Convert your Free trail customers - Stey.ai edition
You have two options when a customer chooses not to sign up for your Saas after the first trial.
Option 1 - You give up, count your losses and move on with your day
Option 2 - You try and nurture the user - and bring them back on as a paying customer (there is still hope)
It’s pretty simple, and let us discuss a few.
But first - we need a product to showcase as an example. One interesting Saas product I’ve come across recently is Stey.ai. It’s a Saas product that helps developers, designers and product owners uncover UX issues. It uses AI-assisted session replays to help uncover UX issues and provide analytics about how users interact with their applications. I have no affiliation with the product, but I wanted to test myself and see what I could come up with.
It is also important to note that Stey.ai doesn’t technically have a free trial or a paying product at the moment. They are still in beta. So a lot of what I’m about to say is preparing them for when they do take on paying customers. I’m also sure there is a range of features around the corner for them so for their current iteration of features - here are some examples.
Let’s first take a look at the product and how a tool like Stey.ai fits into the current market. I find that answering the questions below will give me a good idea of how to position the Post Trail Email flow ideas.
What is their unique selling point?
Their unique selling point is AI-assisted insights. They are taking your typical session recording software and infusing it with AI for better insights and recordings - a pretty interesting idea, and a perfect usecase for AI.
Who is the ideal customer?
The ideal customer for a product like this is not as clear. From working in tech myself, and having a good understanding of how start-ups and enterprise software companies work. I have a hard time believing that the ideal customer is the developer. If you take the start-up for example I think the developer is going to be spending more time trying to fix bugs that they know about rather than trying to uncover new ones. It seems as though the product is geared towards, Founders, Product owners and designers.
What is the user experience like?
I did use Stey.ai in its example mode. It seems very standard in terms of a Saas product - which is good as it felt very familiar. I doubt there would be a lot of complaints regarding its usability.
What does the rest of the market look like?
This is a mature market with some large players such as Hotjar, and Datadog. I’ve used these tools before. They are overkill if you are just looking to get session replays. I think this is something that we can use in the post-trail email. From a product perspective, Stey.ai seems a lot simpler and easier to use.
What is the brand personality like?
Stey.ai is a SaaS product, and they don’t try to be anything they are not. They are very product-focused.
As I mentioned earlier there are only 2 options. You give up, or you keep trying. Now if you want to keep trying here are a few ideas.
1. Discounted Subscription rate
The most obvious thing you can do for a user who has recently completed a free trial is to offer them a discount. For example, it could be %50 off their first 3 months, or free for the 1st month.
With a product like Stey.ai which requires additional setup (integrating it into your code). You probably need more time to work with the product as a user. And you can’t exactly use it properly until you have set up a project.
Offering a long-term trial period may work out for Stey.ai, as it will allow the user to get value out of the product and get people set up properly.
"Try Stey.ai for 1 month for free"The perceived value they are getting from your offer is a lot. I’m also not saying that a free month is going to cost the business - but the potential to hook clients onto a hard-to-setup product is going to do wonders for converting potential users.
2. How you could use the product better
In my experience sometimes a tool like this needs to be explained to the customer - it is something that has a very particular use case. This means that A lot of people may not be able to use it to its full effect. With Stey.ai you have 4 big features.
- Session replays
- A.I. Search - search for specific sessions that meet certain criteria
- A.I. Summaries
- Analysis tools and reporting
We take features of the product and write case studies around it. These should be short and simple and give the user an “aha” moment. Here is where you need to give users some use cases, or reach out to current clients and ask for some of their use cases. One example of a use case that I thought would be good:
Stey.ai emits events in real time. This potentially could work out to be a low-maintenance, easy-to-sort logging mechanism for a start-up. Something that works out of the box, but would provide a large amount of value to people. They don’t have to be long-winded stories, but they give an interesting perspective on how you could use the product and what value they provided the users. It is generally good to be specific though, if you or a current user has talk about how they analysed a user - be specific about what happened and tell a story around how it helped.
The obvious isn’t that obvious until you spell it out - so make sure you can " S P E L L".
Below I’ve gone with my current idea of using Stey.ai for logging errors at a start-up.
Personalise your emails
I’ve got one sentence for you, and it is a no-brainer. You should probably (by probably I mean definitely) personalise your emails - everybody loves the sound of their name. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to hear “Dear Client”. After I spend time putting in all of my information. It would also be good to go through some specific stats their way. I’m a big fan of putting stats in emails because of the fact - they give little glimpses that are specific to the user.
"Hey you've used the app for 1.23 Hours - why not try it for a month on us for free"It’s a simple way of personalising your emails and just brings a little joy to your user’s day.
Don’t beat a dead horse
As the old saying goes, don’t beat a dead horse. Not everyone will want to pay for your product. But hey you have to at least try, right? So with that, you always want to send out the follow-up email after a trial ends. This is where you want to make use of your email analytics. If you are getting no opens from a user. Then stop sending the follow-up emails. You don’t want to beat a dead horse. Move on to the next user.
So I’ve given a bit of an example with Stey.ai as a Saas product, and I may do more of this as it was quite an enjoyable exercise. I hope that you can see the link between theory and practice with this one - If you implement some of these strategies along with having a great product, I think that you will find it easy to convert customers into paying users in no time.
Do you need a hand with the email marketing for your Saas Product?
edit: After writing this it looks as if Stey.ai has pivoted their business to focus on rewriting copy on websites using A.I. - Very interesting!