6 Easy Steps to Convert Your Trial Users to Paying Customers
- Name
- Malarvizhi V
- @malarvizhiii
- Published on

You know that wonderful feeling you get when receiving a lot of notifications on new trial users for your product? It feels super cool to transform your website visitors into free trial users because it means all your strategies are working, and your audience decided to pay attention to your product and give it a try. But, it’s very disappointing when only one went ahead and paid for your product or, even worse, when no one did.
At that moment, you are most likely to think there is something wrong with your SaaS product. Is there no value in the product? And, finally, decided to give up. No way! In most cases, the product is not a problem. All you need to concentrate on is designing an excellent trial user experience that shows the real potential of your product.
In other words, creating a strong product strategy and improving a meaningful SaaS product is not enough. You also need to put your full effort and dedication to the map and outline the main points your trial users will go through when onboarding your product.
Some crucial reasons why you have to reconsider design an excellent trial customer experience
If you don't have enough resources, you need to concentrate more on transforming your trial users into paying customers than targeting general leads through marketing. Here’s why you should do this:
You’ll increase your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).
This one is clear. After all, your overall efforts are for achieving one main goal: to grow your revenue. And, transforming your free trial users to own your product is the final step you need to take to increase your MRR. If you spend a lot of time on advertising about your product and attracting new customers but miss your focus on the trial user experience, then all your efforts on getting new customers will be in vain.
It’s more worthwhile to prove the value of your product.
- What is your priority?
- Should you focus more on grabbing the attention of the website visitors who may later become the hope for your product?
- Should you concentrate on converting the eager audience, you already have?
The answer is pretty apparent, you’ll want to focus on getting your common audience attracted to your product. And, it’s more worthwhile to prove your product’s value to those people who have already planned to give it a chance. If you completed this step correctly, you can ensure that all of your efforts are rewarded.
Communicate the value of your product.
However, you have to follow a few communication strategies to reduce customer churns. If you don’t give a quality free trial experience, there are chances where people don’t understand the value of your product. By reconsidering and designing the product discovery experience, you’ll know you’ve expressed your product’s potential and value the right way.
Easy steps to convert your trial users into paying customers:
Keep things in mind what we have discussed about the reasons earlier, here are some steps that help you in mapping and designing the free trial user experience for your prospects.
#1 Build the right features based on customer needs
Undoubtedly, your product will have a lot of good features and options. However, when it comes to the trial user experience, build the right features that are in demand and unique. Don’t overwhelm your trial customers with too many features that are not in their needs. If you confuse them with a lot of things, then there is a chance where people can’t understand how to use your product. So, be proactive, analyze their needs, and give them the right one.
*Pro tip: You can also try using the dedicated feature request collection tool which helps in finding the real user needs effortlessly.*
In other words, the needed options and features your free trial customers get, they’ll show more interest when exploring your product. This will result in a great understanding of how your product works and the value it can offer. All those prominent features are for investing customers who’ve already explored your SaaS product, went through the onboarding process, and have a perfect clear-cut idea of how to use your software.
#2 Let your trial users find all the possible ways of using your product
For some reason, you may be offering a packed number of features to your trial users. But, when you need to transform your trial customers it’s extremely crucial to showcase the full potential of your product and it should be easy for them to find all the possible ways they can use it. After all, you want to make sure that they can understand your product and enjoy all the features while using it.
When improving a trial user experience, figure out what “wow” factors you can offer them. Likewise, think about a few achievements your free-trial users can get when using your product.
This can be anything like collecting feedback from product users, emailing them to know how they enjoyed using products, catching up with them on social media asking for where you need to improve. It’s a valuable decision to sync-up with your negative feedbackers, asking where you can improve your product.
What is more important is to make people know how your product will help them to overcome certain challenges and get the results they’re expecting.
#3 Communicate with your free trial users and give them the maximum support
Ultimately, we believe that SaaS businesses should offer support to every single user, regardless of their status. Whether it’s your investing customer or a trial user, always be ready to guide them throughout their journey with you!
These actions will give a better attraction and your real dedication to helping your customers will provide worth beyond your product itself. Your trial users will start believing you, that apart from experiencing an awesome product, your team also provides value and care about them.
#4 Offer better brand customization
Yes, brand customization is a premium feature that only investing customers should have access to; this is the most worked strategy of converting trial users. Providing a perfect customization option is a better way to show your trail customers how your product helps in showcasing their brands.
For example, you can approach your trial customers to upload their logo or color palette and adjust your software to their brand. These custom domain options will help users see how flexible your product is and how well it integrates into their daily workflow and brand culture.
#5 Grab free trial users to a premium plan by providing them with a hassle-free UX:
What will be the happiest moment, when your free trial customers decide to invest in your product? Don’t ruin the moment by making them search how to upgrade or what to do next, creating a hassle-free atmosphere when they find it super easy to figure out.
Like how Hellonext creates a simple UX for transforming customers into premium investors.
Make it easy for the customers to upgrade and choose the plan that suits them. Create an attractive homepage with classy designs as easy as possible, where it urges the customers to make a great deal with you. The more friction you negotiate from the trial customer experience, the greater the chances they’ll upgrade.
The last step Notify your customers when the trail is about to end.
That’s a crucial one, although most of the SaaS product fails to do it. While scouring the internet, I noticed that few brands have an email sequence, notifying people when their trial ends. While some products won’t even do that. They’ll just disable user’s access to the product once the trial ends without any proper notification. And that creates a very cringe moment for the people using it.
You want to keep your users in the loop and remind them frequently about the trial deadline without spamming them. Just notify them on the dashboard how many days are left to trial ends.
Users also receive another reminder when accessing the pricing option. It is advisable to both fix a reminder inside the dashboard along with an email sequence that notifies people about the deadlines and let them know the different pricing options.
Small tweaks, more significant results
Don’t expect all trial users to upgrade, and they shouldn’t. After all, sometimes a product is not well satisfied with their needs, and they’ll churn. Learn why they are churning so that you will get a chance to rebuild it. Don’t make a mistake of not realizing what your Saas Product can give to customers. Only after this realization, you can target the right customers.
Create a UX where your target customers recognize how excellent your product is and that’s why free trials exist. However, in most cases, this has not much more to do with the value of your product. It’s all about the trial user experience.
By not designing a positive experience, you miss the chance of conversing with your product’s original value and possible way of development, which will lead to a smaller MRR. To keep this from happening, always prefer some time to analyze your current trial user experience and rethink about some details and plan a roadmap to make it better. Sometimes, small tweaks can result in big wins.