Strategies for a Freemium World

But what happens if your B2B tech business doesn’t fit neatly into this model? What if the technology you’ve developed can’t easily be adapted into a more basic version that you’d be happy to distribute for free? What if it can’t easily be delivered over the cloud (as most freemium B2B tech products are)? What if you’re a hardware manufacturer who can’t just hand out your product and expect people to pay later?

At its heart, Freemium is about adding value for prospects before they become paying customers. If we’re to thrive in an increasingly Freemium world then B2B marketers will need to explore all kinds of creative options for adding value in this way.

These could involve a free version of your core product. However, they could equally involve offering free consultations, or free tickets to high-profile conferences and events. The most successful tech companies know that the easiest lead to convert to a paying customer is one that’s already delighted with you. The good news is that there’s more than one way to generate those leads.

The first and most obvious question is whether there is a valid Freemium version of your solution. Can you make parts of your product available for free without undermining your overall business model? Perhaps there’s one specific feature that could be hugely useful to large numbers of people but only represents a fraction of what your full solution can do. It’s not always easy to re-engineer your portfolio this way. However, the success of Freemium tech businesses shows that it’s a possibility worth exploring.

If you can’t adapt your business to accommodate Freemium, you might well be able to tailor your existing free trials, discounts or offers so that they come closer to the Freemium experience. Focus in on the friction points, and when and how you ask for personal and payment details. Could you structure free trials so that customers can get started without putting in payment details and with minimal personal information? What would happen if you triggered this process at the end of the trial rather than the start? You’ll get fewer people becoming paying customers by default when they forget to cancel a trial subscription – but you might find that you get a far wider pool of people taking the trial to begin with.

Freemium may not feel like an option for hardware brands – but that doesn’t mean you can’t find innovative ways to grow the number of people using your product. The headset manufacturer Jabra runs attractive discount offers on its state-of-the-art consumer headphones for employees at its priority target accounts. This equips the brand with a large number of user-advocates at businesses making enterprise-wide buying decisions. It achieves something similar to a Freemium business model, but via a different route.

The first stage of the tech buying process often involves anonymous buyers experimenting, to see what a solution could eventually do for them. Helping them to visualise this could add up to an accessible, Freemium-style experience without actually providing a solution for free.

The communications solutions provider Twilio encourages developers to start experimenting with building chatbots and other widgets in its Twilio Studio, before they start paying (or have to share any credit card details). Conversational marketing platform Drift shows potential customers what a ‘Driftbot’ would look like on their site. Both solutions invite anonymous buyers to experience what it’s like to be a customer – without the need to become a customer.