Stop losing revenue!
Optimize SaaS onboarding for trial users and get higher conversions
Kudos for getting a lead to sign up for your free trial.
Now, for the onboarding process.
The goal is for your trial users to realize the value of your product and convert them to paid customers before the trial period ends.
It seems straightforward, and most SaaS companies believe their onboarding is obvious.
Yet, only 10% of SaaS trial users convert to paid before their trial ends. That’s the average free trial conversion rate in 2023.
So, what on earth happened to that massive marketing spend that generated leads, demo calls, signups, and trial starts? Only 10% of trial users converted, and 90% didn’t.
Even more eye-watering is that such a dismally low conversion rate is accepted. The default solution is to do whatever it takes to generate more leads.
But this strategy, if you can call it a strategy, needs to be revised. It’s like putting a band-aid on a big open wound. More leads won’t fix the problem.
The problem lies in the onboarding process, from free signup to trial ending.
Your trial user opted in—eyes wide open—hoping your product could solve their problem. Maybe they saw your UI, did some onboarding, and tested some features. Even worse, perhaps they didn’t even get to the welcome email.
Whatever it is, the trial ends without a new customer.
So, what went wrong with the onboarding process?
Optimize your SaaS onboarding for trial users… and convert them to paid customers
Firstly, the hard truth.
There are countless reasons why a trial user doesn’t convert to paid, even if they actively used the product during the trial period.
Some of the reasons include:
- Difficult signup process
- Taken out of the app for verification of email
- Unnecessary onboarding steps
- Lack of guidance
- User expectations didn’t match messaging
- Educational content not moving the user forward
- The user is unable to realize value during the trial
- Lack of customer support
- The user didn’t have high intent to buy
- … and the list goes on.
There are many reasons why the onboarding process didn’t create a customer.
Whatever the reason, action must be taken now to optimize onboarding and increase conversion.
The 3-step framework for optimizing conversion is as follows:
✔️ Conduct an onboarding audit to find where the roadblocks are.
✔️ Provide an actionable strategy to optimize the onboarding process.
✔️ Implement that strategy.
That’s what we do at SaaS Copy.
We focus on optimizing the onboarding of SaaS trial users to increase conversion to paid customers
SaaS companies have CRMs filled with trial users who never converted. They were once promising leads and are now just sitting there as wasted email addresses. Literally hundreds of thousands of them, in many cases.
Hi, I’m Mark Crosling, Founder and SaaS Lifecycle Strategist at SaaS Copy.
I help B2B SaaS companies increase the conversion of trial users to paid customers by optimizing onboarding.
It amazes me that so many SaaS companies believe that once the trial period ends and the user hasn’t converted to paid, that’s it. Move on.
It’s like there’s an acceptance of having an abysmally low number of trial users convert.
It shouldn’t be like this. And it doesn’t need to be.
Optimizing your onboarding process increases the conversion rate of trial users to paid customers with higher lifetime values.
It’s very measurable, and it’s immediate revenue.
And it looks like this:
✔️ Imagine increasing your trial user conversion rate from 10% to 14%. That’s a 40% increase in revenue hitting your bottom line.