I was pleasantly surprised to find such relevant information on a subject so close to my heart. (combine accounting software and internet marketing)

Offer a reduced price for 1st year if they commit within 30 days, stressing the initial 60 days remains free.

Send a mini survey after 45 days of the trial period, with simple tickbox answerable questions asking if they will be signing-up soon, or possible reasons why they won’t

Essentially it can in some cases boil down to an admittedly complex ROI equation – what amount of effort or investment is going into obtaining and dealing with each “trial user” (nearly did trailer there!) – and what is the associated return if they sign up.

The critical thing is to get the balance right, so you maximise conversion but without having to put in so much work that it’s not worth doing!

Re: Adwords, people often go wrong by simply chucking cash at it – its essential to tweak, adjust and re-work until you can prove that running an advert is profitable – then scale up/out appropriately. As Duane notes – once you get it right it can be very efficient!

By using Google analytics and webmaster tools, plus cute SEO work you can drive more targeted visitors to your site. (And this of course applies to any online business.)

Visitor numbers may well suffer, but the effect is beneficial as the trial-to-pay ratio necessarily increases as the propensity to purchase is greater with these visitors.

I think Duane has a good point too about contacting the trialists. Gets positive feedback – perhaps to avoid a “sell” to use the software – but we’ve found the same result, or lack of result.

Positive responses from just about everyone, but no marked increase in conversions.

No – we don’t actively try to convert trialists. They get a couple of automated emails telling them how to contact us and showing them how to get started

We find there are 3 main types of “trialist”

1) Sign up, enter 100 transactions in the first day and use forever.

2) Sign up – contact us for some advice on functionality or to do a data import – usually Sage but often price list/stock imports

3) Sign up and do nothing.

We did, for a period, try and find out why some people had signed up for a trial and done absolutely nothing. We wanted to know why? Were we missing something?

This was a lot of effort for very little reward. Those who we did manage to contact seemed to have little recollection or reason for having signed up. Most simply ignored us.

So now, like yourselves, we concentrate on not only getting more traffic, but also the right kind of traffic.

Stuart

There’s always the danger that if you pump low-quality into the trial pipeline then you’ll decrease your trial-to-paying ratio.

But that’s not what we’re seeing. Ratio of trial-to-paying is gradually increasing as we improve the processes we have in place and also as the product is continually improving (and therefore of use to a wider audience). There’s still a lot more we can and will do on those fronts to further improve on the conversion rates.

Is there a human/time cost for you guys to convert trialists to paying? For us there isn’t much involved (besides support, who would only be involved if the trialist is actively using and interested int he software) as we don’t pro-actively contact triallists. There’s just way too many of them every day and too low a monthly fee to make it practical or economical.

We do very well from organic traffic from Google.

We work with a *very* good external firm to manage our adwords. We stopped it for a while as the cost of a customer acquisition was too high because the conversion rates of vistor->trial->paying were too low.

We’ve recently re-started it again because now we have improved conversion rates through all the different stages all of a sudden it’s very cost effective.

I’d be interested to see – although I would not expect you to publish – if the increased trial sign ups also read to increased end sales.

We have found in the past that increasing the number of trial sign ups can simply drain your sales resources if those signing up are not really interested in your product.

I would guess in this case that by putting the “big brand” names at the top you have told people exactly what you do – which should prevent time wasters.

I notice you also sometimes use Google ad words. We did do some optimization around this (or rather Google did) and managed to increase our conversion (both goal and real) and 1/2 our spend.

Have a look here for a rough guide.

http://www.fusionaccounts.com/Blogs/tabid/100/EntryId/53/What-has-Google-ever-done-for-you.aspx

Thanks again for the advice!

The “something” might be an entire webpage, a layout, a way of providing a form for completion – or a block of sales copy – almost anything, but only by comparative testing (an arduous but worthwhile process) can we achieve better results.

I keep hearing storys recently about eCommerce shop owners who have changed the look and feel of their entire website and suddenly a successful site has nose-dived.. cautionary tales at best!

Great stuff though and keep it up – would be very interested to hear a little bit about what you conciously do to help convert trial users into paid users (beyond the product itself)!