My question is: Should we collect payment information during the signup process for any of the paid plans? Or should we prompt for payment info after the free trial has ended?
Are there any studies showing one has higher conversion rates?
If you would like to do a 'first month free' kind of deal, collect payment/payment information up front, but drop off the cost of one month from the total. Or, allow people to cancel within 30 days for a full refund.
Essentially, I agree with avoiding 'free trials' that want credit card information - I am always afraid that it's going to be a nightmare. But if I know I am signing up to pay, that's a different story. The "being able to cancel within 30 days for a full refund" rings much better to my ears than "30 day free trial with payment details collected up front".
In fact, I hate "trial versions" altogether. I much prefer that either it's free, or it's not.
It's always a nice gesture to let users see paid plans before any money is exchanged.
There are many reasons for this, but the most important one is letting the user test drive your software with no limitations so they can evaluate if their needs will be fulfilled.
Whenever I bump into the financial info hostage model it reminds me of the BS "free 30 day" credit monitoring services or hardship insurance plans the credit card companies always try to trick you into when you activate a credit card. You don't want to be associated with that model. Because the next mental association from there is rape. No, means NO.
Having said that, asking for payment info upfront is generally not a good idea when you have a trail period. But then again, if you do not pick it up, you might get some abusers who won't cough up the dough after the trail period is over.
There may have been other factors at work, people could have seen this as the catalyst to finally take the plunge after the site had already been active for nearly a year, but the results were fairly compelling. That said, I'm not sure what this would translate to if we made the trial our default offering. Only one way for us to find out...
The magazine model has a lot of funnel dropout at the first stage (sign up) and fairly little dropout at the second stage (cancellation). The shareware model has less drop out at the first stage (sign up) and hideous dropout at the second stage (decision to pay).
For a service, I'd go for the magazine model. (A lot of non-technical customers assume you're going with the magazine model even if you're not. I get an email on a weekly basis asking to cancel a downloadable free trial.)
One possible exception is if you think your free trial is likely to be in-freaking-sanely sticky for users that start with it. In that case, you might want to make up the difference in conversion rates in sheer volume. Another possible exception is if you get business value from free trial users. For example, if your software has strong network effects, or if you are running an online game and free players are essentially bonus content for playing players, then you might want to encourage as many signups as possible even if you knew a-priori that you would fail to monetize most of them.
Note that if you collect information prior to collecting authorization you've got some headaches to think about beyond the scopes of conversion rates -- information security, whether your payment processor will let you do it, etc.
I don't know of any studies, but I would guess that many people feel the same.
As a startup, one of the things you're selling is great service. So get some contact info and contact them with a few days left and ask if they'd like to re-up.
Really, the only way to know for sure is to do an A/B test on it and compare the conversion rates.
One company I worked for was famous in it's niche for running tests. We'd run 30/45/60 day free trials, bundle offers, one-time offers, and so on. I mean we ran literally hundreds of split tests every year. The funny thing is that we went a few years before trying a low $1 trial (for a $100+ item) on a whim, and you know what? It out-pulled almost every free trial test we'd ever run. Then we bumped it up to $2.95, and that out-pulled $1 even more.
All this time we'd been running free trials because common sense said that's what would pull best. Not testing this earlier was literally a multi-million dollar mistake.
This taught me a valuable lesson: never make any assumptions about what will or will not work, and test all time.
The other issue with a free trial is it gives you thirty days of your product being out there before you need to get the billing working. Maybe you can launch next week instead of next month.
The other thing I like, that is rare to see (and would probably suit your time tracking app), is a working demo. Allow people to use the app without having to create an account or enter an email etc, just have some dummy data and preferably ensure the data is cleaned after each use (to prevent someone entering objectionable material). Most people that are likely to use your app are smart enough to go and click around and see if it is what they want. Then they can sign up to a free trial and you have a customer who is more likely to turn into a real customer.
Good luck.
A: To 'trick' people into paying for something they might have decided against buying. (Bad reason)
B: To limit people who try to take advantage of unlimited free trials - buy using credit card info as an identifier, you could tell who's already had a free trial and who hasn't (to some extent).
If it's for reason A, don't do it. If it's for reason B, do it, but don't charge them until they confirm at the end of 30 days. Send them an email with something like, "We hope you enjoyed your free trial. If you are happy with the service and would like to continue using it, click here and get a promotional 10% off your next 3 months." Anything to ease your customers over the second hurdle of committing to using the service will be good.
This essentially forces you to actually use the thing and decide if you want it before buying. Before switching to this mode, we used to get a lot of signup/pay/cancel cycles in the first few days of an account's lifetime. Since it sometimes takes a few days before our product is up and running at full force, it seemed like we were losing a significant percentage of the "impatient" demographic.
Now that we enforce a bit of chillin', immediate cancellations have dropped almost to zero, while our conversion rate has stayed about the same.
Can't beat real data that applies.
Don't scare people into denying you the ability to sell to them out of fear or mistrust..
Loose the free trial because you are giving a free version away which is enough to try it out.