dj1977

My partner has this website that is subscription based. He has 3 paid plans. He just moved to only paid plans as of last year he had a free option and did away with it. Since he did that now not as many people sign up. Should we implement a free plan with as not as many options for the user? We were thinking of reimplementing a free plan or offering a trial period. Would this help convert customers to paid plans? We were thinking by giving the customer a taste that we could get them to upgrade to a paid plan.

thedark

Free plans has great potential to bring traffic and awareness. Having a free plan will benefit your business long term, but might bring down the premium sales on short term.

The 80-20 rule is something a lot of people refer to in premium business models. 80% of your users should use the free plans while 20% purchase a paid plan. This might some low but if you have a free plan your user base will be bigger.

Make sure that you give something fully usable for free, and provide premium, specific features as paid. For paid plans, you can come with something different or something that will require some additional processing that justify the money and other companies are not offering it.

For example, I have a wordpress plugin that can do automatic linking. The user can add link-keyword pairs and links will be added trough content. 90% of users are looking for features. As a premium feature, I am offering automated processing of text and the software automatically decide what keywords and what products to link.

Automatically add affiliate links in your website content with Auto Affiliate Links

dj1977

Great points. We thought about for instance allowing paid profiles to post pictures of their work. This is a home services business directory where home services list their business in a specialty niche. Paid plans can receive reviews, post pictures of their work etc. You are saying maybe limit free plans to not being able to do that?

savidge4

So you have a directory... I would say yes, limit the free plans to a basic listing.. then you can start the e-mail sequence to introduce the benefits of your upgrade plans.

dj1977

I was thinking of a pop up instead of email sequence. What about a pop up that popped up every time a free user logged in to tell them the benefits of a paid plan and provide them with an upgrade button in the pop up.

Chris-

Yes, a free plan or trial period is a very good idea. Especially if the product or service is so good that users feel that they can't do without it.

Look at what others in your area of business are doing, and do something similar.

Chris