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Free Trial Success Secret #6: Perfect Free Trial Length

Article by Lincoln Murphy

Free Trial Success Secret #6: Perfect Free Trial Length

About Lincoln Murphy

I invented Customer Success. I focus primarily on Customer Engagement. Learn more about me here.

You should read these articles, too…

  • Customer Success: Defined (Winter 2023 Update)
  • Stop Confusing Free Trials and Onboarding (It’s Costing You Customers)
  • The Importance of Consistency in Customer Success Management
  • The Real Reason Your Company Invests in Customer Success
  • Customers Hate These 3 Things (and How to Avoid Them)

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Customer Success & Growth Articles

  • Customer Success: Defined (Winter 2023 Update)
  • Stop Confusing Free Trials and Onboarding (It’s Costing You Customers)
  • The Importance of Consistency in Customer Success Management
  • The Real Reason Your Company Invests in Customer Success
  • Customers Hate These 3 Things (and How to Avoid Them)
  • The 5 Secrets of World-class Customer Success Managers
  • 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
  • Common Conversion Activities (CCA): SaaS Free Trial 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
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