Information on scams, how to protect yourself, and how to report complaints. This scam can take on various forms, but usually the company will let you try a product such as a diet pill, anti-wrinkle cream, teeth whitener, etc.

for a small shipping fee or for your credit card information. But then, the company makes it so hard if not, impossible to cancel. Even worse, the company might enroll you in additional offers or products for more monthly fees that you did not even know about. Companies will offer a promotional time period or an introductory package of products, but require that you enroll in a program that bills you monthly or automatically renews your subscription at the end of that time period.

If you have been wrongly charged for a free trial offer, first try working it out with the company. Skip to main content. You can refer to the following to learn more about the free trial model, and about the various pros and cons of using it:.

Finding the right trial strategy for your SaaS might be hard. With Chargebee, you can experiment with trials and improve your conversions, at ease. Want to find out the right trial strategy that your business should employ?

Read our guide on - Trials, and the tribulations of finding the perfect strategy that works for you. Further Reads Recurring Revenue Model Freemium Checkout Cart Abandonment Subscription Management Volume Discounting Grandfathering Free Trial Discounts and Coupons.

Subscription Management What is Free Trial? The Ultimate Guide to Revenue Operations. See how you can drive efficiency into your RevOps with our extensive guide.

By the end of this article, you will be able to determine which kind of trial offer works best for your business model. Before we even begin talking about how long your free trial should be, we must cover what trial periods are and what is their purpose. A successful free trial depends heavily on user onboarding.

You can include an onboarding experience for new users that guide them to the activation events. Days and debit card requirements are not the only factors that define a free trial.

You can also be creative with other factors like your design and incentives for your user. Here are some common types of a free trial period:. Then you have different standards for free trials depending on your business model. Generally, requiring payment details and having a high-touch onboarding process is more common in B2B.

If you are B2C, most companies leave their users to explore everything in only 7 days with no sales involved. You should take several factors into account when deciding how long your free trial needs to be. Short free trials 7 days are great for adding urgency to the buying process but are more likely to be used by B2C companies.

If you have a complex product you may need longer trial periods but if your service is easy to use, your trial length should be shorter. Some might have the funding to support a day trial, so they know everything about their ideal users. It makes sense to define a short free trial as no more than 7 days.

So, companies opt for the short free trial period because it adds a sense of urgency to the buying process. Users will take the time more seriously , so companies have their full attention. These short trials work more for the B2C space of SaaS because the job people are trying to get done is much simpler.

Trials that are too long or include product walkthroughs in this space bore users, and they are more likely to become inactive. Your customer acquisition costs CAC are also reduced when people convert faster. The longer the trial, the longer the sales cycle, which means a higher CAC.

With a shorter trial and shorter sales cycle, your sales and customer success teams will have fewer prospects they need to manage and can be more supportive. As soon you enter the product, you are met with a checklist that leads straight to their activation point.

Since there are only a couple of core features of the software, users realize the value within the first two minutes of signing up and setting up the product.

Seven days is more than enough time for the user to come to a buying decision. A free trial is considered long if it extends beyond 14 days. It might be the best option when selling a product with several use cases and secondary features.

Many companies hesitate to implement a long free trial because they think their product will be overrun by people who have no intention of buying. Usually, this depends on who you are targeting, your messaging, and your product positioning. Dropbox realized that a short free trial might scare away potential users looking for a complete solution.

3. Trial period. Most free trials last two to four weeks before they expire and the customer is expected to pay. If you give them too little time A free trial is a product or service offered to a customer for a limited time without any terms or conditions. A free subscription period offers an exclusive Free Trial Period means a period of 30 days starting from the Effective Date during which the Contracting Party is entitled to use Market Data, free-of-charges

Free trial period - In a large-scale experiment, 7-day long free trials (vs 30 days) led to % higher conversions, % better retention, and % higher revenue 3. Trial period. Most free trials last two to four weeks before they expire and the customer is expected to pay. If you give them too little time A free trial is a product or service offered to a customer for a limited time without any terms or conditions. A free subscription period offers an exclusive Free Trial Period means a period of 30 days starting from the Effective Date during which the Contracting Party is entitled to use Market Data, free-of-charges

In our product category of all-in-one customer communication tools the standard length is a day trial period. As our platform is a pretty complex one, 14 days seems to be a perfect length for:. That said, not every user has the opportunity to get enough value during a day trial period due to various reasons.

That proved to be an effective engagement and conversion tactic. SaaS Consultant for Global Audiences, SophiaLe. See B. Of course, you can get away with days IF you know and can replicate that Aha moment for a user.

CEO, Brainy Bees. Editor, Process Street. The question should not be what the perfect length is, but what the perfect process is for finding the length. For us at Process Street, we played with a number of different pricing plans, freemium options, and trial lengths.

We ended up settling on a two week trial of access to premium features, followed by a downgrade into a limited freemium service. For people who are going to buy, two weeks is long enough for them to get to a certain level of activation where they can see the true value of the service.

Some products have value that shines right off them; others have more layers of complexity that can obscure that value. The key for us was finding out what was the series of actions a user would take at the beginning of their journey which would indicate whether they would end up being a paid customer.

Then we knew how long we had to make the trial for people to have enough time to complete that journey, which predicted the likelihood to buy. Director, Marketing at Inspire Planner. If you are looking for a magic number, I am afraid you will be disappointed.

A perfect SaaS trial length depends on several factors and your particular business. I would say there are two major schools of thought — that your SaaS trial must be short under 14 days or that it must be longer up to 30 days. Some of the typical arguments for a short SaaS trial are that you create a sense of urgency in your customers, increase the efficiency of your sales team, reduce customer acquisition cost through a shorter sales cycle, and that no one actually uses your trial for its whole duration.

This is the model mainly used by B2C and some simple B2B SaaS products. The most common arguments for longer SaaS trials are that your users need more time to learn the product if you are selling complex software, it makes your customers stick to your product more, and that your customers might have multiple other priorities before even testing your product.

This option is typically chosen by more expensive, sophisticated B2B products, that target larger customers, and often require buy-in from several stakeholders. My advice for SaaS companies is to consider the industry trends but then use your data to determine the right trial length for your SaaS product.

After that, forget about your trial length and focus on how you handle your customer experience during the trial. Does your product offer enough value during the trial?

Are your customers engaged? With Inspire Planner, a Salesforce project management app , we chose a longer day free trial. Even though our software is intuitive, our potential customers typically need more time.

First, their Salesforce admin needs to install and configure the app. Then business users can test it, invite their colleagues, play around with workflow automation opportunities, and more. The more time they spend using Inspire Planner, the more they stick to our product by seeing the tremendous value and efficiency gains.

It costs us almost nothing, but it is a nice gesture towards our clients. Most of the people who request a trial extension then convert into paying customers without much effort from our side. Vice President of Marketing at Red Stag Fulfillment. The shorter the trial length, the lower your customer acquisition cost will be.

This is why, in my experience, I would recommend a trial closer to 14 days, rather than 30 days. Not only are you getting through to the people who are truly invested in your product — you can engage directly with them, find out their specific needs, which bodes well for your own learning of your customer base as well as being able to help convert them.

As a SaaS-y fanatic, 30 days is the perfect mark. Plus, if the product is really good, customers rarely wait for the trial to finish before they purchase it. Head of Marketing at Nifty. When considering the length of a trial, my recommendation is to ask yourself these most important questions:.

Can the user evaluate if our product is a good fit for them from the features accessible in the free trial? After you understand these three key points, I recommend moving into an action plan to create a complete trial strategy.

Our biggest mistake was stopping sending transactional emails on day We concluded we need to continue sending emails after the trial email sequence ends, and these emails need to be more transactionally focused.

Author of SaaS Email Marketing Handbook. The ideal length is determined by a lot of variables. For example, if it takes your users 5 minutes with your product to achieve the results they desire, not having a free trial is okay.

Ahrefs is a great example of this. Normally, people would sign up for the trial, get their report, and cancel before the trial period is over.

Ahrefs is avoiding that by not having a free trial. An example of such a product is PPCProtect. com which provides fraud prevention for Google Adwords. After a user has set up PPCProtect it takes an indeterminate amount of time before enough fraudulent clicks occur for PPCProtect to justify their monthly price.

In that case, you want to give yourself at least 14 days to show your users the value of your app. This scenario serves well to highlight another factor in determining the ideal trial length: A shorter trial keeps the momentum going.

PPCProtect could go with a day trial but that leads to a high percentage of users to sign up without completing the onboarding.

There is no time pressure and users will drop off as a consequence. Another example of this is when the new owner of HitTail at that time reduced trial length first from 30 to 21 days and then down to 14 days. Every time he shortened the trial he saw no drop in trial signup rates but an increase in trial-to-paid conversion rates.

At the end of the day, you have to find a balance between a trial that is long enough to properly onboard your customers and short enough to keep them moving forward.

Further reading: 28 SaaS Free Trial Best Practices to Supercharge Your Growth In Native Forms are live! Use Cases. View all. Marketing automation. Create user journeys that convert, onboard, and retain customers. Lead nurturing. Nurture email leads into trial users and customers. User onboarding.

Boost product activation and guide your users to value faster. Trial conversion. Smart marketing automation and behavior-based emails to double your trial conversion. Success Stories. Flow builder. Create remarkable user journeys with a robust and easy to use visual flow builder.

Send targeted one-off newsletters to your audience or a segment of people. Behavior emails. Event management. Track, create, and edit the actions that happen in your product. User segments. User profiles.

See the people behind the actions and access the full view of your customer data. Email personalization. Get your users to act with highly-personalized emails. Email editor. Design beautiful mobile-ready emails without any HTML skills. Lead scoring. Identify interested users and best-fit customers and proactively reach out to them.

Website tracking. Track page visits and form submissions on your website in real-time. Build and implement native forms on your website with just a few clicks.

Free email verification. Free email verification for all your contacts in Encharge, on all plans. Transactional emails. Send emails like password reset, payment receipt, single sign-on link from your app. Company profiles. Nurture, onboard, and convert whole teams with account-based marketing.

Custom objects. Store and customize all your data the way you use it right inside of Encharge. Facebook Logo. HubSpot Logo. Calendly Logo. Typeform Logo. Slack Logo. Intercom Logo. Mailchimp Logo. for a small shipping fee or for your credit card information.

But then, the company makes it so hard if not, impossible to cancel. Even worse, the company might enroll you in additional offers or products for more monthly fees that you did not even know about. Companies will offer a promotional time period or an introductory package of products, but require that you enroll in a program that bills you monthly or automatically renews your subscription at the end of that time period.

If you have been wrongly charged for a free trial offer, first try working it out with the company. Skip to main content. Search Search. Home About. Who We Are About AG Rob Bonta About the Office of the Attorney General History of the Office. Media Center Press Releases Media Library. Social Media Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube.

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