How do you reduce/convert your free users bouncing rate?

Tai Nguyen
7 replies
So one of the few "as old as a book problems" of any SaaS while scaling is to increase your conversion rate and reduce the bouncing rate upon the free users. Some of the practices that I know: - Build, enhance or improve your assets strongly related to your onboarding process. - Keep on generating MKT activities (most of the time will be paid ads) to onboard a new set of customers to replace the old one. - Just keep on focusing to enrich the features pool without paying proper attention to their assets. - Merge a low-tier app (high bounce rate) to become a feature on a higher-tier app. - Etc... So at WriterZen, we choose to build our assets by conducting thorough user tracking to see what is wrong and whatnot. We realize two things: 1. Generally, people use only around 10% of the full capacity of a tool. 2. When it comes to a complicated but very important niche (SEO), being features-rich is compulsory but at the same time, it's so hard for your users to merge them into their workflows hence utilizing it to an extent of familiarity. So naturally, guidance through the app is an obvious thing to do but proper knowledge of the provided niche is also very important, especially for a complicated and constantly changing niche like Google's algorithm. That's why we build our own Academy for the sake of all our users (a bit late to our regret) Here is the academy, it would be nice to have your support upon our launch today! https://www.producthunt.com/post...

Replies

Richard Gao
I think the best way to do this is to give them a goodbye survey that asks them why they didn't use the paid tier. A better option is to offer them compensation (does not have to be financial) for completing a survey. For example, you can offer them a trial of the paid service if they decide to leave the free tier, but you'll only offer a trial if you ask them why they did not use the paid tier. If they still decide to bounce after the trial, then have another survey ready asking them why they left. What I recommend is a multiple choice combined with a text box for your survey, but make the textbox mandatory so they're forced to explain in more detail why they bounced.
Tai Nguyen
@richard_gao2 I agree with the survey but only to some extent, if the survey is not clean enough it would be very hard for them to move on with it. Perhaps, you may have any template for such a survey that maybe you can share with us? Besides, stumbling too often into a survey will create a negative impact in the long run, which will eliminate all potential buyers just because the in-app experience is kind of pushy. Well from my own experience, I do think that a trial of a paid plan is very standard of a practice, but we did have a practice that by tracking our users and provided a tailored paid plan according to their percentage usage as a lifetime deal, and it proves to be quite useful to raise the temporary budget to improve other aspects of the apps.
Richard Gao
@tai_nguyen_wz You can use surveymonkey for your surveys. They have a free plan that's pretty extensive and they come with good templates as well. Whatever template I used was years and years ago so probably outdated. I think it won't be considered pushy if you manage it correctly. Make the survey short (no more than 3 questions) and it should be fine.
Pat Sullivan
To Reduce Bounce Rate and Increase Your Conversions: 1. What Is Bounce Rate? 2. Improve Your Content's Readability. 3. Avoid Popups – Don't Disrupt the UX. 4. Create a Compelling Call-to-Action. 5. Improve Your Brand Storytelling.
Tai Nguyen
@pat_sullivan2 Haha that first question though! Ths for the list man! I totally agree with all the above points except number 4. I would replace that with "Don't let CTA disrupt your users-flow". Believe it or not, I do believe that in some sense our users can actually detect our intention to push for conversion, and obviously, we shouldn't let that happen.