Do you follow up with customers that don't convert after trial?
Hi IndieHackers,
I'd like to know if you have found some success on following up with customers that don't convert after trial, or even before trial finished, if you see they are not engaging with your product?
I'm trying to email customers during trial that are not fully engaged, but I'm also worried to be annoying or look desperate.
Let me know if you have experience on the matter or have read related articles/books.
Hey Eduardo,
How many trials do you get per month?
Do you collect any user data (apart from email and name) to qualify the trial users? Do they look qualified?
If you get a good amount of trials (I'd say at least 10 per week) that are qualified (i.e., a good fit for your product), then there are things you could do to improve the engagement:
Try to understand their desired outcome. What's their goal with your app. You could ask that as a part of the signup process. This makes it so much easier for you to help them out and make your emails relevant.
Proactively reach out when they fail to do a critical activity in your app. "I see you haven't done [this]. What's stopping you?"
To avoid sounding desperate, you need to demonstrate how your product can help them achieve their desired outcome. "We have helped companies like yours [achieve the desired outcome], so I wanted to make sure you're getting the best from Product." Basically, you need to give them a reason to get back to you and do whatever you ask them to do in your app vs. just asking them to do it for the sake of doing it.
Try to reduce the time to value. Any friction in your app like confirmation emails, non-mission-critical features, etc — delay or completely eliminate them, and focus on the features that are tied to value moments in your app.
Send a feedback email to the expired trial users.
This article that I wrote recently could give you some ideas on how to approach email communication during the trial phase - https://encharge.io/trial-expiration-emails/
Hope that helps.
Again, this would only work if you get a good number of trial and they are qualified. If your trials are unqualified, then it would be very hard to get them to engage with you, as you don't know what they care about. if you get just a handful of trials per month then it's best to manually prospect each of them and run a sales-driven cadence where you follow-up with them manually via email, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
Thanks for the thorough reply! much appreciated.
I do receive a fair amount of trials per week, I'd say around 20, how do I go about qualifying them? is that what companies do when they ask you some questions after signup? like: number of employees in the company, your position, the field of the company, etc.
"is that what companies do when they ask you some questions after signup? like: number of employees in the company, your position, the field of the company, etc."
Yes, exactly :)
Happy to give you some further tips on this :) Feel free to book a quick call - https://calendly.com/kaloyan/discovery-call?month=2020-05
Thanks, I just booked one :) talks soon!
Brilliant!
I send emails during trial and ask if they need any help, more often the emails are being ignored, maybe they think it's automated, sometimes, I do get a reply and I provide assistance...
I think I will also add in the emails that it's not send by a bot :/ or automated, because I literally do it manually.