I’ve been laid up the last couple days with a glutening (ughhhh fucking gluten), but Thomas is working on embedding Noko reports into web pages (for the Growth Stacking project itself!!) and the rest of the team is working on changing up our trial.
A long, long time ago, we switched to a 14-day trial with no credit card required, and changed up our onboarding email sequence accordingly. It was supposed to be an experiment… theoretically, removing the CC requirement should increase our conversion to trial, and the shorter 14-day limit should have spurred people to act… but then I got sick and never checked back in, and neither did anyone else.
The experiment didn’t work.
We’re going back to a 30-day, CC-required trial.
No, not because we want to rely on people forgetting to cancel. We have always and will always send ample notification.
We’re going back to CC trials because of human nature.
The key to converting trials is creating success.
You can’t create success if people don’t take 5 minutes to actually try the software out.
Yep, you can work on your onboarding interface, and your supportive lifecycle emails. We did work a lot on those.
But a lot of our trials end up not making even one single time entry.
It’s not because they don’t care or aren’t really in the market.
We’re all busy, and have so many conflicting demands on our time, that a deadline (with teeth) is sometimes the only way to get us to take any action, even towards something we want.
I know I’m not the only one who’s immediately signed up for a no-deadline trial, taken 5 seconds to poke around, gotten distracted and forgot it ever existed.
That’s why launches and live events are such powerful marketing tools: they create a deadline to decide, in or out.
The SaaS equivalent is being very aware that you have an upcoming deadline to pay or cancel.
And your level of commitment to trying the app is so much higher when you’ve already gone to the trouble to take out your wallet.
In some cases, more friction leads to better results.
I absolutely know that there’s room for improvement in our onboarding UI and emails, and the app interface itself overall — there are so many ways I can create more sucess, *faster*… and that’s part of my plan.
But first we’re going back to the thing that worked.
I’m not committing to getting anything else done myself at this point because I’ve got one, maybe two days before I spend all day getting an infusion that will leave me groggy if not actually asleep.
I’m going to try to review the trial emails and sketch out the improved onboarding UI. But we shall see.
