A critical part of increasing conversions is following up with those who have expressed interest in your product or service. One of the best ways I've found to follow up is via an autoresponder. I've achieved great results by putting together a series of messages that are sent to our trial users. I have had to tweak them along the way and measure their effectiveness.
Below are a few important things that I have learned:
•Include the trial user's login information with each message so they can easily login to their account. Many of us sign up for various trials and use different login and passwords for each. By providing the login information in each message you allow the trial user to quickly login to their account without contacting you to retrieve their username and/or password.
•Always provide the contact information for your customer support team along with support resources in a specified location of each message. This will allow the user to quickly and easily locate this information if they need assistance. For instance, I include a navigational column on the right side of each message with a "Support" container that includes links to our video tutorials, user guide, support phone number along with their available hours and the support email address.
•Always let the trial user know that their expiration date is soon approaching. I signed up for a trial version of a web-based software app a few weeks ago and just the other day I receive an email message "out of the blue" stating "Your Trial has Expired". It had been 4 or 5 days since I had logged in so I had lost track of how much time I had before my trial expired. Now, what I do is send out one message three days prior to the expiration of the trial to remind the user of their trial account and let them know that they have only three days left. This gives them a couple of days to log into their account and send out a few sample messages prior to their trial expiring. Two days later I let them know that their trial will expire the following day and finally a message goes out the day of the expiration letting them know that their trial has expired and encouraging the trial user to upgrade to a full account.
•Include testimonials within your autoresponder messages. I cannot stress enough the importance of dedicating at least 2-3 autoresponder messages to include expanded case studies on a few of your clients. If someone is testing your product they want to know that others are achieving great results. For instance, one of my autoresponder messages includes, within the testimonial, a quote from a client that states: "The months we send out a newsletter we at least double our monthly sales". This is powerful for trial users looking at our product to help increase their sales.
•For those who do not sign up for a full account send a message a week to two weeks after their trial has expired requesting feedback on your product. This will provide information about your company and product and point out places where you can improve.
I hope these tips help increase your conversions.

About The Author

Brandon Milford is the Executive Director of Marketing for Broadwick Corporation, makers of IntelliContact (www.intellicontact.com). IntelliContact is an industry leading email marketing and surveying application. Brandon is considered a thought leader in web marketing and through Brandon's Blog (www.brandonmilford.com), he shares his insight on marketing, design, and entrepreneurship.
brandon@broadwick.com