Consumers aren’t always eager to commit to spending big money upfront on an untested service or product. For companies trying to sell their services, free trials offer an excellent way to turn potential customers into certain customers.
Users can try out products before entering their credit card information, and they might just end up more impressed with what a company has to sell.
If you’re at the helm of a business, know that free trials can be a big opportunity for growth – and the growth isn’t just related to revenue.
A free trial’s success or lack thereof can signal whether a new service is worth expanding and alert you to revisions you should make in your strategic plan.
The benefits don’t end there, either. Keep reading to learn how free trials can help shape internal efforts related to goal setting and achievement.
Focusing on Goals
Setting goals can be rewarding, but you need to define your desired outcomes first. After all, an ambiguous goal makes measuring success harder. For businesses, free trials enable a more concrete approach to goal setting. You can use free trials to test new ideas and then set goals based on the experience.
Maybe you want to introduce new features with an app. Or perhaps you want to introduce a new online editing service. With free trials, you can launch your revised app or service, for instance, and see how customers respond.
You can ask for feedback, too, to make the most of your efforts as you evaluate the free trial’s impact – and your long-term business strategy. You may find that customers have experienced a lot of glitches, and you may need to make some significant adjustments.
But in having transparent conversations with your company team, you’ll enhance trust and communication. Free trials connect the dots between knowledge and practice so you can set more informed goals.
How to Use Free Trials Effectively
Don’t enter a free trial blindly. Instead, take time to determine your strategy and what you hope to gain from the experience within your company. Here are a few steps to follow to ensure you’re making progress toward your goals:
1. Start with Goal Setting: What are your objectives for your team when offering a free trial? And what are your goals for the product or service?
Improving communication response times or streamlining operations for an SaaS experience you’re testing, for instance, could make sense. By identifying goals on the front end, you’ll stand a better chance of achieving them.
2. Choose Key Features to Assess: Rather than trying to assess every feature in a service, focus on a few that connect to your goals. This could mean looking closely at email automation services in a new software package, for example, to see how users respond to your changes. Improved email templates could trigger more sales.
3. Look at Ease of Use: Does your new tool or service integrate smoothly with current workflows? Even if a new function in your software looks impressive on the outside, it won’t be helpful if it’s not user-friendly.
Someone hoping to get a free roof measurement won’t want to jump through a bunch of hoops to get there. As users try a new function, you’ll be able to track their responses and determine if your goals – or the product itself – need refinement.
Reviewing Benchmarks
A free trial period is an opportunity to gather data on a tool’s success. Establish benchmarks to determine if a product is working as intended. As an example, a new software platform that has a confusing dashboard may not help you achieve faster reporting within your organization.
Aim to keep an eye on critical metrics and review them with key stakeholders to see what changes you need to make.
Consider a scenario where a contractor is wondering whether they should invest in software that allows them to gather measurements for a job, generate estimates, and track project progress.
A free trial for that software would allow the contractor to see if the software meets their needs.
The contractor may be hoping to create a more professional presence in their local market, or they might be eager to respond to customer inquiries more quickly and become more efficient.
The company that offers the free trial stands to benefit, too. It can count on having a host of contractors interested in their product.
But knowing whether the software has the level of precision and range of tools to make contractors happy is another issue – and one that can be probed with a free trial.
As the company assesses the trial, it may discover that contractors are seeing more bookings or faster estimate times. With live data, they can collect evidence that their product works, and that can be a useful marketing tool.
If the data is less promising, the company can create a new, more informed goal or adjust the way their product works.
Conclusion
Free trials help companies test-drive a new service or product with prospective customers. Having a set of goals in mind before unleashing the free trial will give companies an edge as they try to attract customers.
They can gather critical insights from customer experiences with the free trial to build actionable goals.
Better yet, free trials help a company’s team members gel, setting up a culture that prioritizes goal setting, ambitious objectives, and transparent conversations.
