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My only point of contention after skimming through the article is with the trial period. The other side of that coin is that, if it's too short then users bookm

My only point of contention after skimming through the article is with the trial period. The other side of that coin is that, if it's too short then users bookmark your site thinking they'll sign up later and forget, and if it doesn't exist then users may end up not signing up at all and going with the free option instead. In practice it really depends on the product's criticality.

arkitaip 7y ago
Came to write this. Companies forget that their product isn't evaluated in a vacuum, that for any serious business need, a person or an group is going to evaluate multiple products for a extended period of time. Having no trial period or a very short one means losing out of business simply because of short term greed. Also, it doesn't help that psych pop is used to arbitrarily justify any conversion tactic.
- DanHulton 7y ago
  It's an optimization problem - you lose X% of people if your trial is long enough that they don't prioritize evaluating it before it expires. You lose Y% of people if your trial is too short for them to evaluate it against competitors. If X > Y, shorten your trial. If Y > X, lengthen it. The problem comes in the fact that it's really hard to identify what X and Y are - there's some voodoo involved in properly attributing actual reasons for not converting a trial. This is why I like the idea of going immediately paid with a very-long money-back guarantee, though that comes with its own optimization problems.
  - ddebernardy 7y ago
    In my mind, there's more to it than a metrics-driven optimization in isolation from the rest of the company. In your example, the Y% of people you might lose if your trial is too short may very well turn out to be higher paying and/or lower churn customers. What you suggest in your post is the marketing equivalent of sales and support ignoring the colloquial small fry, without realizing that the latter might be sitting on company boards and referring large clients. Also, if they bookmark the service until they can set aside a time to sign up and evaluate (which as an occasional buyer of SaaS products, I can anecdotally report that some do), you'd have no way to reach out to them and build a relationship unless they contacted you. By contrast, if you have a free tier, and/or make it clear from the outset that when your trial expires you'll be able to do new ones when the product hits major milestones, then you have the end-user's email, you're building a relationship, you can interview the end-user to understand why they didn't convert, you can try to rescue trials that didn't move forward with a sale for a reason or another, etc.

arkitaip 7y ago

Came to write this. Companies forget that their product isn't evaluated in a vacuum, that for any serious business need, a person or an group is going to evaluate multiple products for a extended period of time. Having no trial period or a very short one means losing out of business simply because of short term greed. Also, it doesn't help that psych pop is used to arbitrarily justify any conversion tactic.

DanHulton 7y ago
It's an optimization problem - you lose X% of people if your trial is long enough that they don't prioritize evaluating it before it expires. You lose Y% of people if your trial is too short for them to evaluate it against competitors. If X > Y, shorten your trial. If Y > X, lengthen it. The problem comes in the fact that it's really hard to identify what X and Y are - there's some voodoo involved in properly attributing actual reasons for not converting a trial. This is why I like the idea of going immediately paid with a very-long money-back guarantee, though that comes with its own optimization problems.
- ddebernardy 7y ago
  In my mind, there's more to it than a metrics-driven optimization in isolation from the rest of the company. In your example, the Y% of people you might lose if your trial is too short may very well turn out to be higher paying and/or lower churn customers. What you suggest in your post is the marketing equivalent of sales and support ignoring the colloquial small fry, without realizing that the latter might be sitting on company boards and referring large clients. Also, if they bookmark the service until they can set aside a time to sign up and evaluate (which as an occasional buyer of SaaS products, I can anecdotally report that some do), you'd have no way to reach out to them and build a relationship unless they contacted you. By contrast, if you have a free tier, and/or make it clear from the outset that when your trial expires you'll be able to do new ones when the product hits major milestones, then you have the end-user's email, you're building a relationship, you can interview the end-user to understand why they didn't convert, you can try to rescue trials that didn't move forward with a sale for a reason or another, etc.