When I marketed products for the application development community, we relied heavily on free product trials to convince prospects to buy the product. I think we had a love-hate relationship with those trials. Looking back, I am not sure that free product trials offered us the success that we hoped for. But they sure seem to make the marketer's job much easier.
To start our discussion, let's define what a free product trial is.
A free product trial is hands-on access to full (or partial) functionality of a product for a specified period of time.
If you have a technology product, a free product trial is usually enabled by some type of software mechanism that turns the product on and shuts it off for the term of the trial.
Marketers and sales people like free product trials because they are a seemingly inexpensive way of presenting the prospect with the real product experience.
- This means that the marketer has to write a lot less content.
- Rather than describing the product experience, the marketer can rely on the prospect's ability to try it for him/herself.
- This also takes the pressure off the marketer when it comes to purchase conversions. With a product trial in place, the marketer can almost always say that the reason the prospect didn't buy was because of the product.
So, before you embark on creating a free product trial, what should you know?
- Free trials are costly.
- Not all buyer modalities go for product trials.
- Not all product experiences need to be supported by free product trials.
- There is always overhead to making product trials successful.
- Make sure you understand what expectations your buyer's have regarding a product trial.
- Free product trials lengthen the sales cycle.
- Free trials are out of your control.
- You have more to lose than the buyer does.
They require strategy, design, implementation, and support. Marketing needs to carefully craft a positive product experience for the target buyer.
Determine whether your buyer personas actually require the hands-on experience before they buy.
Marketers today have plenty of other tools to demonstrate product experience. Product demos, flash videos, and other mechanisms can better focus on important product experiences without the overhead of actually trying the product.
The more complex the product, the more difficult the management of the trial experience.
Disappointing trial experiences are sales killers. Don't underestimate the damage a bad trial experience can generate.
That 30 day trial just postponed a purchase decision by at least 30 days. And you don't truly know whether your buyer is any closer to buying once that trial period is up.
Yes, you can control the entry and can nag with emails along the way. But you don't have a clue what they are doing (or not doing) with the trial. We're not even talking about hacking or other abuse here. Just that you can't control the user experience in the trial. What does that do to your odds of creating a good user experience?
Most buyers are going to limit their stake in the trial. By very definition, they are going to have limited time, attention, and patience to spend. For you, every trial is a potential ticking time bomb. A bad trial experience can now be quickly disseminated with tweets, blogs, and Facebook updates.
You might take from this list that free product trials are generally a bad idea. But that isn't quite what I am saying.
Tune into my next blog entry where I discuss how you can tell whether your product is a good candidate for a free product trial.
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