

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

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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moozeek
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.

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

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moozeek
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...

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bdfh42
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.

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

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arkitaip
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.

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PonyGumbo
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?

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fastspring
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.

