5 Tips for Driving Free to Paid Conversions in B2B SaaS

Your free trial users aren’t converting to paid customers?

We’re here to fix that.

Getting people to try your product for free in exchange for their email addresses is simple. But, converting them into paid customers is the hardest part.

No wonder, free trial to paid conversions in B2B SaaS are pegged at 18.2% for organic traffic and 17.4% for paid traffic as per a recent survey.

Well, having a lower free trial to paid conversion rate in your B2B SaaS business could be caused by the following reasons:

• Friction during customer onboarding
• Product not a good fit
• Value gaps
• You’re giving out too much of the product for free
• Price mismatch with the perceived value

In this article, you will discover practical strategies for driving free to paid conversions in B2B SaaS.

1. Focus on Ease-of-Use

To get trial users to upgrade to a paid plan, you must deliver value by making your product easy to use.

If users feel confused about where to begin with your software during their free trial, they will hesitate to upgrade to a paid plan.

Your free trial needs to show users the value your product delivers. But, if they struggle to realize its value, then most of them will abandon your free trial and sign up for that of your competitors.

Here are useful tips to make your software easy to use in the free trial phase:

• Don’t be aggressive when pushing for upgrades
• Launch a simple user onboarding email campaign

Another effective way to make your software easy to use is to create in-depth tutorials. Tutorials cannot only help users understand how your product works but also help them to solve common problems and get them on the right track.

Younium, a B2B SaaS subscription management platform has mastered this trick by creating a guide on subscription management that teaches users everything about subscription management.

2. Personalize the Experience for Different Trial Users

Personalization is a powerful tool for successful user onboarding and overall customer experience. Remember that people trying your software product have specific challenges they are facing.

Personalizing the experience based on individual users can help them realize the value in your product which encourages them to convert into paying customers.

One of the most effective ways to personalize the user experience is to collect information about the users to understand their motivations to try your product.

3. Create a Solid Email Marketing Strategy for Inactive Users

No matter how much effort you put into pushing people to purchase your subscriptions, not all trial users will upgrade during the free trial stage. Most of them don’t.

However, that doesn’t mean you cannot convince them.

Since you already have their email addresses, you can always reach out to them by sending them targeted emails to win them back.

To personalize your emails to your inactive users, leverage the information you collected during the trial period.

For instance, if you notice they didn’t utilize a feature that is relevant to their use case, send them an email highlighting the benefits of the feature to their business.

4. Allow Users to Try the Most Valuable Features of Your Software

One of the main goals of offering a free trial is to allow users to feel the value your product offers but, for a limited period.

However, you shouldn’t give them access to your entire software during the free trial period because they will not see the need to upgrade their subscriptions.

So, what features should you allow users to access?

• Features that make your software competitive: Research your competition as much as you can to identify outstanding features in your product that are lacking in theirs’ then allow your free trial users to access them.
• Features most commonly used by your customers: Avail the feature that fixes a problem many businesses are facing

5. Make it Easy to Upgrade or Downgrade

How easy or complex it is to upgrade or downgrade can make or break your efforts to drive free to paid conversions in your B2B SaaS.

To find any needless friction, try creating an account in your software as if you’re a stranger to understand what the process of upgrading looks like.

Ensure that users don’t need to contact customer support for them to activate their accounts. If users have to fill out a form, make sure you don’t ask for too much information.

Here, you can leverage robust subscription management software that can create and manage different subscription plans, handle upgrades and downgrades as well as manage user accounts. Here is a curated list by Attrock on the best subscription management solutions that can help you in choosing a suitable solution for your business.

Conclusion

Converting free trial users to paid customers doesn’t have to be complicated.

Since they have shown interest in your product by trying it, all you need is to come up with a strategy to get them to upgrade their subscriptions.

Leverage these tips to drive free to paid conversions in your B2B SaaS.

Author Bio – Reena Aggarwal

Reena is Director of Operations and Sales at Attrock, a result-driven digital marketing company. With 10+ years of sales and operations experience in the field of e-commerce and digital marketing, she is quite an industry expert. She is a people person and considers the human resources as the most valuable asset of a company. In her free time, you would find her spending quality time with her brilliant, almost teenage daughter and watching her grow in this digital, fast-paced era.

Social connects: LinkedIn, Twitter

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