Sam Nurmi has a nice post over on Vitamin which details his recipe to Create an Irresistible Free Trial For Your App. This caught my attention since we are big believers in free accounts and we offer them on all of our software apps.
Here's a brief synopsis of Sam's points:
- Signing up for a trial account should be easy and painless
- Do not require trial users to enter their credit card information
- Do not cripple the trial (meaning: don't hide pieces of functionality from the free users -- let them experience the full software)
- Include a "highlight bonus" (this one he describes as being somewhat optional, based on what your product is).
I am in full agreement with numbers 1-3. In fact, it's uncanny how I can recall these same three objectives as a part of our conversations back when we were discussing how to make the free accounts work. In particular, number three was a big deal. Most online CMS systems we had encountered offered "tiered" functionality based on the level of payment. We made the decision that all of our package levels, including the free account, would have all of the functionality available. We just restricted users, pages and space.
Number 4 is not something that we've offered, but it does sound like a good idea, though I think it does have to be considered on a product by product basis.
Our experience over the past year would concur with Sam's conclusion that offering free accounts in this manner has huge advantages.
Posted on
Wed, April 4, 2007
by Tim Wall