Overview
A lot of content is available online regarding freemium or trial conversion: it is something SaaS companies and marketers have been trying to improve for a few decades now. The new Product-Led approach brings it to the next level, allowing for a more personalized experience to end-users.
Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Defining your ICP is always where you should start, because it allows you to:
• have a more in-depth understanding of the efficiency of your marketing campaigns
• have a better way to segment your customers in order to identify wether they are a good match for a human-touch or a pure self-service experience
• provide your customer success team more insights about the type of company they will be working with
Working on your ICP is not a one time step, it has to be reviewed and updated on a regular basis according to your learnings and discoveries. First traits might come from your personal researches and assumptions, additional ones from your churn analysis, and churners segmentation for instance.
Try to describe with as many details as possible the companies that should be interested in your services. Characteristics can be linked to the country they come from, technologies they use, etc.
Each one of these signals will then be used to define your Successeve ICP which will group them in 4 main categories.
Note: at this step, you can include users traits for an even more detailed overview, such as the job title of the contact who signed up, also checking if the email address is a corporate one or not!
These signals will provide you team perfect insights for the next steps!
Track your product adoption
Understanding what your signups are doing in your product during their trial is a sine qua none condition to master your trial conversion and start improving it. Don’t get us wrong, you can have people converting into paying customers without understanding this part, but you won’t be able to make sure to repeat it, and even worst, might per mistake delete the messages, triggers, or anything that was at the basis of their conversion.
The easiest way to implement such tracking is to split your core features into milestones your signups must go through in order to experience the real value of your product. Each one of these features can be categorized per product or tool you offer, as follow:
Example: you are a SaaS company providing a product for newsletters. Your customers want to engage at scale with their community. For this purpose, they need to 1/ import a list of contacts, 2/ create a newsletter, 3/ send the newsletter and 4/ analyse the results.
Someone who went through the 4 steps would have experienced more value than someone who got stuck at the first step.
