchase decision. However do not let live chat team members convert customers aggressively, as it will only alienate potential customers. Just doing their job correctly would allow you to convert more.

4. Lead Nurturing Through Emails

Deploy an email marketing campaign to keep trial users in loop, so that they can make the purchase at the end of the trial. Welcome them with an email when they sign up and send them emails accordingly depending on how deep they are into the trial. Provide clear instructions as to how to operate your product and how they can get the most out of it. Design an email specifically for that purpose so that they know that you care about them using your product. Craft emails that look personalized. No one wants to receive emails that feels like a robot sent it methodically. Your emails should contain a primary call-to-action that trial users must check out and secondary CTAs that they should click if they feel like it.

5. Extension

For users who are close to making a decision but their trial time is running out, you should extend their free trial so that they are not cut off from using your product and reach the decision of buying it. Every person is different and not everyone can decide to buy a certain product in that stipulated amount of time. For those people who require more time, you should have an extension plan. Once the original trial period is over, renew their trial for a week or so and let them know that it has been renewed so that they can review their purchase decision.

6. Feedback

If the statistics are to be trusted, a whole lot of people do not end up being paying customers. So, keep a line of communication open so that you get constant feedback from every trial user. Not only will it help you know what went wrong with those users who didn’t buy your product, you will also be able to improve your product accordingly so that it never happens again. This will improve your conversion ROI in the future.

The greatest satisfaction that you can ever derive is the sale of your product. It is not an easy process, but nobody said it is difficult either. So, go ahead, convert more SaaS trial users into paying customers.

Leave your valuable comments below and let us know what conversion strategies are you using for your SaaS product.