Use Case
Most software companies have a free trial period where they provide limited or full access to the capabilities of their product within a specific timeframe - without asking for any payment information. This approach has proven to be an effective way of onboarding users by letting them understand how the tool can help their business solve specific business problems.
Implementing a paywall upon the end of the free trial period can increase your product's free trial-to-paid conversion rates and speed up your sales processes. How? By:
Prompting users to visit the payment/subscription page so that they can review the suitable plan tiers and add their payment information.
Connecting users with your team in case they need an extension for their free trial period - so that more qualified leads are generated.
This guide will focus on creating a one-step modal that informs users that their trial period is over. We’ll cover:
Creating the modal
Targeting the correct users
Testing the experience
What metrics will this impact?
The final look of your modal will look similar to the example we created below:
Creating the Modal
Let’s begin by creating the actual content.
1-) Launch the Chrome Extension to Create a New Guide
Navigate to the platform page where you'd want your walkthrough to start and open the Chrome Extension.
Then, click + Guide, enter Guide's info, add a new step and select the "Create from Scratch" template under the Modal section.
Pro tip: This modal is where we inform users that their free trial period has expired; thus, we recommend setting the narrative around selecting a paid plan. However, it may be a good idea to provide a trial period extension for those interested but did not have enough time to evaluate your solution.
2-) Adding & editing the CTA
Remove the requisite button, which ends the Guide on the Side Notification template by default, and add two custom buttons that:
Links your users to your payment page.
Triggers a survey for those who want to extend the trial period.
Pro tip: Triggering an in-app survey with UserGuiding’s 3rd party survey integration options will enable you to gather insights about why the user wants to extend their free trial period. You can share the collected insights with the relevant teams to fine-tune the user experience during onboarding.
3-) Triggering your feature announcement conditionally
You can control for which user segment and under which conditions your modal triggers. You can also select the page(s) where it would appear.
You can also set an appearance frequency for your prompt. For example, it could always trigger when a user from the selected segment arrives at the target page. This is applicable to a modal that informs users about expired trial periods.
4-) Customize
UserGuiding gives you the ability to customize the walkthrough fully.
You can personalize the upgrade prompt by including the user's first name.
Visuals drive users' attention and can give a visual sense related to the content.
You can also fully customize the look & feel of the Guides with Customized Themes.
Pro tip: For this specific use case, you may consider creating a new Theme and removing the close icon through CSS.
Targeting the correct users
For this specific use case, we recommend you segment your users based on whether their free trial period has expired or not. You can achieve this by sending property to UserGuiding. You may send a boolean attribute trialExpired = true/false.
Once you decide on the segment, don't forget to set it to the content you've created.
Testing the experience
Setting the audience to Only Me will limit the content displayed for you and your colleagues.
You can navigate to a page where the support content should display, test it to see what it will look like, and publish it when you're ready.
What metrics will this impact?
Increased conversion rates by setting up paywalls and using UserGuiding to communicate the expiry date of the free trial period.