Customer-centric Growth by Lincoln Murphy

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Free Trial Success Secret #3: Stop Confusing Freemium and Free Trials

Article by Lincoln Murphy

Free Trial Success Secret #3: Stop Confusing Freemium and Free Trials

About Lincoln Murphy

I am a world-renowned Growth Architect, Consultant, Author, and Keynote Speaker and have helped drive exponential growth across the entire customer lifecycle for more than 1000 companies worldwide I wrote the Customer Success book which you can buy at Amazon. If you need help growing your company or would like me to speak at your event, please contact me. Also, connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter or Facebook.

You should read these articles, too…

  • Customers Hate These 3 Things (and How to Avoid Them)
  • The 5 Secrets of World-class Customer Success Managers
  • Customer Success: Defined (Updated for 2022)
  • Customer Onboarding: How to Design and Implement an Effective Onboarding Process
  • Eliminate Churn Forever in 5 Simple Steps

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Customer Success & Growth Articles

  • Customers Hate These 3 Things (and How to Avoid Them)
  • The 5 Secrets of World-class Customer Success Managers
  • Customer Success: Defined (Updated for 2022)
  • Customer Onboarding: How to Design and Implement an Effective Onboarding Process
  • Eliminate Churn Forever in 5 Simple Steps
  • Customer Success: The Lost Art of Churn Reason Analysis
  • Customer Success: How to Quantify the Impact of Bad-fit Customers
  • Designing a Sales-to-CSM Handoff that Actually Works
  • What is a good SaaS Churn Rate?
  • Customer Success: CSM Capacity Planning Guide & Calculator
  • Achieve Exponential Growth by Focusing on CAC Efficiency
  • TTFV as a Sales KPI to Drive Engagement and Expansion
  • Time to First Value (TTFV) is a Customer Onboarding Goal
  • Customer Onboarding: AHA! or WTF?
  • Emotional Disconnect During Customer Onboarding
  • Bad Sales Handoffs Cause Customers to Ghost During Onboarding
  • How to Know if Customers are Actually Ghosting you
  • Why Customers Ghost you
  • The Basics of Customer Onboarding
  • Success Potential: Real Customer Success Starts Here
  • Account Expansion: How to Upsell Unsuccessful Customers
  • Customer Growth: Why Lack Of Expansion Is A Really Bad Sign
  • Account Expansion: If You Want To Grow Fast, Do This…
  • Customer Growth: Upselling Hurts Trust (When You Do It Wrong)
  • Customer Growth: The Difference between Sales and Expansion
  • Introducing the BEAST Message Framework for Customer Engagement
  • Introducing the Customer Engagement Communication Model
  • Churn Classification Framework For Customer Success Management
  • Customer Success and Sales: Why the Latter determines the Former
  • Appropriate Experience is Required for Customer Success
  • What Are The Best Customer Success KPIs?
  • You Can’t Solve Upstream Problems Down Stream
  • Customer Success is a Simple Concept (Don’t Overthink It)
  • Customer Success can’t fit into Existing Frameworks
  • Those aren’t Problems. Those are Customers!
  • Customer Onboarding Success Secret: Don’t Overwhelm Customers
  • A QBR is NOT Required for Customer Success
  • Customer Success: The Importance of User or Customer Onboarding
  • How to Define Roles in Customer Success Management
  • Customer Success: High/Low/No Touch Customer Segmentation
  • Customer Success: Incorporating High/Low/No Touch into Onboarding
  • Customer Success: How to help Salespeople with Customer Segmentation
  • Customer Success: Determining Which Customers on which to Focus
  • Customer Success: Who Should Handle Upsells?
  • Customer Success: How to Reset Mismanaged Expectations
  • Customer Success: Customer Engagement Across the Entire Lifecycle
  • Customer Success: Working with Customers that don’t like Technology
  • Customer Success: How to Tell Customers What to Do
  • How to Get Customers to Help Define Engagement Models
  • Customer Success-driven Marketing: Targeting Offline Customers
  • Lincoln Murphy Customer Success AMA Transcript and Video – May 19, 2017
  • The Process for Discovering your Customer’s Desired Outcome
  • Customer Success: How to Close the Feedback Loop with…
  • Customer Success and Upgrading Grandfathered Customers
  • Customer Success in Early-stage Startups
  • Drawing the Line between Customer Success and Support
  • The Best Customer Success Management (CSM) Software
  • Why Aligning Sales and Customer Success is Critical
  • Customer Success and Charging Setup Fees
  • The Biggest Customer Success Mistake (and How to Avoid it)
  • Determining the Ideal Customer Success Organization Structure
  • Customer Success in Two-sided Markets
  • Customer Success: The Secret to Improving Customer Adoption
  • Customer Success in a B2B2C (Partner / Value Chain) Scenario
  • Customer Success: How to Monitor Customer Happiness
  • Determining the Perfect Number of Customer Segments
  • The Difference between Customer Success and Account Management
  • The Secret to Defining Customer Success Coverage Models
  • Lincoln Murphy Customer Success AMA Transcript and Video – May 5, 2017
  • The 5 Fatal Flaws of most Customer Journey Maps
  • The Cost of Bad-Fit Customers: How a Simple Sales Mistake Wiped Out $1.2M in Revenue Overnight
  • Customer Success Goals: Cohorts, Metrics, and Prioritization
  • Contents of an Awesome Customer Success Playbook
  • Understanding Customer Success Management Compensation Models
  • Determining the Number of Accounts per Customer Success Manager
  • Customer Success-driven Growth: Rapid, Exponential, and Efficient
  • Why You Can’t Offset Churn with Upsells
  • 9 Things Customer Success is Not
  • Customer Success Management: An Executive Overview
  • Customer Success Management: The 8 Elements of this Valuable Business Function
  • Logical Customer Segmentation: The Key to Scaling Customer Success
  • Orchestrating Sales and Customer Success Alignment
  • Success Potential: The Foundation of Customer Success
  • Excuses and the Myth of Near-Zero Churn
  • Success Vector – a Better Customer Health Score
  • Don’t Mix SaaS Free Trial and Churn Metrics
  • SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate Benchmarks
  • Churn is a Symptom, Not a Disease
  • 7 Ways Customer Success drives Company Valuation
  • Customer Success: The Difference between Stretch and Bad-Fit Customers
  • Two Ways to Reduce SaaS Cancellations
  • The Only Two Reasons Customers Churn
  • You Have to Know why Your Customers Churn
  • Use Customer Success to Reduce Credit Card Failures
  • Upgrading Grandfathered Early Customers
  • Pricing Strategy Framework for SaaS Startups
  • Qualifying Leads in a SaaS Free Trial
  • Customer Success and Logical Account Expansion
  • Reasonable SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate
  • Acceptable Churn Rate for Small Accounts
  • Success is Uncomfortable
  • The Risk (and Opportunity) in Stealing Customers
  • A Foolproof Way to Get Testimonials Without Asking for Them
  • Success Milestones: The Path to the Customer’s Desired Outcome
  • Customer Accountability: The Missing Piece in your Customer Success Strategy
  • This Customer Acquisition Mistake Can Kill your Growth
  • Stop Using these Anti-Customer Terms
  • 7 Reasons to Optimize your SaaS Free Trial
  • Desired Outcome is a Transformative Concept
  • The Seeds of Churn are Planted Early
  • 5 Situations When Massive Churn is Just Fine
  • 5 Lesser-Known Ways Churn Hurts your Company
  • Podcast: Getting Inside the Minds of Your SaaS Customers
  • The Fiction that Friction Improves Customer Onboarding
  • Customer Psychology and the Unexpected Power of Surveys
  • How Social Proof Actually Works in Marketing
  • Customer Success Starts at Sales Done Right
  • Achieve Network Effect on a Smaller Scale
  • Podcast: Customer Success is the Foundation of Your Success
  • 3 Secrets of High-Converting SaaS Free Trials
  • How To Get Sales To Help Test your Ideal Customer Profile
  • Stick Point: When Your SaaS Customer is Truly a Customer
  • Free Trials Do Not Devalue Your Enterprise SaaS
  • 4 Undercover Ways to Hack Social for More Sales
  • The Success Gap: A HUGE Opportunity You Haven’t Considered
  • Your SaaS Metrics Are Wrong if You Include These Customers
  • Active Users are a Vanity Metric
  • CAC Strategy is the Key to Scaling your SaaS Company
  • Let Your Customers Write Your Marketing Copy
  • Exposed! A Top-Secret “Enterprise Pricing” Growth Hack
  • The Only 3 Acceptable Pricing Page Discount Tactics
  • Engaging at Scale: The Secret to Automating Personal Emails
  • 5 Growth Hacks to Supercharge your Invite or Referral System
  • The Myth of Unavoidable Churn
  • The Secret to Successful Customer Onboarding
  • 7 Sanity Checks for Sending Cold Email
  • You’re Doing Annual Pre-Pay Renewals Wrong
  • 10 Growth Hacking Lessons from Dodgeball
  • Understanding Your Customer’s Desired Outcome
  • How-to Avoid SaaS Free Trial Abuse
  • SaaS Free Trial Extension Requests are a Bad Sign
  • The Best SaaS Free Trial Length
  • Ideal Customer Profile Framework
  • 4 Sales Mistakes That Lead To High SaaS Churn
  • SaaS Free Trial: Requiring a Credit Card is Shortsighted
  • 3 Email Lead Capture Hacks to Get More Customers
  • 5 Steps to Unstick Your User Onboarding Flow
  • How-to Use SaaS Pricing Discounts to Grow Revenue
  • Customer Development Hacks for SaaS Startups
  • The Greatest Word of Mouth Follow-up Question… Ever!
  • How to Get in Front of your Ideal Customers
  • Email Marketing: How Vero Got a 450% Increase in Conversions
  • Customer Success: 22 Ways To Reduce Churn With Growth Hacking
  • Time Management for Startups: Quantify, Prioritize, and Automate
  • The best way to grow your SaaS business
  • Case Study: Growth Hacking Pre-Launch Revenue
  • Freemium or Free Trial? There’s a Better Question
  • WTF is a Growth Hacker, anyway?
  • Predictions for Customer Success in 2014
  • Autoresponders are Dead: 5 Types of Follow-up Emails
  • SaaS Pricing Model: Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems
  • The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Myth and Misguided Optimization
  • 5 Rules for Successful Growth Hacking
  • Use Partner Offers to Quickly Grow Your Business
  • Growth Hack: Warm-Up Your Leads Before You Email Them
  • When Customers Go Dark: Customer Success to fight the Zombies
  • SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages
  • SaaS Pricing: Multi Currency Support
  • How to Create an Affiliate Program for your SaaS
  • SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacks to Test Today
  • SaaS Sales Funnel: Stop Optimizing for the Wrong Customers
  • SaaS Freemium Customer Acquisition Costs
  • No More Email from Your SaaS App? Introducing GMail Tabbed Inbox and Categories
  • SaaS Marketing: Are you Lazy or Deliberate?
  • SaaS Churn: Measure Revenue or Customer Retention?
  • SaaS Marketing: Random Effort Yields Random Results
  • SaaS Growth Hacking: An Interview with Lincoln Murphy
  • Engagement is the key to lowering SaaS Churn
  • SaaS Marketing: Rise of the Growth Copyists?
  • SaaS Free Trial: Require a Credit Card to begin?
  • Who’s your ideal customer?
  • SaaS Customer Success: Eliminate ‘Dead Ends’ to Drive Engagement
  • SaaS Customer Success: Start with Quick Wins
  • SaaS Churn Threats: Identify and Retain At-Risk Customers
  • SaaS Churn Rate Improvement: Monitor and Drive Engagement
  • SaaS Churn Rate Reduction Starts with Attracting the Right Customers
  • SaaS Churn Rate: Go Negative with Expansion Revenue
  • SaaS Customer Onboarding: 3 Steps to a Successful Welcome Email
  • SaaS Market Positioning: How to Compete in Crowded Markets
  • SaaS Marketing Plan: 5 Ways to Get your App to Sell Itself
  • Increase your SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate with this Key Metric
  • 5 Rules for SaaS Email Marketing and Transactional Messages
  • List of SaaS and Cloud Consultants and Analysts
  • Growth Hacking: 43 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website
  • Beta Testing & Pricing: Examples (Video)
  • Beta Testing & Pricing: A Hazardous Combination (Video)
  • SaaS Marketing Plan: 100 Places to Promote Your App (Part 2)
  • SaaS Marketing Plan: 100 Places to Promote Your App (Part 1)
  • SaaS Conversion Rate Lies: 97% won’t become customers, anyway
  • How to Develop your SaaS Pricing Model
  • Pivot to Profit: Ditch Freemium and Start Making Money
  • SaaS Customer Retention is the key to Long-term Profitability
  • SaaS Churn kills Growth; Customer Retention is a Growth Accelerator
  • SaaS Customer Retention Requires Ongoing Realization of Value
  • Free Trials: Not just for Startups or toy Web Apps
  • Why $1 Trials are a REALLY Bad Idea
  • SaaS Pricing Model: How a 10x Price Increase lead to Happier Customers
  • Free Trial Frustrations from a SaaS CEO
  • SaaS Free Trial: How Self-Service fits with a High-Touch Sales Process
  • Simply Offering a SaaS Free Trial Increases Conversions
  • SaaS Free Trial: Your Customer Qualification Machine
  • SaaS Free Trial Optimization: When to start?
  • 7 Tips for Software Vendors Moving to the Cloud
  • How to keep App-generated Email from Being Marked Spam
  • SaaS Free Trial: Confused Minds Don’t Buy
  • SaaS Free Trial Users are a Vanity Metric
  • SaaS Pricing Page Design: Highest Price on the Left?
  • SaaS Conversion Rate: A Simple Trick to DOUBLE Your Revenue
  • SaaS Pricing Strategy: The 10x Rule
  • Display a Phone Number to Increase Conversions?
  • SaaS Affiliate Marketing: How-To Supercharge Your Growth
  • 9 Ways to Instantly Improve Your PPC Results
  • Why SaaS Free Trial Optimization is So Important
  • SaaS Free Trial: The #1 Reason You Fail to Convert Customers
  • Switch from a Reactive to Proactive SaaS Free Trial
  • SaaS Free Trials: The Shorter the Better?
  • SaaS Pricing Models Resource Guide
  • SaaS Pricing: The Advanced Stuff
  • SaaS Pricing: The Basics
  • SaaS and Web Apps: Increase Your Free Trial Conversion Rate
  • SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate Optimization Resource Guide
  • Where is Your Ideal Customer on the Awareness Ladder?
  • What’s the biggest issue you’re dealing with right now?
  • Your Signup Form is Hurting Your Free Trial Conversions!
  • How to Offer Both Freemium and Free Trials
  • SaaS Customer Retention: The Secret to Reducing your Churn Rate
  • What’s Your Biggest Challenge in 2012?
  • Average Free Trial Conversion Rates… and why they don’t matter
  • What’s the Ideal SaaS Free Trial Length?
  • Year-End Free Trial Conversion Ideas
  • Freemium isn’t just for “Startups with Nothing to Lose”
  • Classical Freemium Doesn’t Exist At Scale
  • SaaS Free Trials: Common Problems with Sign-up Forms
  • Focus on People, not Features, in 2012 (Happy Holidays!)
  • The Free Trial Secrets of 100’s of SaaS vendors… just for you
  • SaaS & Web Apps: Optimize Your Pricing Page for 2012
  • SaaS Customer Success Experts Resource Guide
  • SaaS Freemium Model Resource Guide
  • The 7 Secrets to DOMINATING Your Free Trials
  • Web App Pricing: How To Avoid the Commodity Trap
  • Can You Answer These 15 Questions About Your Free Trial?
  • Stop Obsessing About Your Competitors
  • Competitor Pricing… Does It Matter?
  • Price Objections are Value Objections
  • Wait… You Actually WANT to Be Average?
  • Offer a Free Trial of your Web App? Don’t EVER do this…
  • The SECRET to $1M ARR in 6 Months is 9 Customers
  • My EVIL Method to Reduce SaaS Churn
  • SaaS Affiliate Marketing: Your Virtual Salesforce
  • There are 7 Types of Freemium and Why That Matters…
  • Why OfficeDrop Went Freemium… and how Mobile Apps forced their hand
  • Copywriting for Geeks Author Marc-Andre Cournoyer Teaches You How to Sell Your App
  • Assistly Marketing VP Tells You Why They Dropped Tiered Pricing and Picked Up Freemium
  • Web App Sales Funnel: 2 Questions You MUST Answer
  • SaaS Customer Success: Technology Will Fail, but Service Must Never
  • SaaS Business Model Resource Guide
  • SaaS Distribution and Promotion Resource Guide
  • SaaS Pricing Model: Value Metrics Are Key
  • SaaS Marketing – Web App Pricing Page Review: Salesforce.com
  • Your Revenue Crutch is Killing Your SaaS Startup
  • 37Signals Caught Treating SaaS Pricing Page like a Marketing Page
  • SaaS Growth Hacking Experts Resource Guide
  • SaaS Free Trial: Feature or Time-Limited?
  • Web Apps use Customer Support to Increase Revenue
  • Does Goldilocks Pricing Work for SaaS?
  • As SaaS Matures, so will SaaS Pricing
  • 5 SaaS Pricing Mistakes to Avoid
  • SaaS Pricing: Please Learn From the Zendesk Fiasco
  • Cloud Acquisitions Create New Opportunities
  • SaaS Distribution: Time to Change the Channel
  • SaaS, Web Apps, or Just ‘Apps’?
  • SaaS Pricing: Commodity Metrics and the $240 GB
  • SaaS Pricing: Versioning for Market Segments
  • Free Trial Success Secret #7: The Four Phases of a Free Trial
  • Free Trial Success Secret #6: Perfect Free Trial Length
  • Free Trial Success Secret #5: Credit Cards are a Red Herring
  • Free Trial Success Secret #4: Measure the Right Things
  • Free Trial Success Secret #3: Stop Confusing Freemium and Free Trials
  • Free Trial Success Secret #2: Get Your Product to Sell Itself
  • Free Trial Success Secret #1: No More Evaluations
  • 7 Secrets to Increasing Conversions
  • [Replay] 7 Secrets to Increasing Conversions with Free Trials
  • [Replay] 7 Secrets to Increasing Conversions with Free Trials
  • SaaS Network Effect: Companies Should Exploit Aggregate Data
  • SaaS Business Model – You Break It, You Buy It
  • SaaS Business Model is About Rules, Not Exceptions
  • SaaS Success Requires Dropping the Legacy Baggage
  • SaaS Companies Should Learn from Netflix
  • ASP vs SaaS – What’s the difference?
  • The SaaS Single-Tenancy vs. Multi-Tenancy Debate
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