Thoughts on trials?
It's still early days for Twylu and we're thinking about ditching the trial. Twylu is a tool that automates a lot of the internal linking audit and recommendations process. The current 30 day trial only lets you test with 500 URLs but if your site is much bigger than that, it may not give the best examples. We then thought about bringing the trial down to 14 days, giving access to the full URL allowance and requiring card details (to push people to try it within the trial period). Trouble with that is if they have the full URL allowance and only have 1 website, they may use it as much as they can during the trial and then cancel.
We're now thinking, let's just ditch the trial. What's people's thoughts/experience with this? Maybe we could help conversions by offering a demo (before or after sign up)?
It sounds like your tool is super easy to get value from (enter my URL, I get valuable recommendations). In this case, I would lean towards charging up-front and offering a 30-day money-back guarantee.
IMO, trials are optimal for more complex apps where you don't get instant value the day you sign up usually due to the ned for a lot of setup, such as a CRM or ESP.
Great to hear from you Rob. I actually popped you a message earlier today on another platform so funny to see your name pop up here. Someone else mentioned a money back guarantee and I hadn't considered that. They mentioned 10 days so it was interesting to see you mention 30 days. Do you have any insights on optimal days for guarantees like this? I guess the longer the better as far as users are concerned?
I don't think it will make a big difference. 10 days "feels" short to me. I've normally seen 14-30 days. I don't see a big downside in making it 30. If it was 10 days and someone asked for a refund at day 12, you're going to want to give it to them anyway.
This was a very good read and has a great section on refund policies https://stripe.com/gb/atlas/guides/saas-pricing
I think it makes sense for us to introduce a 30 day money back guarantee.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like value from the tool is mostly from the initial set of recommendations? i.e. value is front-loaded.
This makes me want to use the tool for 1 month and stop there unless I was making changes to my site.
Given this, 2 thoughts on pricing.
I've investigated many tools that don't need a credit card, but very few that ask for a cc right away.
Hadn't thought about the one off but worth considering. Our ideal customers are agencies (who would be using it ongoing for new clients and also at intervals for existing clients) and larger websites (who update/create content more regular and would see more benefit from it, like media brands). But I guess for the others outside of that, a one off is worth thinking about. Needs some thought.
This article has an interesting view on requiring credit card details. https://stripe.com/gb/atlas/guides/saas-pricing ... seems it can help with conversions.
Summary of recommendation: Give full access with a 30 day trial.
Here is why.
Two things I noted. Your ideal customer are larger agencies/websites and you're concerned with a 14 day full free trial because a 1 website customer might use it once and not ever pay.
You need to choose who your target customer is: smaller 1 website users or agencies/large websites. That will then direct you to what kind of trials, pricing, messaging, etc.
Let's start with the 14 day trial and 1 website. It sounds like these really aren't your customers. Even if you had a pay up front, which will kill your conversions in the early stages until you're more well known, these users will pay for one month and leave. Your churn will be super high and you're probably looking for a LTV of 12-18 months, not 1 month. In the long-term for your business, it really doesn't matter if you get these use once (or even pay once) customers.
Ok, so if these aren't your customers then who is the trial/freemium for? Your agency/larger website customers - who will also pay more. As you stated they will always have new clients, add new pages, etc. If you give them fully access for even 30 days it give them a great feel for the capabilities and you might (*experiment) capture more of these bigger customers. You probably won't lose agencies because they used the trial and never need your service again.
I know it is hard to say I'll give up these customers, who are willing to pay, to focus on the bigger growth strategy, but in the long run it might be worth it.
*Remember that it is all about experimentation to find what works right now for the customers you want to focus on, which might not tomorrow.
The first question that jumps to mind here is, even if we focus on agencies/large websites and offer a free trial, what's to stop the one-man bands rinsing the credits still?
That is my point - unless there are significant costs, do you really care if someone is going to the effort to keep setting up free accounts and burn email addresses. If they are, they will never pay and the only way to stop them is not offer a trial. If you believe a trial for 30 days would attract more agencies, then do that.
Also, you can also have email verification to keep out abusers.
Depends a bit on the market. If your competitors have a free trial you risk losing some prospects to them only because you don't offer one. Another issue are if you're customers are businesses and the employees don't want to add their personal credit card but still try the tool.
That said, these things vary a lot between markets and I guess it also depends what you're optimizing for?
One idea that comes to mind is to have a credit limited trial but if it's not too resource heavy could you present some of the best examples and blur out the rest?
The trouble for us with a credit limited trial (what we do now) is that the insights could be lacking due to missing out on opportunities. We could crawl everything and then blur things out but there's still the cost impact to us. Although I guess people are less likely to take advantage as they're only getting partial view of insights. Worth a thought.
We have tried all kinds of things with StatusGator. Recently we moved from a 30 day to a14 day trial and we have liked the results. Mostly, it's a shorter time for us to discover the results of experiments and how they affect conversion rates.
It depends a lot on your market though, as others have mentioned here. We have a high number of educational customers, nonprofits, which are slow-moving and often request trial extensions. We are always happen to grant them because it means they are actively evaluating the product. At least 95% of people who request an extension end up converting.
Maybe consider shortening your trial, not having a credit card required, but offering an automated way to extend?
We are targeting more of the agency side and larger web businesses (e.g. larger ecommerce with in-house team). We currently have 30 days and no card required but we can see that some people sign up and then don't really try it. I think if the trial was shorter, or no trial at all, it would push people to try it more. Also, I think a number of these trials are smaller businesses and freelancers so not necessarily our target. We get great feedback from agencies and I guess one worry is, if we give access to a full credit trial, will those people we're not really targeting, rinse all the credits (which has a cost impact to us)? I think you made the right move switching to 14 days. I keep hearing shorter trials are better. I think it pushed people to act sooner and it also just shortens the turnaround.
We're asking ourselves the same question with a saas tool. As we're still unsure how we'll be able to scale, we decided not to offer free trials but rather a 30 days money back guaranteed policy.
Tough one to decide because displaying value is ultimately what drives growth and free trials are a good way to do it. But the drawbacks of having to offer support to non-paying users is we believe not worth it given the stage we're in at the moment
I think it makes sense for some tools and I've seen a number of examples of products who aren't offering trials. I think we're going to give it a try with a 30 day guarantee and see how things go. There are some other good options mentioned in these comments but I think we might try this first. I'd be interested to hear how yours goes if you want to share results and ideas.
This is a tool for business: do ask for a credit card
Maybe you could sell them credits for 100 url / month.
Pay per use is very popular even if it is more expensive just because it is less risky.
I'm not in your vertical, but as a consumer, trials have converted me into a paying customer much more than an initial paywall. If I can prove value to myself by using the product, I'm much more likely to keep paying for it then wondering if it provides value at all hidden behind an initial charge.
You could combine the two approaches that you mentioned: give them a 14-day trial (with credit card given upfront) but still somewhat limit the URL allowances (say to 1000).
Trials are supposed to be an introduction to the product for demonstrating its value, and not an unlimited offering.
Sounds like Twylu is more of a one-off service than an ongoing subscription? If that is the case, I'd personally go with an approach that lets them get started with the audit, shows them a few recommendations, and then asks them to unlock the rest by paying up.
Depends on the market I guess for B2B I think a short trial is better 2-4 weeks seem reasonable. I've seen too many horror stories of companies giving stuff away for free for years. Yikes how do they afford it?
I think it's about showing value. If your customers need some time to get value, maybe it takes some time to setup, then I think a trial makes sense. Personally, I think 30 days is long. If you are to offer a trial, I would go with 7 or 14 days to be honest.
If, as some of the other comments have suggested, your customers can get value right away you may not need a trial. I really think it's useful to focus on the value you provide, what value are you bringing the customer and how long does it take for them to realize it.
A key component of product-led growth is allowing customer to see the value of your product before they buy it. This usually equates to a free trial in a low-touch SaaS business. I believe it’s a requirement for a successful business. How else will the customer know that your product is really worth buying?
Another thing to consider is not muddying the implementation with your free trial. You should basically offer different plans, rather than limitations specifically for the free trial. Then just put free trial users on a certain plan with a two week discount.
One thought was to switch the trial out with a demo/call. I see some SaaS products do very well without a trial but they're often high cost products. I quite like what Ahrefs do too, where they offer a 7 day trial for $7 (actual packages start at $99 I think). What are you thoughts around offering a 2 week discount but only for select potential customers, as a way to push them over the line (rather than offering it as a trial to everyone)?
It really depends if you want to have to have that one-on-one interaction with your customer before they purchase your product. Remember the point of the trial is only to get them to buy it.
If you want my opinion, I don't think your Twylu's prices are high enough to justify the time spent on a demo/call for every customer. But then again, it depends if you want the feedback or just the money.
If you do one thing, you really should read this post by Stripe, they explain it all really well :) https://stripe.com/gb/atlas/guides/business-of-saas
Great article. That article also linked to this one about pricing which was an excellent read:
https://stripe.com/gb/atlas/guides/saas-pricing
Some really good stuff in there, especially around requiring card details, demos and refund policies. I thought these 2 sections were really interesting:
Generous refund policies are to your advantage
I would generally encourage software sold on the low-touch model to offer refunds to customers who are dissatisfied. Refunds do cause a short-term cashflow hit, but dissatisfied customers are a much bigger threat to your business than that cashflow hit, because dissatisfaction that you don’t know about causes churn that is hard to control.
You should eagerly encourage customers who are very unhappy about your services to tell you why and with specificity; consider the refund a small consulting fee you’re giving them if it helps you.
Additionally, customers who are dissatisfied with a SaaS company’s services can always escalate the decision to not refund to their bank. The bank will often take their customer’s side over yours, since you are not their customer. It will be difficult for you to prevail in a dispute along the lines of “They promised me the software would do X / Y / Z but it didn’t so I asked for my money back and they said no.” Answering that dispute is a poorer use of your time than talking to customers or building software, and you likely wouldn’t win it even if you were entirely accurate in describing the software.
To demo or not to demo?
You’re trying to strike a balance between conversion rates and learning with the decision to offer free trials or not. I would maximize for learning right now: offer a call to literally everyone who starts using the software. Use it 80% for learning about their business and 20% for showing them the important parts of your software.
You should use these calls for customer development and for sales, not training—if they have questions, note them for later and produce screencasts or similar that you can show to everyone.
I would probably use the fact of the call and concierge onboarding to tell everyone that of course you charge for your services, just like they charge for their services, but that as a limited time offer you’ll retroactively waive one month of fees if they can commit to a 15 minute conversation about why the software didn’t work for your needs.
This is effectively a demo but puts the onus on the user to organize themselves to actually use the software or feel embarrassed, as opposed to the typical free trial, which is just “Try it, or don’t, either way really.” Committing to putting a software product through its paces is real work which software people, as inveterate early adopters, often underestimate. You’re asking a busy professional to change the way they do business with respect to an actual project with an actual customer who has an actual kitchen on the line. If you do not project manage them in the adoption of your software and process, you can reasonably expect for them to not make effective use of your trial during the time limit, mooting any benefit of it being available.
This is a very common failure case for free software trials; they carry a cost which, despite not being charged to a credit card, is much more material than software people give it credit for. We like them too much and we should be more considered about whether offering them is in the interests of our businesses or our customers.
Nice one, that's a great article 🙌🏼 thanks for sharing!
You may have a different take, but I view the SEO/links space as having some shady operators in so until you've got enough clout/reputation to not offer some insight for free, you may end up doing harm to your pipeline?
Can you do some free analysis then present the top X most impactful results (or a spread of imapctful results and lower value results)?
If I saw 5 quick wins that could be fixed and make an impact to my rankings, I'd definitely be more interested, and you don't give away all your value in a trial period.
We could potentially do some audits for target customers and send them some example quick wins. I suppose in a way this is similar to video audits for agency prospects, which don't tend to convert that great. SaaS is different though I suppose so maybe worth a try.
I'd read it as you had customers coming to you and kicking of trials, just that type of trial maybe did not demonstrate the biggest value if you burned through 500 credits.
If you could offer the ability to analyze the whole site so you can find and present the opportunities (and hide 90% of the results) it feels like you can show the value and not have people maxxing out in their 30 days and not converting.
...might have misunderstood your challenges though!
Something like this is definitely worth thinking about.
You could try to ditch the trial and replace it with a 10 days refund policy
That's not a bad shout. I hadn't thought of a refund policy.
https://tomtunguz.com/how-long-free-trial/
I think this article might help!
Interesting article. I agree that shorter trials are better. It's a shame he doesn't delve into examples of no trials.
Right. Maybe in product-led-growth world no trial isn't really popular option.
Thanks for dropping this link; I've got his RSS feed but anytime you land on his site you find something useful
Honestly, I don't really open the feeds often😂 but somehow this one got my interest. Glad if you think it's useful for you. Cheers!
I'm not sure that you can make a solid decision without testing your options. I'll share what I do with my projects.
For Price2Spy there's a free 30 day trial with no strings attached. There's only a limit as to how many URLs you can monitor.
For BotMeNot, which is still in beta I'm planning to do a credit system. Every new registrant will receive enough credits to run a Starter or Light Test. This should make it possible for them to see the functionality of the tool and make a decision. Currently, however, as I've said, it's in the beta stage and it can be checked out free of charge.
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One thing I like about the money back guarantee is that you can use that as an opportunity to get feedback on why they're cancelling and what they didn't like. I think we might introduce a 30 day money back guarantee.
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It's also weighing up how cost effective a full trial is for us. There's a cost impact related to people rinsing the credits as much as they can and then cancelling. Lots to consider.
This comment was deleted a year ago.