Convert Your Free Users to Paid Customers (Automations)

Happy Sunday!

This week I caught up with one of my friends from my Meta/Facebook days. We had a great conversation about the AR/VR space and apparently we both bought the Apple Vision Pro Headset.

I got mine a week ago and I’ve been loving it so far. If you don’t know, I’m a massive fan of Apple Products.

Speaking of Apple, I just opened up a referral program where you can get products like the AirPods Max, Apple TV 4K and more.

Let’s get to the Revenue Automations!

I had a few calls this week with existing and potential clients, all looking to reduce cost of acquisition and increase revenue. (I mean who doesn’t want this?)

So today I’ll be telling you about marketing automation (through email automations) and how you can use it to boost conversion. We got 9% conversion increase for one our clients.

1. Increase Revenue 💵 

2. Reduce COA 📉

3. Optimize Marketing Spend ✨

There are only so many customers who will immediately buy your product upon first sight. If you’re acquiring paid customers, you have to understand that you need 7 touch points at minimum to drive conversion. .

Touch points need to educate, inform, provide value, and up-sell.

Email Automation is THE channel to increase touch points at a very low cost and you just need a tool for execution.

How I’m doing this with one of my clients right now?

Background: my client is a SaaS company with a Free and Pro (Paid) Model

You should have two primary goals in mind here:

1. Introduce customers to your Product (Engagement)

2. Convert Free to Pro (Revenue Focused)

3. Retain Pro/Paid Customers (Churn)

My focus is going to be on 1 and 2 with what I’ve coined as the E-T-P Model. We will tackle churn reduction another day.

Step 1: Engagement (E)

A free user will not convert to Pro if they don’t first engage with your platform and see value from it.

First comes engagement.

1. Welcome Series: The best time to drive engagement is right at signup and during onboarding

2. Engagement Series: Drive true engagement by offering value, demos, tutorial, inspiration.

In the process slide, we use the Welcome Series and Engagement Series for our touch points. Each Series has a set of 3-5 emails at a timed cadence. We also A/B test emails, test designs, time of send and CTAs.

So now, with these two series, you’ve driven free users to engage with your product.

✅ User Engaged - aka they are actually using your product.

Step 2: Conversion (T-P)

With a primed, highly engaged user, it's time to offer value and convert.

You have the option to offer a Pro trial version (value). You can technically skip this part of the funnel but the Trial allows you to collect credit card information with a lowered friction (30 day free trial, which converts to a Pro Plan)

And yes, this will make a MASSIVE difference in your conversion.

If you look at the graphic, some Free Users will move onto Trial and then Pro Users.

Other users will move onto Trial and then cancel. This is an opportunity to get feedback. Remember, these users can still be converted down the road.

With this E-T-P Model, you’ll get more paid users! We’ve seen a 9% conversion uplift by applying the right strategies and continuous improvements.

Tooling - What Tool to Use 🛠️

You’re not manually tracking each user and writing emails to send out to them. That’s a waste of time!

How do I handle email automations for all my clients? Simple - Active Campaign. All tech companies I work with use this. They are the best fit for tech companies, and very technically advanced in terms of features. This means as your company scales, you can scale within Active Campaign. Also, much cheaper than HubSpot. Active Campaign Free Trial 

I know some of y’all might be in the e-commerce space. The best tool for e-commerce is Klaviyo.

Data is Gold 🏆

With a true automation, you should have datasets to segment your audience. Active Campaign allows this!

Example 1: A Free user who’s used your app more than 6 hours within a week is likely to convert (User 1), more than one who only spent 1 hour (User 2). The first user is primed for a upsell as they see the value.

Example 2: For User 2, who only utilized your product for 1 hour, you will want to target them to engage with your product, to bring them to a hot spot for upselling.

There may be another user, who signed up for an app and never used it. That’s another segment you can create, to get them to open the app.

Examples of Segmentation

1. Free User - No Engagement

2. Free User - Low Engagement

3. Free User - High Engagement

Thinking ahead for Churn, segments can be:

1. Pro User - High Usage (Healthy)

2. Pro User - Low Usage (These users will likely drop off and cancel subscription)

If you have the right data you can also track feature usage. Imagine for a second you have a credit based usage system for a free user, 100 credits free. As a free users nears above 90 credits, you can infer they see value and then email them to convert to pro.

So to enable this, you need tracking, tracking data is gold to create segments. segments allow you to automate your emails based on customer journey.

Automations Rule 🤖

The best thing about automations are, once you set them up, you can sit back and relax. The process itself generates revenue without having to do a thing. Having that said, you’ll need to continue monitoring your campaigns, regular optimization to ensure effectiveness.

That’s all folks! Now you know how valuable email automation can be for your company. I know the process is a bit tricky at first, so if you have any questions - reply back to me here.

If you need help with automation strategy, implementation, email design, copy and messaging - we can do this for you! Reach out to my team here to apply.

My team and I help scale tech companies and growing startups with our growth marketing services.

Lastly, we’ve got a few weeks left for summer shenanigans. Go enjoy your summer and I’ll see you back in 2 weeks.

Best,

Harsh

Founder at Roveir & RIS3 Studio

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