How to Drive Conversions from Trial to Paid Conversions in B2B SaaS Businesses

From trial to paid . . . A long journey? The answer is no if SaaS free trial best practices are adopted.

The customer acquisition and customer retention process are integral to the success of a SaaS business. This process is directly linked to trial to paid conversions in the B2B SaaS business.

With strong roots in statistics, 65% of the best subscription businesses offer free trials to the users who opt to use the product. In SaaS businesses, this is known as Sampling and as the name suggests, sampling is the way you showcase the product or service to the customers. The research shows that the free samples have proven to be an effective strategy as they have been known to boost sales by 200%. Impressive, isn’t it?

Before we dive into driving conversions by converting the trial users to paid conversions, it is essential to get knowledge of the types of trials you can offer to your free users.

Free Trial Types

By the term free trial, the concept gets instant clear that the user will be able to use the product for a certain period to see the outcomes and benefits it can bring to the user. However, the free trial is not of one type.  Free trial types include freemium, opt-in free trial, opt-out free trial, and limited free trial.

Opt-in Free Trial: The opt-in free trial does not have the prerequisite of entering payment details or card details. After the trial period ends, the user has to purchase the plan manually as it will not be bought automatically.

Opt-out Free Trial: Unlike an opt-out free trial, the user has to enter the card or payment details to continue the trial period. In this case, the plan or service is bought automatically as soon as the trial ends.

Freemium: With freemium, the user is awarded the features of the basic trial and premium version of the product. This version gives access to all the versions for a set period of time.

Limited Free Trial: As the name suggests, in this type of SaaS free trial, the user is given access to only a few basic features and that for limited days as well.

Read More: Psychological Aspects to Know to Level Up The Recurring Billing with Free Trials And Freemium

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How to Calculate Free Trial Conversion Rate?

The free trial conversion rate is the percentage of the users who turned from the free version to the paid version of the product and service.

To calculate the free trial conversion rate, the following calculations are used:

Trial conversion rate = Number of trial-to-paid users/ number of trial users.

Why is a free-trial conversion rate important for your SaaS business?

In SaaS businesses, customer retention and customer success metrics are important as they all link to revenue growth and business health.

Essentially, every metric determines an important factor or aspect of the business. in essence to this, the higher the free trial conversion rate is, the more business success is with the lower customer acquisition rate.

Moreover, talking of the leads i.e., Product Qualified leads and marketing qualified leads, they are important for the metric of free trial conversion rate.

Product-qualified leads are easier to convert and bring to the trial version as they use the product and are closer to understanding the system rather than market-qualified leads who visit websites, read blogs, and are interlinked to the outreach.

Also Read: Optimize your Freemium Subscriptions Conversion Rate and Business Health with SubscriptionFlow

SaaS Free Trial Best Practices to Drive Conversions from Trial to Paid Conversions

Having a higher trial to paid conversion rate drives the business to the heights of scalability and reduces the chances of stymie in the B2B SaaS business.

For this, there are some of the best SaaS free trial best practices that give impetus to the free trial conversion rate as it improves business health and workflow.

Let’s look at the best practices to improve the SaaS free trial conversion rate.

Promote Product Adoption to the Trial Users and Paid Users

The engagement from the user-end brings about success and reduces the chances of customer churn. In the jargon of SaaS and businesses, it is called product adoption. The engagement of the user with the product and how frequently the user uses it is a strong point that determines the customer’s success.

As a matter of fact, product adoption and product usage are not limited to either paid users or trial users, rather it is significant for both users because at the end of the day the main goal is to increase the trial conversion rate and retain the users.

This practice emphasizes that the product must be easy to use or the business can provide guidance if any factor stymies the process of product adoption and product usage.

There could be tools, guides, or customer success playbooks that can assist the user to navigate through the product easily and fetch the results as desired. Other than those, knowledgebases, user documentation, and other troubleshooting materials will be helpful to the users.

Nurture the Trial Subscribers

Increasing the number of trial subscribers is not a great deal, rather converting them into paid users is the culmination point for the success of the business.

To nurture the trial subscribers, it is highly suggested to enhance the user engagement so that the user does not churn. In this SaaS free trial practice, the customer success team or support team can be there for the user to guide and nurture him into the paid conversion using the subscriber-centric approach.

While your nurture the trial subscribers, the analytics and reports from the customer success platform or customer success tool can bring the data to understand the customer behavior and determine the aspects that can be the game changers to increase the free trial conversion rate.

Enable Personalization for the Trial Users

Personalization has become the key to the success of businesses as users are more driven towards it rather than generalized content and activities.

You might give personalization to the paid users but do you facilitate the trial users with this luxury? If yes, then high-five. But, in case it’s a no then we suggest you offer personalization to the trial users as well.

Offering personalized solutions to the trial users enables them to experience the product in a most customized way and the personalized way which will lead you to understand customer behavior. For this reason, customer segmentation can be carried out and further calls to action (CTAs) can be made for the customers based on the segmentation. For an instance, in-app messaging can be useful for personalization and get interaction with the customer.

Read More: SaaS Free Trial vs. SaaS Freemium

Bottom-Line

With the SaaS free trial practices, the business can reach the heights of scalability and will also reduce the time to marketability. Not only this but important SaaS metrics and customer success metrics can be achieved to improve the revenue of the business and improve customer health along with business health.

To drive more product trials, it is vital that the optimized strategies must be followed so that the trial management can be done seamlessly using the trial management software. The trial management can bring in more customers and improve the customer retention rate along with the customer lifetime value.

Schedule a demo with SubscriptionFlow for trial management, now!