Marketer Crew - ⚡ MC - Create Effective Free Trials

A Guide to Free Trials

Free trials are a great way to increase your MRR. Here's how!

Who should run free trials

Giving your customer a timed subscription to your product, in hopes that they will start paying after it ends, can be risky. In other words, if a company representative seeking a free trial has no purchase power, your trial will be wasted.

Creating an effective trial

Do:
- Clearly outline an "A-ha!" moment within the first 15 minutes.
- No empty states, ever! Add sample data and templates, or make data entry part of the onboarding process.
- Send regular reminder emails about the trial ending.
- Nurture users with educational material.
- Craft a stellar onboarding experience.

Don't:
- Ask for a credit card upfront. Use Google Captcha to deter scammers.
- Auto-charge people. Customers hate this, and Stripe punishes it anyway.

Heads up!
- You will get a flood of support requests. Have a full FAQ prepared.
- A user on trial is not yet a paying customer, but they'll still need storage space, customer support, and onboarding. 

Measure everything

Collect data, regardless of whether someone converted or not. Keep a log of: Who the customer is, What they came for, What they did, Whether they converted, What will they do now.

Crunch the results

If your conversion rate is:
- Low: Your customer didn't find value. Iterate and improve your product.
- High: Pour more resources into user acquisition, and lower your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Ending the trial

Be intentional about collecting user feedback that is helpful and actionable. Your follow-up methods will determine this.

Also, even if a user can't convert at the end of the trial, there are other ways to keep them engaged. You can run an offer such as: “Give us a shoutout on Twitter and get $5 off!” or “Get $10 off for every friend that you refer!”

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Snippets

• Best Affiliate Programs — Curated directory of 100+ best startup affiliate programs.
• Productool — 100 SaaS products curated by product people.
• Andrew — Split Testing Simplified. How to get started with one of the most powerful profit-boosting tools for marketers and copywriters.
• Ryan Kaufman — ActiveCampaign has 150K customers with $165M ARR. I started a 14-day trial. Here's their 4 part email marketing strategy and how it converted me to a paying customer.
• Armon Sho — 2 weeks ago I microacquired a Shopify app. and users have 2X'ed since. Here's what I did.
• Phil — Making small UI/UX changes can feel like a waste of time. But they eventually compound. Here are 6 changes which resulted in longer sessions, and lower bounce rate.

Worth Reading

1. How to create a roadmap that connects technical SEO strategy with delivery.

2. Instagram shares new overviews of the key ranking factors for Feed Posts, Stories and Reels.

3. The case for Roblox as a marketing tool.

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