The Best Ways To Engage Your SaaS Free Trials

Added by achaidaroglou 7 years ago in
B2B
Customer Growth
Growth Hacking

Engaging your B2B SaaS free trials the right way can be detrimental to your conversion rates and onboarding.

This post has the best ways to engage your free trials, for various SaaS stages and various scalability. Specific examples included.

Discussion

trevorhatfield

NEW 7 years ago

I like the reference to webinars @AChaidaroglou. I've seen this be very effective for sales teams since you can address everyone in free trials, or those expressing interested in your product, as little as once a month with a webinar. Otherwise if you reach out to them individually it could take way too much time as you get 100's+ of signups per month.

Just curious, what strategies out of this post do you think would differ when doing demos vs free trials?

achaidaroglou

7 years ago

Glad you liked it @trevorhatfield. Webinars indeed work surprisingly well. To scale a part of it at 100+ signups per month, a tool like Intercom can be used. And I mention Intercom because it almost always lands at the Primary inbox and that's a big deal. Now, regarding demos, when someone requests for a demo, after that it's the sales team's job to take care of them, so I can't say much. However, if there are processes and everything works as intended, the demo requests that weren't ready to buy, can be further nurtured through regular emails and just keep on top of their head. Otherwise, they convert and they go to retention phase and customer success. Tip: I don't mention this in my blog post, but if you want to know beforehand if a lead/demo request/signup/free trial is worth to go after, you can add a field in your form asking for the numbers of users/products/subscribers/contacts etc. That way, when someone puts a high number, it means they are a potentially high end customer, so you can dedicate more resources to them. Does that help? Happy to answer follow up questions or clarify anything.

achaidaroglou

NEW 7 years ago

Glad you liked it @trevorhatfield. Webinars indeed work surprisingly well. To scale a part of it at 100+ signups per month, a tool like Intercom can be used. And I mention Intercom because it almost always lands at the Primary inbox and that's a big deal. Now, regarding demos, when someone requests for a demo, after that it's the sales team's job to take care of them, so I can't say much. However, if there are processes and everything works as intended, the demo requests that weren't ready to buy, can be further nurtured through regular emails and just keep on top of their head. Otherwise, they convert and they go to retention phase and customer success. Tip: I don't mention this in my blog post, but if you want to know beforehand if a lead/demo request/signup/free trial is worth to go after, you can add a field in your form asking for the numbers of users/products/subscribers/contacts etc. That way, when someone puts a high number, it means they are a potentially high end customer, so you can dedicate more resources to them. Does that help? Happy to answer follow up questions or clarify anything.

trevorhatfield

7 years ago

Good points @AChaidaroglou, and your last tip makes a lot of sense. I would be curious with an product pushing demos over free trials at what point doing a webinar would be worthwhile. Generally speaking the companies pushing demos have more pricey and complex products so assuming it would be much less than the free trials, where you suggested about 500 / month. I would love to talk sometime on your experience with webinars. I'll connect with online and reach out there too. Thanks!

trevorhatfield

NEW 7 years ago

Good points @AChaidaroglou, and your last tip makes a lot of sense. I would be curious with an product pushing demos over free trials at what point doing a webinar would be worthwhile. Generally speaking the companies pushing demos have more pricey and complex products so assuming it would be much less than the free trials, where you suggested about 500 / month. I would love to talk sometime on your experience with webinars. I'll connect with online and reach out there too. Thanks!

achaidaroglou

7 years ago

Thanks @trevorhatfield. From what I have seen it depends on how "engaged" or "warm" a lead is. The warmer they are, the more likely it is to show up at the webinar. I'd strive for 10-30 attendees for such a webinar, because even if 1-2 convert it makes sense from an ROI perspective. Based on that, one could run some numbers and see how many they would need to have in order to have, say, 60 registrants, of which 20 show up at the live webinar. Thanks for the heads up regarding demos, I will add that to my article. Happy to discuss and exchange experiences any time!

achaidaroglou

NEW 7 years ago

Thanks @trevorhatfield. From what I have seen it depends on how "engaged" or "warm" a lead is. The warmer they are, the more likely it is to show up at the webinar. I'd strive for 10-30 attendees for such a webinar, because even if 1-2 convert it makes sense from an ROI perspective. Based on that, one could run some numbers and see how many they would need to have in order to have, say, 60 registrants, of which 20 show up at the live webinar. Thanks for the heads up regarding demos, I will add that to my article. Happy to discuss and exchange experiences any time!

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