You developed a great product. Customers would like to try it too. But they want it free. How would you convert them to a paid subscriber?
Listed below are the few trending solutions.
One of the major hurdles of SaaS products is to convert free users to paying subscribers. Because of the existence of freeware and tough competition, customers would demand products for free.
This is a conflict as your whole revenue depends on paid subscribers.
Even though your product is good and customers know it too, they are still hesitant to swipe the card for the purchase.
Many SaaS companies accepted the fact that it takes 3 to 6 months to convert a free user into a paid subscriber and about 30-40% stop using the products once the demo or free trial period is over.
Hence it is important to use a new tool to communicate with users even after they sign up for a free trial. The tool should involve pro-active communication with professionally trained Online Sales Experts [OSE].
Why OSE?
Most sales representatives think their job is over when they get a customer subscribed for a trial period or free demo. However, at the end of that period, they either miss converting such customers as they are looking out for new customers.
Hence it is important to establish a proper communication strategy between the free user and company to emphasize the value of the product throughout the trial or demo period.
Although you can adopt few known strategies like email or telemarketing, we recommend you try CaaS (Conversation as a Service) as emails get ignored and people get frustrated over telemarketers.
What is CaaS?
In simple terms, CaaS is the evolved form of AI operated Live Chat.
The idea was developed when chatbot based Live Chat faced technical issues, higher set-up cost, inability to attend customers in non-business hours, and data security.
Wherein through CaaS providers, the live chatbox on your website is managed by professionally trained Online Sales Experts [OSE’s] who work 24/7, 365 days, across the globe to engage your customers for the goals set by you.
By promoting human interaction, they get to know the customer’s state of mind and talk in both a friendly and professional way to sell your products. They don’t indulge in hard selling like chatbots or desperate sales representatives would but explain the benefits and features of the product/service in a subtle tone.
Here is how OSEs work in converting free users to paid subscribers:
- They Greet Customers Every Time:
According to a report from Microsoft survey, about 72% of the consumers say that they expect the company to know who they are, what they have purchased and prefer to have insights on their previous engagement.
CaaS providers believe in pro-active communication. Pro-active simply means creating a situation rather than just responding to it after it has happened.
Every time, a visitor is on your website, the live chat box opens up automatically, and OSE’s greet them gently and ask for their query.
This makes users feel valued and they also have the option to close the chat box in the click of a button if they are not ready for a chat at that time.
- Nurture, Up-sell and Cross-sell:
Nurturing your free users is very essential for conversion. You can work out a strategy with OSEs of your CaaS provider like scoring free users based on their engagement with the software, giving a star value for their continuous usage, providing useful tips and suggestions to use it better, announcing them about the special offers or discounts they are qualified for, appreciating their frequent usage and offering a special deal such as “Try ‘Premium’ free for 3 days” so that they would know how they could benefit more from becoming a Premium user. Once they have tasted a sample of the benefits of becoming a premium user, they are most likely to upgrade their plans.
CaaS makes it easier because of the flexibility in working out a strategy as it is handled by humans (against Chatbots where you need to reprogram all codes).
You can also set goals to up-sell or cross-sell which brings additional revenue.
- Communication Established 24/7, 365 Days
While generating leads for most of our clients, we figured that more than 50% of the leads we generated were during non-business hours. Hence it is important to establish communication round the clock.
Most of the SaaS softwares are launched for a large number of customers across the globe who operate in different time zone. Some may use it at midnight where you cannot establish communication via email or a phone call.
The OSEs operate in different shifts and thus establish greetings and nurture customers all the time.
- Book Calendar Meetings
Buying a SaaS product is quite an investment for the customer. Most subscription plans are available for quarterly, half-yearly or annual plans after the trial period. Hence users have the reservations on whether or not to become a paid subscriber. OSE’s help to book calendar meetings or schedule a phone call into your sales team calendars to further discuss with a salesperson.
The booking process is very simple for free users with just the click of the button and the meeting notification is sent instantly to the sales team inbox for further follow-up.
- Feedback to Improvement
One of the biggest advantages of CaaS is the ability to view the entire chat history and getting to know what customers think of your products/services and what is stopping them from becoming a paid user.
Your customers might have talked about price or user experience or customer service or technical stuff.
You could also recommend your CaaS provider to customize the customer prospects into different categories and ask for different qualifying criteria’s that match the category of prospects.
Additionally, all these insights are highly cost-effective and faster than your marketing campaign study because this is collected from your own prospects and existing customers.
A study conducted by Hubspot indicated that a mere 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95% and 90% of happy consumers are more likely to purchase again, and 93% are more likely to be repeat customers at companies with excellent customer service.
Customer retention happens only when you establish healthy communication. With CaaS you could do it with ease.
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If you are looking for more knowledge about CaaS and how we deliver a 25% increase in conversion rates in 30 days reducing the overall Cost-per-conversion, visit Chat Metrics and view the video.
