You know the feeling. You’re visiting an interesting website that has a service you think might be useful, but there is no way to try it out properly without parting with your hard-earned cash. And often, even if they do have a trial option, it’s set up so poorly and requires you to give up so much personal information that you give up and go somewhere else. No thanks, I don’t want to give you my home phone number.
Pingdom, my company, had long planned to include the possibility for prospective users to try out the service for free before signing up for a full account. After analyzing the different kinds of trials available for a large number of services around the internet, we felt that we had found our success formula. Even in retrospect, the few simple rules we came up with have worked really well for us. Not all online services are created equal, but I think that our approach is generally enough to suit almost everyone.
So what is this success formula I’m talking about? We’ve narrowed it down to four simple rules for how a free trial of an online service should work. Let’s go through them one by one.
Signing up for a trial account should be easy and painless
This may seem like a no-brainer, but all too many companies require you to enter a significant amount of information about yourself before allowing you to try them out. Have you ever tried signing up for something only to be met by a huge registration form with lots of required fields? Most likely yes. How did it make you feel? That in itself should tell you not to do the same yourself.
Never make someone who is interested in your service jump through hoops to get to it. Instead, go in the other direction and make it even easier to sign up for a trial than it is to sign up for the vast majority of the free email services out there.
Do not require trial users to enter their credit card information
Anyone wanting to try out your service should be sure that there is no commitment involved. Requiring a credit card sends the wrong signals.
This is a shift in mentality from services where you actively have to cancel your account before the trial ends or be automatically charged for the next month. Users should upgrade their accounts themselves, making an active choice. You can remind them about it, and if you want to sweeten the deal by offering discounts or other offers, that is fine, but make sure the customer feels safe. Let them know that their account will just expire by itself after X number of days unless they themselves choose to upgrade it.
Do not cripple the trial
There should be no blanked-out options or missing features to stop the user from fully evaluating every aspect of your service. It is very common to cripple the features available during a trial, but the potential customers want to see everything you have to offer, and you should let them. Give them what any regular, paying customer gets, but for a limited period of time.
Though perhaps not obvious, this should also include support. Depending on the nature of your service, support can be a crucial part of the user experience, and an important part of their evaluation of you. Make sure that you address the needs of your trial users as well as your regular customers. Think of them as customers in the making.
Include a "highlight bonus."
Depending on how your service is built up, this fourth point may not be essential, but if you have add-ons and extra functionality that users pay for, this is a great way to make the trial more attractive. If a visitor is looking at your trial option, have something that will tip them over the edge and dive in.
The trick here is to pick a bonus that really highlights an important feature of your service. That way you are not just randomly spending money to add another feature checkbox for the trial option. Note that it doesn’t have to be anything huge. In our case, for example, the bonus is 20 free SMS alerts, which helps show users the full potential of our site monitoring service during the trial.
In the rear-view mirror
When we launched our free trial option, sign-ups and order flow both increased drastically from day one. We didn’t have more visitors than we normally did (at first), but that just goes to show how many potential customers may be dropping by the wayside if you don’t provide a way for visitors to sample what you have to offer.
Aside from the increased order flow, a positive side effect of the trial is that our support now has to deal with much fewer questions about specific features from prospective customers, since those who are interested can easily see for themselves. Sure, you have more users to deal with, but providing your service is not overly complicated (if so, then perhaps that is something you should look into, but more on that some other time) the support load is more than worth the effort.
Yes, all the key points I’ve listed are pretty much based on common sense, but it is surprising to see how often one or more of these items are ignored. Most often you should just look to yourself. How do you want to be treated? How would you react? Again, common sense, but sometimes in our rush to innovate and therefore often complicate, it’s hard to remember the simple things.
I would strongly urge all web apps to offer a full-featured trial option following the points outlined above. If you really believe in your product, that is the right thing to do, and you should end up getting a lot of new customers who may never have discovered you otherwise.
[…] Beth Kanter, NpTech Netsquared blogger wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptDepending on how your service is built up, this fourth point may not be essential, but if you have add-ons and extra functionality that users pay for, this is a great way to make the trial more attractive. If a visitor is looking at … […]
Hi Sam,
I think you are right, if you have a great product, then you should take every opportunity to get people using it, remove any reservations they may have about using the free trial and show them how good your product really is.
I think people could learn a thing or two from the pingdom website about how to focus on acquiring new signups. Great idea, great site, great article.
Cheers.
Hi Matt,
First let me say thank you for your kind words.
It’s like you say, the main point of the article is having a low barrier of entry. Remove all hesitation from a visitor’s mind. There is no better way to show off a service than having people actually use it.
Of course, once you actually manage to get someone to sign up for a trial, you need to take good care of them. If you can give your trial users a positive experience, maybe even surprise them, then that’s great. Like the old business saying goes, “under promise and over deliver.â€
Ease of signing up is essential, I think OpenID will dramatically increase the amount of people signing up for a trial application, as most of the work there is already done.
This may work for the very simple applications where the concept is easily understood - and its more of a marketing challenge between commodotised software…. but its not a “golden rule” that should apply everywhere
For example our system is complex - but we still give away free accounts…. but only after a bit of “filtering” - to check they really are appropriate for the system.
Alex
Thank you for the comments.
Matthew:
You have a good point there. If OpenID (or something similar) really manages to get into the mainstream and become a widely used standard, that would be A Good Thing. I’m convinced that such a solution would benefit everyone (consumers and companies alike), as long as it’s truly secure and easy to use.
Let’s just hope that OpenID makes it as a fully secure solution and doesn’t end up being slowed down by phishing abuse, etc.
Alex:
As with everything, there are no absolutes. Even though I believe the points I outlined in the article are suitable for most services, of course there will be exceptions.
Btw, if your concept is not easily understood, perhaps there’s an opportunity to optimize that?
Hi Sam,
You wrote:
“Btw, if your concept is not easily understood, perhaps there’s an opportunity to optimize that? ”
Yes indeed - our web application is competing with enterprise software selling at 50,000 USD etc…. and with that 50k USD you get face to face training etc…. which gets you around problems of people not understanding what everything does…..
However, with our approach (which is free accounts, delivered via web) not everyone understands the system “out of the box” - and don’t therefore see the value immediately.
The difficultly is in showing enough power so people consider a system suitable for their needs vs confusing people on a free signup - when really they need someone to explain the system to them a little bit first….
Its a very fine line to go down…. and probably why many web app designers go for the “low hanging fruit” like uptime tracking - rather than complex enterprise software :)
Horses for courses!
Alex
Heh… I remember a couple years ago there was a piece of music software that I got a crack for. I was happy. I learned it, it was awesome and I got hooked. About three months after I got it, the crack failed and their copyright control kicked in. No amount of uninstalling, reinstalling, deleting and reinstalling again would get it to work, so I went out and dropped $400 on the real version. I was hooked (and cracked software is bad… yeah, yeah). The thing is, I’ve known a lot of other people using the same piece of software who had the same thing happen to them. I’ve always wondered if it was intentional. Instead of offering a “free trial,” they released a “pirated” copy into the community that would work just long enough to become indispensible. Anyway, just looking at the apps in my OS X doc, three of them are pieces of software that I bought just because there was a free trial and I got pretty hooked on using them. And they were all fully functioning, time limited demos. Definitely a great strategy. I probably wouldn’t use any of them otherwise.
[…] Sam Nurmi, our CEO, has written a feature article for the highly respected web industry magazine Vitamin titled Create an irresistible free trial for your app. If you’re about to create a trial option for your web service, or you have a free trial that isn’t performing as well as you’d like, this is definitely worth a read. The article is mainly based on the research we made when we created Pingdom’s own free trial option. […]
Hi Tyler,
Regarding software piracy, I wouldn’t be surprised if some companies use that strategy. I’m not saying they create “cracks†themselves, but perhaps they don’t take any extreme steps to stop piracy either. It could be seen as a kind of viral marketing for building up a large user base, especially for software that costs thousands of dollars which would otherwise be outside the reach of regular consumers.
Once these users enter the corporate world, where most people pay for software, there is a good chance that legitimate copies of the software will be purchased. After all, they are already familiar with the software. This can make software so widely used it’s basically a standard, and part of the reason would be piracy. Of course, it’s not such a simple black-and-white issue and I don’t want to sound like I condone piracy. It’s an interesting perspective, though.
It’ll be interesting to see what will happen with the market share of Windows, Office, and other Microsoft products now that they are focusing even more on preventing piracy. They may stop more people from using their software illegally, but will it benefit them or work against them by leaving more room for competing solutions? If it becomes a negative thing for Microsoft, then your theory could be right, Tyler.
Well that’s just it. Microsoft is in a lot of trouble. Not necessarily today, but long term, I can see them having real problems. Their bread and butter comes through their operating system and office tools - but the desktop is becoming more and more invisible with the increasing popularity of web-based applications and open source software, all of which aren’t as into locking down copy protection. Despite this, the MS strategy isn’t changing, in fact as you said, piracy protection is a larger priority than ever. So, looking to the future, why would I spend on MS software I can’t even test drive, when there are plenty of tools available for free that are just as good (debatable)? Especially when you consider that I can use these tools for free for a limited time to learn the ins and outs and see if their for me, or in some cases they are available for free forever? As a copywriter, I’ve already moved off of MS Word, and started using Scrivener (a tool I demoed for free and fell in love with). I still use Word for formatting of my final deliverable, but only because it’s made available to me by my company. If I were in a freelancing situation, I’d use Scrivener, and format via Google online (this is also partially because I really don’t like Word in Office 2007 and now seems like the time to jump ship).
[…] Creating inviting free trials: Some great tips from ThinkVitamin on making your new shiny app trial irresistible […]
[…] A while ago I wrote on some of the ways of converting prospective customers into ex-prospective customers. Yesterday, I found this excellent post at Vitamin by Sam Nurmi on the same topic for pure online services: “Create an irresistible free trial for your app”. […]
Wow, I haven’t thought about the “crack-scheme” that Tyler described. For me, as a micro-ISV, I am really afraid of my software being cracked. Maybe this strategy is a good idea?
[…] April 9th, 2007 Sam Nurmi from Pingdom gives basic pointers on how to create an irresistible free trial for your app. […]
[…] Sam Nurmi of Pingdom revealed the secrets of creating an irresistible free trial for your applications. The sign up should be easy, do not require credit card information, full functional trial, etc. […]
Hi Magnus (J),
Tyler did raise an interesting point with the whole piracy angle. I suspect it has a better effect the more expensive your software is, since high prices are a hurdle for many people, but until we see any hard numbers on this, it’s all speculation.
It does make me curious about what other unconventional strategies are out there. Has anyone created a very different way to trial or market an application, and how has that affected sales? I’m sure there are plenty of good ideas out there (hopefully not involving any form of spam…)
[…] creating an efficient trial: AÂ great article on vitamin.com by Sam Nurmi : Create an irresistible free trial for your app […]
I just read article relating to the “software for free” mentality and how it can pay off later down the line by creating new consumers.
Microsoft plans to offer a version of Windows and Office for $3 in developing nations, according to an article in the New York Times. They are hoping to double the number of PC users in the world from one billion to two billion by 2015.
It has a very interesting comment from Microsoft’s senior vice president for emerging markets, Orlando Ayala:
“Certainly, for Microsoft this is an investment in the long term. These are the consumers of the future.â€
This certainly is one way for Microsoft to build a much larger consumer base than they would otherwise have in the future. They have made some similar moves before, for example in Thailand.
It’s quite possible that Microsoft really needs to do something along these lines, or be pushed aside in these nations by free alternatives such as Linux (or piracy). Not to mention all the free publicity they are getting for this…
Excellent article, very well written and some good advise as well. If you plan on charging money for your application do yourself a favor and check out my web site: CrackMyApp.com.
Thanks for the nice article.
Never make someone who is interested in your service jump through hoops to get to it. Instead, go in the other direction and make it even easier to sign up for a trial than it is to sign up for the vast majority of the free email services out there.
I’ve made it evevn easier for my new intranet e-learning platform by not even requiring them to sign up. Just download .
Nice article Sam :)
Offering free trials is all well and good, especially when the app your providing is worth buying down the line - but is it just me or are (some) application licenses too expensive? Surely the likes of ms and adobe are forgetting about “the little people”, I mean its all well and good to charge companies £xxx’s for licenses, most companies can afford and indeed expect to pay this, so what are students supposed to do? Or casual users?
Personally, I wouldnt be where I am today without getting my hands on cracks for adobe’s products years ago. Why not make licenses a quarter of the price? I guarantee four times more people will purchase legal copies as a result - after a great trial of course! ;)
[…] Sam Nurmi is at it again. After having articles published in Vitamin and Center Networks, Pingdom’s CEO now has an article (see picture) featured in the Web Pro section of issue 164 of the very well-respected .net magazine. […]
A very good article. One more thing I would have mentioned is the possibility of an ‘unlimited trial’ option. This is a limited free version of the service if the user does not take up the full offer after the trial period expires. www.ZoneAlaram.com is a good example of a company that does this. For smaller companies it might be worthwhile to understand clearly who your target market is. Let’s say (for the sake of the example) this is 5+ employee businesses up to 100+ employees. If you’re not penetrating the
One more thing I would have mentioned is the possibility of an ‘unlimited trial’ option. This is a limited free version of the service if the user does not take up the full offer after the trial period expires. www.ZoneAlaram.com is a good example of a company that does this. For smaller companies it might be worthwhile to understand clearly who your target market is. Let’s say (for the sake of the example) this is 5+ employee businesses up to 100+ employees. If you’re not penetrating the
Hey Saurabh, looks like the guys at Panic software have ripped off the design of your website with their Coda promotional site…
You should write them a strongly worded letter. How dare they!
Very interesting, however i suppose it doesn’t matter too much about free trials unless you can get the people through the door in the first place, what i want to know about all of these web-apps and other web sites is the most effective ways to market them, blogs are good, but is there some other fandango way of marketing?
What would be the difference between a “trail” and a “demo”.
What if you provided a demo which required no sign up but only lasted for that session, and a trail that did require a quick sign up with credit details?
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