Once you’ve built your SaaS platform, you’re on to a more challenging task — acquiring and retaining your customers.
No matter how awesome and helpful your product is, you need to do your best to convince your prospects to give it a try and see its benefits for themselves. So, every demo, subscription, or free trial counts as it contributes to the ultimate success of your company and its revenue.
But in the mercilessly competitive world of SaaS, simply having a great product doesn’t cut it. To ensure your potential prospects convert to paying customers, you need to optimize every step of the user journey.
In this article, we’ll discuss some tried-and-true strategies to help you boost your SaaS trial or freemium conversion rate and build a funnel packed with high-quality leads.
What exactly is a SaaS conversion?
Before we delve into tips and tricks for boosting your SaaS conversion rates, we should clarify the concept of a SaaS conversion itself. The truth is that “converting a lead” doesn’t mean the same for the SaaS industry and other sectors, such as eCommerce.
For eCommerce businesses, a conversion usually means that a website visitor finalized the transaction — ordered an item and paid for it.
Things get more complicated when it comes to the definition of a SaaS conversion. It can be several different actions, such as when:
- A website visitor signs up for a free trial or freemium.
- A free trial or freemium user becomes a product-qualified lead (PQL).
- A free trial or a freemium user decides to become a paying customer.
Of course, there are many other conversions that you can track across your performance metrics, but these are the important ones for most free trial/freemium SaaS businesses.
Each of these stages requires distinct optimization tactics that we’ll cover below.
Visitor to free trial or freemium conversions
This step marks the beginning of your sales funnel, and it happens right after the awareness stage. However, the fact that your target audience has become aware of your product as a solution to their pain point isn’t enough to get them to grab their credit card and hit the purchase button.
Before committing, potential customers want to give your product a try and see how it works for them. You have three business models you can implement in this case:
- Free trial, or allowing your potential customers to use a full version of your product for a limited time
- Freemium, or giving them forever access to the version of your product with limited functionality.
- Reverse trial, or combining a regular free trial and freemium. This usually means that users have access to all the product features during the trial period, and then once it expires, they’re downgraded to the light version.
To improve your free trial and freemium conversion rates, you should know industry benchmarks.
For the visitor to freemium model, the average conversion rate is 13.7%. At the same time, its free trial counterpart is typically lower and depends on whether you require payment information. If you do, you can expect to convert 2.4% of visitors to free trials, while opt-in free trials result in a 7.8% conversion rate.
Strategies for boosting free trial/freemium conversion rates
1. Craft compelling landing pages
Getting someone to actually sign up for a free trial or freemium and see your product in action is difficult. You need to capture your visitors’ attention and illustrate what’s in it for them.
In many cases, your potential customers will end up on your landing page while they’re looking for a solution for their pain points so that it will be their first touchpoint with your company and product. That’s why you need to make it memorable and clearly communicate what your offering can do for them.
This means placing your value proposition above the fold and using a benefit-oriented narrative to highlight how your product addresses your audience’s needs and challenges. Don’t forget to keep an eye on how your competitors are performing and find out how they’re positioning their products. You can use various competitor monitoring tools to quickly gain insights into their messaging, CTAs, value propositions, paid ads copy, and other key elements of their marketing strategy.
Check out how Audible did this on their landing page — potential customers are invited to take some time for themselves and enjoy bestselling audiobooks free of charge for 30 days. Such a customer-centered narrative goes a long way toward securing conversions. People aren’t interested in reading about your product and its features; they want to know how you can help them improve their lives. That’s exactly the promise that Audible incorporated in their value proposition.
Another critical element of a landing page you need to get right is the call to action. To be more precise, there should be more than one CTA leading to the same offer throughout your landing page. The point is to make sure your visitors have an opportunity to sign up and convert while they’re scrolling up and down. Use actionable microcopy that encourages them to convert. To add extra value, leverage supporting copy.
Biteable’s landing page is another great example of landing page conversion optimization. It has several prominently placed CTAs accompanied by straightforward supporting copy that explains what exactly will happen once visitors start their free trial. By clearly communicating to your potential users what they can achieve with your product, you give them a strong incentive to accept your offer.
2. Optimize your free-trial feature set
Determining what features to include in your free trial is a balancing act.
One of the most common mistakes is adding too many features in an attempt to demonstrate how powerful and effective your solution is. Such an abundance can be overwhelming, which will, in turn, make the entire experience confusing and prevent your users from making the most of your product.
On the other hand, if your free trial lacks features, your users might not be able to see the value of your product and churn.
Diving into your onboarding data and user feedback is one way out of this dilemma. Understanding what went wrong can help you hit the sweet spot.
3. Send free trial emails
A trial expiration email is a message (or sequence of messages) a SaaS business sends to inform users that their free trial period is about to expire or has already expired. These emails are typically sent to customers who have signed up for a trial version of a product, service, or subscription. They are critical for increasing the trial conversion rate of your SaaS.
You can start by reviewing our free trial email templates and examples.
Free trial or freemium to PQL conversions
After you’ve successfully completed the first round of conversions and got visitors to try out your product, it’s time to focus all your efforts on converting these users into product-qualified leads (PQL.)
A PQL is someone who has been using your product through a free trial or freemium and has experienced its benefits. Since they understand the value of your product and how it can effectively solve their challenges, they’re very likely to move on to the next stage and become a paying customer.
You still have to impress your free-trial and freemium users to accelerate and streamline this transition.
Strategies for boosting free trial/freemium to PQL conversion rates
Offer exceptional onboarding
No matter how user-friendly your product is, the odds are that new users will need some help finding their way around it. CapitalPad, a company working with SaaS investors, points out that the onboarding process is responsible for the “aha” moment that results in free trial/freemium to PQL conversions. It’s about solidifying your user’s understanding of your product and demonstrating its true value.
That’s why offering multiple support and help methods goes a long way toward increasing conversion and retention rates. So, ensure a comprehensive Help section, lots of how-to videos, and tutorials.
Also, it’s essential to be as available as possible so that your new (and long-time) users can easily reach you if they have an issue or question about your product. Provide several communication channels because, for example, some people prefer live chat over email or phone.
However, great customer service requires extra effort, so think about building a dedicated chatbot that will handle routine inquiries and frequently asked questions so that your agents can focus on more complex troubleshooting. Having different support options will minimize friction and demonstrate your commitment to providing a first-class customer experience, meaning that your PQLs won’t have to worry about what will happen if they become paying customers and encounter a product issue.
Free trial to paid conversions
Free trials can be an effective tactic for generating leads and allowing your potential customers to experience the benefits of your product firsthand. Although it seems that you’ve done your best by building a product with an impressive feature set and that you have no control over whether users will decide to upgrade to a paid plan, there are steps you can take to nudge them toward this next conversion.
Strategies for boosting free trial to paid conversion rates
1. Build a diverse resource library
Helping users understand how your product works and discover its full potential is a powerful conversion driver. However, not everyone prefers the same learning style. That’s why you must create different educational resources to cater to your audience’s diverse needs.
Some prefer how-to guides, while others find micro videos or webinars more useful. Product tours, walkthroughs, or tool tips can provide interactive and hands-on learning experiences within the product itself. This can streamline the onboarding process and ultimately lead to more conversions.
Include as many formats in your resource library, including FAQs, knowledge bases, and links to community forums and user groups. This self-service approach makes it easier for users to find all the answers they need using their preferred medium without having to message, call, or email customer support.
That’s precisely what Ahrefs does. New (and existing) users can access a number of different help resources, including a welcome tour, SEO hub, tutorials, and courses, as well as a link to their Facebook community directly from the Dashboard. Such a diversified approach is particularly valuable since Ahrefs is a pretty complex platform that takes some time to master. All this makes the onboarding process smoother and minimizes potential adoption roadblocks.
2. Showcase social proof
70% of people trust recommendations from someone they don’t know personally. This stat underscores the power of social proof for building trust and credibility. To push your free-trial users toward clicking the “Unlock full access” button, share your existing customer reviews. These personal accounts of positive experiences with your product can be a decisive factor and encourage those still sitting on the fence to take the leap and invest.
GetSafe understands their potential customers’ need for reassurance, so they dedicated an entire website section to customer reviews. There’s also a link to YouTube reviews. Their free-trial users can also watch videos of real-life customer calls so that they can rest assured that they can count on impeccable service.
Freemium to paid conversions
The freemium-to-paid conversion type is almost as challenging as getting visitors to become users. While being very effective in terms of increasing brand awareness, this model is very resource-heavy as you’re investing a lot in the infrastructure and customer support to serve users, many of whom have no intention of upgrading.
The fact that they have lifetime access to the “lite” version of your product without premium features might work for many customers, so you need to go the extra mile to entice them to transition to a paid subscription plan.
Strategies for boosting freemium to paid conversion rates
1. Show them what they’re missing out on
One of the best methods of convincing your freemium users to convert is regularly demonstrating the value of your “locked” premium features. This will inspire the fear of missing out, which is a powerful emotion and an even more powerful conversion driver.
For example, you can send targeted users so-called behavior emails in which you’ll highlight the benefits of your paid version that could be relevant to them based on their preferences, pain points, usage patterns, and needs.
Or, you can go even further and send them helpful notifications in the form of teasers that will showcase additional product capabilities that could be unlocked with an upgrade. These could be glimpses into premium features, previews of exclusive content, or sneak peeks into how a premium plan overcomes specific challenges that freemium can’t.
Grammarly takes FOMO to the next level by informing their freemium users about additional grammar, writing, and style issues they could fix with the help of the Premium plan. Naturally, anyone who uses Grammarly for professional purposes won’t settle for subpar writing. This will most likely prompt them to purchase the premium version and correct their work.
2. Offer a full free trial
To add a little twist to your freemium strategy, you can offer a full free trial so that existing non-paying users get the taste of a more robust and feature-rich version of your product. This way, they will be able to compare the two plans and see how much better the premium is. At least a portion of freemium users won’t be willing to downsize once the free trial expires, and you’ll score more conversions.
Canva offers its freemium users to sign up for a free trial of their robust Pro version with unlimited functionality to explore all the features. This clever tactic aims to trigger FOMO in users and prompt them to upgrade.
Wrapping it up
Monitoring your SaaS conversion rates can make a difference between developing a thriving business and struggling to gain traction. Understanding each individual conversion type and strategies that can help you improve these important metrics is a must. Besides the tactics we mentioned here, you need to experiment a lot and find what works for your specific product and target audience.
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