When it comes to your SaaS free trial, complicated isn’t cool…it kills conversions!
Confused minds don’t buy… they bounce, and take the money that you spent to get them to your site and their lifetime value as a customer with ’em!
Look at your SaaS sales funnel, your Free Trial sign-up process, their first in-app experience, etc.
If anything in there isn’t 100%, absolutely clear – and you happen to rely on an e-commerce/self-service signup process for your web app – you’re losing sales. Period.
Look, it doesn’t matter if your product does 3,574 things… pick the absolute minimum number of things required to get your prospective customer using – then invested in – your product and create an experience that moves prospects in that direction.
If you’re afraid people won’t see all 3,574 awesome features when they come in to “kick the tires” or “evaluate” your SaaS offering if you guide them through just a small subset of those things, let me assure you…
… if you let them fend for themselves in some elaborate dashboard with zero guidance, they won’t see all 3,574 things… in fact, they won’t see any because they’ll get confused or overwhelmed, leave … and never come back!
So how do you avoid this problem and increase Engagement with your Free Trial user (prospect) so they’ll convert?
Create the Shortest Distance to Actual Usage in your SaaS Free Trial
- What do they NEED to do to start to use the app (i.e. one time setup, config, etc.)
- What do they NEED to do to become ENGAGED in the app? (i.e. create a project, write an email, upload a video, embed a widget, etc.)
- What do they NEED to do to become INVESTED in the app? (invite colleagues, setup clients, connect social networks, etc.)
Once you have the list of activities that leads the prospect from sign-up to Investment (remember, once they’re invested – time, resources, etc. – converting to a paying customer is a no-brainer), continue to refine the number of steps/amount of time required to become invested downward.
Once you have it well refined (and after another refinement pass or two), all of your effort should be to move the user through the required steps to become invested.
If they quit before finishing those steps, send emails to encourage the completion of those steps (do it right; make it about them, not just completing some arbitrary step you’d like them to do).
Or when they log back into your App, don’t take them back to a generic “dashboard” – take them to the step they need to finish.
If they can still click back to the dashboard, put a visual reminder that stays with them at all times reminding them that they need to finish that step (but remind them WHY they should do it by making it a value-based message that is all about them!).
You are in full control of the Free Trial and first in-app experience of your users… if they are confused, don’t get it, can’t make it work, or bounce… … it’s all your fault.
But since it is your fault, you can fix it!
About Lincoln Murphy
