From 2014-2022, we aggregated data from our agency’s SaaS clients to determine benchmarks for popular marketing metrics. This report contains free trial and freemium conversion rate benchmarks.
In the first table below, we give average conversion rates for visitors originating from both organic and paid traffic sources to 3 different SaaS models: Free Trial Opt-In, Free Trial Opt-Out, and Freemium. We also give average conversion rates to paid users from each of those 3 models.
In the second table, we break down our conversion rate data by SaaS industry, covering all the markets where we’ve had at least 5 clients.
NOTE: Our total dataset is drawn from 86 SaaS companies, split 71% B2B and 29% B2C.
SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate by Free Trial Type
| Conversion | Traffic Source | Conversion Rate Benchmark | Notes | | ----------------------------------- | ------------------ | ----------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Visitor to Free Trial (Opt-In) | Organic | 8.5% | Opt-in free trials have significantly higher organic conversion rates than opt-out free trials because they don’t require the user to input payment information.Newer SaaS businesses are better served by the low barrier-to-entry of opt-in free trials as they need to prove the value of their software. | | Paid | 7.1% | | | | Free Trial (Opt-In) to Paid | Organic | 18.2% | Because opt-in free trials do not automatically convert to paid subscriptions at the end of the trial period, fewer trial users will convert to full users. | | Paid | 17.4% | | | | Visitor to Free Trial (Opt-Out) | Organic | 2.5% | Opt-out free trials convert at a lower rate than opt-in free trials because they require the user to proactively enter payment information. | | Paid | 2.2% | | | | Free Trial (Opt-Out) to Paid | Organic | 48.8% | Opt-out free trials require the user to submit payment information, and thus their decision to pay the subscription fee is often passive. Thus, they yield a far higher conversion rate than opt-in free trials. A conversion is defined as even a single paid month, so you will want to consider this statistic alongside retention / churn rate as well as Customer LTV to determine the true value of an average conversion. | | Paid | 51% | | | | Visitor to Freemium | Organic | 13.3% | Freemium models have higher visitor conversion rates than free trials because most users value indefinite access to some software features over any other value proposition (free trial or paid). Of course, a higher conversion rate to free use of the software does not mean more long term revenue. | | Paid | 15.9% | | | | Freemium to Paid | Organic | 2.6% | Freemium trials convert to paid at the lowest rates because a significant percentage of users will find that the free features are sufficient for their purposes. This effect is partially offset by conversions among long-time users whose needs grow beyond the free featureset. | | Paid | 2.8% | | |
SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate Benchmarks by Industry
| Industry | Visitor to Trial Conversion Rate | Trial to Paid Conversion Rate | | ----------------------------- | ------------------------------------ | --------------------------------- | | Advertising / AdTech | 9.1% | 24.3% | | Agriculture / Agtech | 8.8% | 21.5% | | Communications | 8.3% | 23.4% | | CRM | 9.7% | 29.0% | | Cybersecurity | 7.4% | 21.9% | | Education / Edtech | 10.3% | 24.8% | | Enterprise | 5.5% | 18.6% | | ERP | 9.4% | 23.7% | | Environmental / CleanTech | 11.1% | 22.9% | | Financial / Fintech | 9.0% | 19.4% | | Healthcare / Medtech | 12.3% | 21.5% | | HR | 8.1% | 22.7% | | IoT | 12.6% | 25.2% | | Legal / Legaltech | 9.7% | 23.1% | | Real Estate / Proptech | 7.1% | 22.7% | | Regtech | 11.7% | 23.6% |
Increasing Free Trial Conversions
We hope you’ve found this report useful. If you have any questions about our dataset or would like to request a .pdf copy of this report, you can contact us here.
We also help some of the top SaaS companies in the world — from SalesForce to Verisign to US Bank — generate and convert leads. If you’d like help creating your strategy, filling the top of your lead generation funnel, or conversion optimizing your website, feel free to reach out to us.
Evan Bailyn is a best-selling author and award-winning speaker on the subjects of SEO and thought leadership. Contact Evan here.