To Free Trial, or Not To Free Trial

Should I offer a free trial for my SaaS product? Everybody loves a deal, and that’s why offering a free trial of your product or service can be a solid strategy for parlaying interest into a new sale.

A free trial offer gets the consumer into your product quickly and easily. After all, people are lazy — rather than have to read a web site or watch videos, they’d much rather just try out the product to see whether it’s for them. A trial removes unnecessary barriers and lets the customer dive right in.

Not only does a free trial give value to the visitor, but it also provides an opportunity to collect valuable feedback in return, even from those who don’t stick around. Every customer who cancels will have unique reasons why they chose to walk away, and by seeking their story you can gain helpful insights while also conveying your commitment to the product. Such a gesture might well encourage the customer to return in the future in a way that a quietly closed account wouldn't.

Vendors often cite reasons why they’re hesitant to extend a free trial offer — fear of snooping by the competition or an influx of the wrong type of customers, for example. For the most part, these are irrational fears. A serious competitor will find other ways to challenge your product, and errant customers will always stumble onto you. In the long run, you’re better off offering a great service with a value proposition that’s hard to beat.

A similar paradigm to the free trial, in different clothes, is the money-back guarantee. We experimented with this for Socket, our online quoting software as a service, and found the results to be mediocre at best. One essential difference is who carries the perceived burden: here, the customer must first part with his money and then it's up to him to ask for it back. Conversely, a free trial feels more like a gift, carrying less risk and more goodwill. It's like an advance on the value that the customer will hopefully choose to invest in, and the marginal cost is easy to consider as a worthwhile marketing expense.

Free trials aren't just a tactic used by the little guys. Plenty of evidence abounds as well-respected and established businesses like Salesforce, 37 Signals, Shopify and Freshbooks all offer trial packages. And there’s AOL, whose proliferation over a couple of decades stemmed from their widespread offering of free trials to new customers.

Try offering a free trial and see what it can do to improve your business. After all, there's no up-front commitment and you have nothing to lose!