Increase exposure by offering your customers a free trial
Finding highly qualified leads in a crowded market can be difficult. A free trial can help you demonstrate the value of your offer and nudge a prospect toward commitment and activation.
Typical software vendors will provide product descriptions, value propositions, and feature overviews. The best offers often include screenshots, video demos, and test drives. Ratings help aggregate feedback across many people, reviews provide insight into individual experiences, and personal references are helpful, but the best way to evaluate an offer is for potential leads to try it themselves.
After drawing attention to your listing, it is important to provide prospects with the next immediate step along the buying journey. Purchasers want control throughout their decision-making process; they decide when and how they get the information they need. It is therefore critical to provide as many engagement options as possible, so that prospects can plan their own buying journey.
By offering a free trial, you provide your customers with a risk-free opportunity that moves a potential buyer closer to purchase. Customers can view you as more trustworthy and transparent, too. Having buyers try before they purchase also increases your chances of being found in the Microsoft commercial marketplace.
Trial options
Each trial-offer option has its own benefits. By providing potential customers with more than one option, they can choose their own experience, based on where they are in the buying journey. The trial subscription converts to paid after the first month automatically, after your customers have fallen in love with your product.
The Microsoft commercial marketplace supports two types of trial:
- Trial period: try the full product for free for a month before you purchase.
- Trial listing: learn about the product, then go to the ISV’s website for trial.
Potential customers can find such offers by setting a filter in Microsoft AppSource or Microsoft Azure Marketplace. For example, to find paid software that includes a month trial for evaluation, users select the Paid option in the Pricing Model drop-down list. Results will sort accordingly, after which users can overlay product types from the Products list.
The newest addition to the trials family is the paid SaaS subscription that starts with a free month. SaaS offers consist of software that is developed, run, managed, and supported on the ISV’s infrastructure, and that customers access over the network. Subscriptions are offered in monthly or annual durations, and they are billed either at a flat rate, per user, or in custom units that are defined by the provider.
Regardless of which type of trial you offer, structure it in a way that speaks to a specific buyer persona. Offer use-case scenarios, if possible, and determine what is driving your target buyers to look for a certain solution. Then, ensure that your trial guides them through what is most important to them and addresses their concerns. Each buyer type will be interested in different capabilities and benefits, so your trial should reflect these variances in focused and compelling ways.
What publishers are saying
Transacting through the Microsoft commercial marketplace provides myriad benefits: customer reach, consolidated billing with Microsoft products, simplified procurement on Microsoft paper, the Cloud Solution Provider program, and Marketplace Rewards. The robust, quickly expanding functionality provides Microsoft partners with powerful tools.
But we’ll let the publishers speak for themselves.