The First Question to Ask Trial Users

Getting trial users for your product is one thing. Getting them to talk is another.

In a dream world, new trial users guide themselves through your product then upgrade or send you a check within 14 days. In reality, most of them won’t get past the onboarding and will leave without telling you why.

The reason for that could be one of many, and it’s tempting to guess and jump to solutions, but that will cost time and money with no guarantee of improving anything.

So instead, try asking a simple question…

What would make this a successful trial for you?

It’s a simple way to start a conversation that may lead to a sale. It will also help you improve your product, marketing, and sales process.

Send an email like this to new trial users no later than a day after they sign up:

Hi, I'm Greg, founder of $company. I saw you signed up for a trial today... Can you tell me what would make this a successful trial for you? Thanks, Greg

For new users, it’s easy and noncommittal to say what would make their trial successful.

If you’re already emailing trial users with an offer to help or get on a call, try this anyway. For one of my clients, this simple email received 47% more opens, infinitely more responses (old one got practically zero), and better responses than their standard intro email.

Specifically, the simple question email had a 67% open rate and 11.2% response rate. The replies were incredibly informative (for both sides), and started productive conversations.

(For enterprise software, “productive” translates to revenue.)

There are more benefits of this simple question to ask new trial users:

• It tells them you're interested in their success, not just that of your sales team. This can lead to a sales conversation where the trial user doesn't feel pressured.
• It makes trial users think about their goals, which makes them invested in the trial.
• It starts a relationship, lowering the barrier for future conversations.
• It tells you about your users' use cases, evaluation criteria, assumptions, pain points, and expectations. This is information over which your sales, marketing, and product teams should be drooling.
• Most importantly: It helps you ensure the user has a productive and successful trial.

This email takes less than a minute to write. Test it out today and tell me how it goes!