Tag: free

What makes freemium pricing work?

Free
photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/bstabler/

 

Should you give away your product for free? The concept of “freemium” — or providing a product offering that doesn’t cost the customer anything, and allows for the prospect of future upsell — has great success for products like Mailchimp, Dropbox, Evernote, and WordPress. The basic idea is that some number (perhaps as many as the high single digits, but more often 2-4%) of customers convert to paying, and as time goes by and the customer sticks
around, that likelihood to convert increases.

What makes freemium pricing work?

Obviously, the zero cost of a freemium product is attractive. One of the challenges inherent in free pricing is that the perception of value for a free product might also be zero unless a few things are present:

  • The product or service offers immediate value to a new customer;
  • There is very low or no sales “touch” required for customer success;
  • And there is one or more natural conversion points where the customer realizes that it’s time to “buy.”

Things that make people say, “That’s valuable!”

Customers think products are valuable when they solve an immediate problem, e.g. the problem that you had when you “hired that product to solve your problem.” Mailing a list that you already have; sharing a big file; keeping an always-on notepad; and writing a blog post are clear, uncomplicated problems for which solving a problem has instant value. Customers also perceive value when there is low effort to implement this solution, and when the exact thing they were trying to solve gets done.

So what should you do if you don’t provide immediate value to customers using your product or service? You can provide “scaffolding” by delivering a simple procedure that will solve an immediate problem. You can deliver Customer Wow. And you can also actively listen to find the items that customers find challenging – those are great candidates to improve as fast as possible.

It sells itself: the magic of “no-touch” selling

It’s easy to believe that with the magic of the Internet, products will sell themselves. And sometimes they do (it’s amazing when that happens.) Most of the time, however, there is some effort required to close a customer from prospect to sale. When customers help themselves; when there is a large enough user based to provide community help; and when there’s no great economic drag on your company to keep them as “freemium” users – it’s all good.

In my experience, the reality of this process falls somewhere in between the perfect situation where users try and buy themselves, and a fully supported scenario, where they are supported figuratively from “cradle-to-grave.” You can help yourself by identifying the attributes that mark currently successful customers (completed activities, speed and acceleration of adoption, and lots of questions to your support and sales team are often good indicators) and try to recreate those attributes in brand-new users. The best way to do that? “Dog-food” your customer experience by trying it yourself and identify the “cringe-list” of items so bad they would make a new customer prospect drop right out of your application.

When is it obvious for the buyer to upgrade?

Sometimes, it just makes sense to upgrade. Run out of space in your networked drive? Need to send to a larger email list? Want to post even more notes to your connected notepad? These are natural conversion points, and are well crafted ways to get you as a customer into the next tier of value for a company. The number of transactions you complete; the number of connected accounts for a complex product; and enough practice to know that you really want to use the product are all good ways to introduce (or gently suggest) a natural conversion point for a freemium product.

Except when life gets in the way, and you really meant to try that product but haven’t taken the time. Placing time limits on the free trial and starting to charge the customer are great ways to use the idea of loss aversion to force the customer to make a decision (“should I stay or should I go?”) You can also use account management and Customer Wow to make this process easier.

Freemium pricing works best on a product when as the customer you understand what you’re getting, you can get what you want without needing help from a sales or support team, and when you know the best time to upgrade (because it just feels right.) As a product team, if you don’t have these attributes immediately, you can create immediate value by providing steps for the 80% solution or “happy path.” You can lower the required touch by fixing the things that first time users most often criticize. And you can place a time limit on your trials (or just leave the customer alone in a semi-dormant state if it’s economically feasible.)

Do you think freemium works for most Internet products? Or is it an idea that really only fits a few, simple and well defined models of behavior that people already use?

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I’m keeping my Instagram account: here’s why.

saltedCaramel

If you opened a web browser and saw the news today, you’d see outrage at the proposed changes to the Instagram Terms of Service, a response from the Instagram team, many people on many social networks vowing to move, archive, or otherwise change their photos in response.

I’m not sure what your assumption was all along when you started using this free service. My assumption was that when I posted the information to Instagram’s servers that I was trading utility (hey, isn’t it fun to post cool pictures that can be seen and shared by other people) for control (because I pay nothing for this service, I expect that it could go away at any moment.) The basic idea is that “If You’re Not Paying For It, You Become The Product” (you can read the original discussion here.)

“Move to Flickr!” some say – cool, I’m there too, and I’ve paid for a subscription to Flickr since 2006 because I understand that if I pay for a service, I have better contractual rights and have the opportunity to have my voice heard. I also know that Flickr is not the only place that I can post my photographs (some of which are whimsically styled food pictures) and that the vast distribution universe of Instagram gives me a much better way to share content with a large potential user base than does the combination of marketing my own Flickr site. (Let’s shelve for a moment the question of whether Flickr should’ve or could’ve created Instagram, because it’s now a laggard or fast follower, depending upon which view you take.)

I’m keeping my Instagram account because I like the combination of fast image cropping, imaginative filtering, and the dopamine “ping” of getting a photo liked. I get some of those things from Flickr, and I’ll definitely be using their new iOS app more (note to Instagram: the focus and zoom on the Flickr camera app is outstanding). Ultimately, I’ll continue to use a mix of free and paid services because it’s always fun to try new stuff. Some of the paid services (and some of the free ones, too) will fall by the way side, and nothing has come along yet that’s 10x better than Instagram. So, find me on Flickr and on Instagram, and I hope to share great images in both places.

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Provide solutions, not giveaways

The message? Deliver solutions, not lottery tickets

Have you ever been to a trade show where you found a t-shirt, a cool robot, or other swag? Or maybe dropped your business card in a bowl for a chance at an iPad or something even better? And did you remember that company a few days later when you got home? I don’t usually remember those things – I just recycle them.

Customers (and potential customers) want solutions to the problems that they have (and perhaps solutions to new problems that they don’t know that they have yet.) If you spend your time focusing on giveaways, you’re going to miss the important part of your relationship with the customer that lasts beyond the trade show floor and lasts, hopefully, for years.

When they find you at a booth in a trade show, the customer likely has a few questions:

  • Who are you and what do you do? (message: how can you help me?)
  • How much does that cost? (message: is it in my budget and should we even be talking?)
  • Are you giving away shiny robots? (message: I have checked out of your pitch and am just looking to cut my losses and take stuff home)

These are all valid questions, and you can share valuable information. And if you focus on the need your customer has, the solution that you can provide that meets those needs, and explaining to the customer how to make these things meet. That’s more valuable than any giveaway, and will have a longer half-life in the customer’s mind.

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What sells when everything wants to be free? Identity, security, and utility.

Chris Anderson’s recent book, Free (referenced on his blog), paints a vivid picture of a world where information wants to be free. Anderson’s thesis — that the underlying architecture making it possible to produce digital content is getting cheaper all of the time, making the cost of individual content “too cheap to meter” — means that many things we previously thought “should” cost money are now low-cost or free. Whether this used for a marketing campaign (the “Freemium” model coined by VC Fred Wilson), or as a way of life (Google and many of its free services subsidized by highly targeted advertising), Free as a model is here to stay. So in a world ruled by Free, what sells and why would customers buy those things? Products and/or services that target identity, security, and utility provide sustained value and competitive advantage over free (and Free will eventually adopt these characteristics if it has not already).

Identity is the first building block for maintaining competitive advantage over Free. By Identity, I mean both the ability to authenticate that you are who you say you are (popularized by services such as OpenID) and the ability to authorize certain actions, products or services based on that identity. So far, various services have done a good job establishing online identity on a single site, but they’ve had challenges extending that influence beyond that site. Twitter’s oAuth and Facebook’s Connect APIs are an interesting step toward this goal, but a service that combined these “public keys” with a few “private keys” would undoubtedly be more effective in aggregating the identity model in one place and securing it.

Security is another concept that provides clear value over Free. Although Free models can offer individual privacy and security, they often feature aggregate data mining, which can allow a savvy investigator to link the digital “fingerprints” of that user across multiple sites. Adding an anonymized model to securely access public sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and other social media will allow users to establish a federated individual identity. Today, if you want to enable purchasing through Twitter, SMS, Facebook, or many other mediums you need to either have that purchasing conversation outside of those services or use a web site as a proxy. Having an “agent” or personalized API for your secure information would allow the user to purchase goods, share information, and to have an audit trail that would allow you to track the secure use of your identity information across the Internet (and offline as well).

Utility is the third idea that can provide value over a Free product. I don’t mean to argue here that Free products do not find utility, but that paid products are a signal that certain users find greater economic utility in a paid product over a free product because it saves them time and money that they otherwise would have spent elsewhere. Free products do have this effect, but I think that targeted products have a stronger effect because they are focused on the 20% of users who really find great utility rather than the 80% of users who like the product but don’t see great economic benefit from that effort. Do You Matter, by Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery, posits that great design can uncover this economic utility that fuels Super Users.

What beats Free as a model? Your product certainly doesn’t beat Free unless it offers clear economic utility to a small group of users who will subsidize the rest of the system, or provide enough revenue to run it on its own. Products that can do this offer Identity (the ability to validate that you are who you say you are), Security (the ability to protect and audit your transactions and actions), and Utility (a clear benefit from using your product that no one else offers in quite the same way to those customers. Products that succeed at this don’t necessarily avoid Free — they just also create an alternate model that gives the most passionate users a way to pay some and to get back more than they paid in terms of time, productivity, and success. iPhone/iPod touch is a great example of this model, but now the application providers building applications for that platform are able to make the same divisions in their customer base to market to the masses and to convert the true users to paying customers. And if those customers want something different, try it. As Chris Anderson notes, Free creates a model where “…company culture can shift from ‘Don’t screw up’ to ‘Fail fast.”

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What should your business model be: Free, “Freemium”, or Paid Content?

How can you make money off of a free product?
Chris Anderson writes in “Giving it All Away” in today’s WSJ that the classic example is the two-sided model, where a small number of paying customers (AdSense buyers or TV ad buyers, for example) subsidize the vast majority of users (Google or TV) and that is a self-fulfilling feedback loop. More eyeballs == more potential buyers == the highest CPM (if, of course, some of these customers buy the product). Anderson posits that new business models, such as “Freemium” (most users free, some users pay for increased functionality), have exploded in popularity as the marginal cost of giving you more digital bits heads to zero. This is very similar to the Microsoft model of providing you with different models of the same OS, unlocked by different serial numbers. The basic cost to write and build the software is the same no matter who buys it. It’s the revenue end that’s tricky.

John Gourville’s classic article on the resistance sellers face from buyers gives us a few directional ideas on what to expect. The realistic possibilities (absent a very complicated model like Airline pricing where practically everyone pays a different price) for many new and current businesses are free (most likely ad-supported); “freemium”, where the few paying customers support the many non-paying customers; and paid content, where the information is not available unless you pay. Which model should you choose?

Free — where nobody pays, or do they?
Free* is the title of the newest Jim’s Big Ego album. This Boston based group is following in the tradition of the tip jar by providing a version of the new album that you can download for nothing. If you like it, buy the physical album, or simply contribute to the band. Radiohead tried this gimmick last year, and eventually ended it because, presumably, there was no reason to download something from Radiohead that you could get anywhere. Gourville’s premise — based on the research showing that buyers want something three times better than what they have, and that sellers overvalue what they are selling by up to a factor of three — is that something new has to be nine times better than what went before to get. What’s nine times better than free? If you are a world-famous band like Radiohead, it’s probably good enough publicity to give away an album when you are handling the distribution yourself instead of using a record label. But maybe not for your business.

“Freemium” — where the needs of the few trump the needs of the many
“Freemium“, or the practice of giving away a version of your product or service for free, is a digital version of the “loss leader” practiced by many brick and mortar stores. Get enough people talking about your product, the theory goes, and eventually enough of them will buy and make up the difference. Your overall average price may be lower, but you have a larger potential pool of customers. LinkedIn and Flickr are excellent examples of this business model, and by segmenting the customer base, savvy marketers can find highly profitable niches (for LinkedIn, it’s turned out to be recruiters; for Flickr, some professional photographers looking for additional exposure — no pun intended). This model, however, hasn’t worked out so well for Twitter, which is wildly popular yet seeking a business model; and Facebook, which should be an ad machine but curiously produces low CPM rates. I’m cautiously optimistic on this model, because the really active, paying users will create the equivalent of the classic two-sided model. The iTunes store shows that if you can price your app correctly, you can be very very successful because the volume of users is so large.

Paid Content — the Holy Grail, but no one really wants it
The Wall Street Journal was the poster child for paid content on the web. The Journal trumpted its paid subscriber base and boasted that it was one of the only sites on the web actually making money through paying customers. Yet a funny thing happen last year: the Journal opened up its pages. Why give the milk away when you can get the cow for free? Obviously the beancounters at the Journal decide that they could make more than the estimated $75m/yearly revenue through ads. So why didn’t the WSJ continue its walled garden?

Tight Niches equal Profit Potential
The Journal opened its walls because there were free substitutes available. From Google News to the Daily Huffington Post to your local newspaper, you can read the news in lots of places. One example of a highly targeted niche is PayBefore, an online resource for the prepaid card industry. This site offers news, opinion, and information to “the prepaid and stored value card industry”, which is essentially a trade magazine online. But no one else is covering this particular trade — hence the profit potential.

So, what now? Which model makes the most sense for my business?
Ask yourself a few easy questions:

  • What am I doing to create, communicate, and deliver unique value?
  • Is my offering 9x (or 10x) better than the substitute people might otherwise choose?
  • Why would users come back over and over again, and tell their friends?.

If the answer to all three of these questions is yes, then you’ve probably got a niche that could be served well by a Paid Content offering. Yet you should ask yourself — how could I increase my reach by broadening the potential appeal — and create a free offering that will seed future customers and provide a feedback loop for growth.

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