How To Get More Paying Customers Using Inbound Marketing Strategies?

When you have a great quality product on your hands and you want to market it to your website visitors, offering them a free trial is a great way to optimize your conversion rates which is marketing speak for converting as many website visitors into customers for good ROI on marketing campaigns. Offering a free trial is a great way to build trust with prospective customers, it provides your customers with the information they need to purchase your product. Above all, it is an easy opportunity to introduce the product into a customer’s life, make them dependent on it for their needs as a necessary aspect of their lives so that after the trial period ends, they don’t have a choice but to buy your product. 

However, this is not as simple as it seems to get right. According to research, there is a wide degree of variance in free trial conversion rates. Some companies have strong free trial conversion rates whereas other companies have weak conversion rates. So what differs between a company that gets most or almost all of its free trial users to buy their product and a company that only gets a few of their free trial users to buy their product? The top reasons why some customers leave is because a) they don’t understand the product or b) they don’t see how the product could benefit them

Here are a few key points that can help you get more paying customers.

Know your customer – For any marketing campaign to be successful, you need to know who your target audience is. Knowing your customer’s expectations, needs and concerns can set you apart from other products/services. The way you sell your free trial should be true to the user experience that you are offering and be enticing for prospects. 

Creating value for customers – For customers to consider buying your product after the trial period ends, your product has to show users that the product will benefit them during the trial period and even more so, after the trial period. To accomplish this, you need to understand how your product brings value to your prospective customers and at what point of time do prospects start realizing this value. Facebook realized that if a user was able to get at least 7 friends in the first 10 days, they would continue using Facebook. This was the point where users started recognizing the value of networking and connecting with peers on Facebook. Paying attention to user behavior during the onboarding process is important to determine whether the user understands the value of your product. 

Getting to know when the user starts to realize the value of your product is crucial. Analytics can help you identify the point at which users start to feel the value of your product in their lives. Using analytics you can notice patterns in user behavior related to your product during the free trial.  You can look out for the following to know whether the user knows the value of your product/service;

• Did they invite other users to use your product? 
• How many features of the product are they using?
• How frequently do they use the application after the first week?

It is not only important to understand your customer through numbers and data but also by their perceptions of your product. Understanding consumer perception combined with data analytics can give you a comprehensive outlook as to why some users purchased your product and why some don’t. This information is vital for you to enhance the onboarding process. Observing such user behavior at every stage of the onboarding sequence should give you some indication of how to streamline your onboarding process and deliver value to the customer with a bang!

To get a better understanding of a user’s behavior with respect to the product, segment your customers by persona so that the data makes is more coherent for you to improve the customer onboarding process for each type of customer segment. At the beginning of the onboarding process, have your customers self-identify so that you can customize the onboarding process and make it relevant to each customer segment. 

Create an addictive user experience so that customers use your product frequently – You can personalize the user experience for each customer with the user behavior data that you have analyzed. This data could help you form a blueprint for mapping out your user experience and enhancing your customer touchpoints.  Let’s say suppose the user abandons the onboarding process, you can send an automated email that reminds them to get back, give them simple directions to finish the process and let them know about the goodies that await them once they finish the onboarding process. Marketing Automation helps you personalize your interactions with each user in addition to enhance user experience. This is particularly useful for when the user is setting up the software, personalized communication through automation can help deliver instructions on setting up the software in a user-friendly way. You can also use chatbots that break down the instructions on the software setup and simplify the whole process for the user. Chatbots can also be used to encourage users to use different features of the product that they don’t already know about. This way you can increase the value of your product in the eyes of the user. 

Interactive walkthroughs are a good way to get users to learn to use our product in an interactive way. Users learn better when the entire setup process is broken down into small steps so that they are not overwhelmed by the process. Making users learn with walkthroughs gives them a complete understanding of your product and its benefits.

Gamification is another method which you can use to make the onboarding process more enjoyable for the user. Gamification refers to integrating game mechanics into an existing system to drive customer engagement for great user experience. For this, you would need to set up some tasks for the user and a reward for performing each task. This is a great way to keep customers engaged in the onboarding process by giving them a sense of accomplishment. Drop Box had a referral campaign where they gave additional storage space to users who referred DropBox to a friend. Users sent out as many referrals as needed to enjoy additional free storage space. This was a great way to get more users on board by making user experience more enjoyable for the user and even get them to do some of the advertising for you!

Integrate your product features with other social media platforms so that the product is a dominant presence in the customer’s virtual activities – Another way to enhance user experience is by integrating your product with other popular apps so that users can share with their user experience with their friends. Let’s say your app allows users to create goofy pictures, allowing the user to share these pictures on Facebook is a great way to optimize the user experience. This is also a clever way to get users to become dependent on your product by expanding your product’s dominance in their life. 

Hope you found this article helpful!