Want To Get Your Customers To Commit After Free Trials? Date Them.

Free trials. Ah, yes. Don’t you love them? What better way to test the waters and show customers why they should keep that membership active. For many subscription-based companies, this is where they will either grow tenfold or fold under pressure. It’s easy to give something away for free and it’s sometimes a pain to get them to stay. To better understand this, we have to see things from a customers perspective in order to keep them coming back. Like courting in a sense.

Companies that offer free trials (or freemiums) should understand that trials are feelers for customers who haven’t tried the product rather than an end all be all. Understanding this will help increase retention in your product. In order to increase sales, you’ll have to think from both the buyer and the sellers perspective.

From a customer standpoint, you’d sign up to try a product and most likely cancel before the trial is up. This is the deciding phase in which you will either become a returning customer or not. If you like the product enough, you will renew your subscription. If you don’t, you get to walk away with a free product. No harm, no foul. You may even ask yourself “Do I like this enough to subscribe?” This comes across everyone's minds when they look into making that decision. Some customers will even swear by the product…