Provide a usage-limited trial, taking your users from frustration to an “Aha” moment or quick win in a matter of seconds/minutes or a few clicks.
When offering a time-limited trial, such as a 7-day, 14-day, or 30-day trial, you may encounter challenges such as:
► Quick note: The only issue you may have with this approach is encountering users who create multiple fake accounts to access and execute the tasks. For example, someone may create dozens of accounts to access an SEO platform and run multiple keyword searches.
📓 Tasks: An umbrella term for different actions (searches, projects, uploads, downloads, etc.) free trial users may perform after accessing a SaaS platform.
📓 Lockups: The limited number of tasks one can perform by accessing a free trial.
Wordable helps its users to publish Google Docs to WordPress in 1-click.
As a free trial experience, the company allows its users to export 5 Google Documents to WordPress.
People can sign up, have a quick onboarding process, and achieve immediate results.
Taloflow helps people to identify the best cloud storage object in less time.
The company packed its free trial into a 5-minute use case questionnaire and an automatically generating report to showcase its value.
It’s worth mentioning that users are asked to fill out the questionnaire, yet to get the results, they must sign up for the platform.
After spending 5 minutes answering Taloflow’s questions, people usually agree to create an account only to access the customized report.
The free trial of SparkToro is based on time-bound tasks.
The company helps people identify audience characteristics (overview, demographics, social, websites, and more) based on keywords.
It’s worth noting that access to certain elements is restricted. For example, after running the search queries, free trial users can’t access data such as audience demographics (top job, top employer industries, skills and interests, education, and more).
Each month, SparkToro provides an account refresh, enabling its free trial users to run 5 more more searches.
Mangools offers a free trial that includes:
VoilaNorbert is allowing its free trial users to find 50 verified emails.
This number doesn’t refer to the search queries but the number of found emails. This happens because the platform isn’t always capable of identifying an email.
✅ Identify the action that leads your users to a quick win. Is it a search query? Is it an export or automation task? Or maybe it’s the number of transcripts your user can generate? The answer to this question will depend greatly on your type of product. The action, though, needs to be central to your users, promptly taking them from frustration to the “Aha” moment or quick win.
✅ Depending on the action type, decide whether you’ll offer time-based or cap-based tasks. Then choose a task limit. How often will you allow your free trial users to execute a specific task?
► Quick note: You may discover that your platform can provide multiple tasks, such as Mangools. If that’s the case, make a list of free trial tasks and put a limit on each of them.
✅ Build your free trial and onboarding experience around this specific task/action.
✅ Don’t forget that you can always experiment and see what type of free trial works best for your product. To ensure the efficiency of this practice, you’ll want to track KPIs such as the number of:
If you’re running an experiment, comparing time-limited and usage-limited trials, for example, these KPIs will give you a great insight into identifying the best practice for your growth.