Offering a free product trial is one of the oldest marketing tactics used by both drug dealers and multinational corporations. It is the crucial part of the customer acquisition process (and a well-known growth hacking tip), but it is only a part of it. Here’s how you can make a free trial visible for the users.
The first thing you need to do is ensure that customers can find your trial. Exit pop-ups are great for people who have already found your site. If you are going for ad promotions, the key is to feature the free trial as bait. Showcase how the product will benefit the users, and formulate your call to action around it.
When people come, you need to encourage them actually to use the product. This may not be so easy, because signing up does not mean that the customers will claim the offer. Therefore, you have to make everything as easy and with as little clicking as possible. And if you can, provide a tutorial or a guide – or quick access online support via chat or video call.
Choose the product that you are going to offer for the free trial wisely. Some products serve great as a lure towards other, more upscale items in your assortment. It is probably wise to offer the best product you have for free trials, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
To determine the optimum duration of a free trial, you have to take into account the complexity of the product, and the expenses that are running the free trial offer incurs. There is no universal rule here, just use your experience and common sense. The key question is how long it would take for somebody to ascertain the value the product brings. So, do some trials of your own first: test the product with users and see how long it took for them to “get it”. See how much it costs you to support the free trial run, which usually requires extensive support for users.
Remember when we said that the trial itself (and getting a customer to claim it) is just a part of the process of customer acquisition? This means that you need to figure out what you will do once the trial runs out for every given customer. How will you convert them into buyers? You can do this by offering further guidance, free bonuses, or you can go the time-honored route of a special reduced price for anyone who completes the trial.