Offering a product or service for free to give people a ‘taste’ is a tried and tested sales technique that has been applied extensively online. There are three concepts of offering your services free…
1. Full product 100% free:
2. Free trial:
3. Separate scaled down product:
This post will focus on the benefits (and potential pit falls) of creating a free standalone product to draw customers in and focus on upgrading them to paying customers. Examples of providing free versions of their services include ourselves at Heart Internet with free web hosting, MailChimp who offer a free version of their email delivery and tracking service and Serif through their specialist free software website.
What are the advantages?
Reduced perceived risk:
Market impact:
Link bait:
Up-sell and cross-sell opportunities:
What are the pitfalls?
The free version is too good!:
Drain on resources:
No upgrade path built in:
When I was working on my Sky+ Remote Recorder app for Android I decided that a free trial version was a good way to gain interest.
Even though the Android store allows a full refund within 24 hours with no questions asked I found that the fuss of buying the app was putting some people off. Worse still, if they didn’t like the app after they’d paid for it they were more likely to give the app a bad rating.
When I released a trial version it took about a week for the number of downloads to exceed that of the full version. There was obviously a lot of interest in the app, but people were put off by the purchase.
Now I find that almost all of the people who buy the full version have come through from the trial version. This post definitely gives good advice. 🙂 I think I’ll make the upgrade procedure a bit easier for people whose trial period has expired next.
I still dont understand why you have written this article when you dont allow your own resellers to offer free hosting?
Hi Doug, We have lots of different customers selling lots of different products and services, the article is simply to get you thinking about the different things you could do. You are absolutely right though, we don’t allow our Resellers to give away web hosting as this could comprise the quality of our product. Our own free hosting is totally isolated from our paid service which is why we are able to do it.
Jonathan