Ask HN: 15-day free trial vs. 30-day free trial | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: 15-day free trial vs. 30-day free trial

9 pointsfezzl8 comments

Does anyone have opinions/experiences about which is better, or even A/B tested trial durations? I'm looking at shortening the trial period to increase sales. Anything that I should be looking out for?

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We switched from a 30 day to a 14 day (2 weeks) trial period. We found out that if the user does not use the service within the first two weeks, he is not very likely to use it in week 3 or 4 as well. When we've split-tested sign-ups we did not find a significant difference. But the conversion rate tester -> paying customer increased. We're at a 3:1 rate now (B2B, pricing starts at 19.90, open end), no free plan offered.

The trial period is accompanied by a follow-up email sequence (day 0, 1, 3, 7, 11, 14 after sign-up) to ask how's it all going and it includes a lot of supporting material (tips, videos, links to support pages, offer to schedule a call or screen sharing session) to get interacting with them and to make sure they really ask if there are questions.

The user can unsubscribe from this sequence (unsubscribe link in every email), but nobody really ever does. We get the occasional (maybe 1 out of 1000 testers or less) complaint about how annoying the follow up sequence is. We just remove those from the list. I remember 1 guy who was really annoyed but became a user anyway :-) So usually the testers really appreciate this information because they get the feeling there's someone who cares.

In all the follow up emails we make it clear that it would be easy to extend the trial period, a short email asking about it would be enough. We had one guy in a trial period for over 160 days. He wanted to use our product but his project did not take off as fast as expected and we just kept waiting (no follow ups). He's been a user for years now.

So if I was to start a new project, I'd start with 14 days and run the occasional split test from time to time.

Thank you very much, just the type of reply I was looking for. Just curious, what app do you sell?

What I can say it's a B2B SaaS app, targeted at small businesses - basically all of them, so not exactly a niche product ;-) and there's a lot of competition around, that we have to "out-smarteking" as I call it. Something in the realms of CRM, team/project management, accounting, CMS...

When the user is told their free trial period has ended - give them the opportunity to extend it - even if you have a process to OK that - this is very likely to increase conversions.

Doing 14 with an option to extend may often be superior to starting at the full term. It makes them say "yes."

30 days is the de facto standard and I don't see why you should change that to make money a bit faster. Any kind of a/b testing would have to be done by you to be relevant.

I think it really depends on the app. How long does it take before people get the hang of it? What's the average time it takes for a trial account to convert?

Best thing to do is test all reasonable trial expiration scenarious, including those tied to user behavior instead of time. You never know what will be optimal, you need to test because each product and audience is unique. I know of a number of software publishers who had near zero conversion with a 30 or 15 day trial but made a lot of money when they expired trials based on other factors such as usage.

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