Many people think of Freemium as a sales / marketing initiative, but in fact the success of the program will depend on alignment with the product team.

Freemium is a Product Initiative too!

Though the freemium may start on an ad or landing page, the result is a customer using your product. The product team needs to be involved to define what their online onboarding experience should be, what tier of features they should receive, and what on screen info will encourage them to become paying customers. You also need to work with the product team to make sure security standards are up to par and to think through A/B testing.

Product design can encourage freemium engagement and upsells

How you show freemium customers what the base vs. premium features are will drive conversion and that maybe different dependent on the segmentation of the users. Sometimes you’ll want to start with a higher tier and threaten to take it away, other times promoting what a expanded features available thought upgrade will do the trick. Utilize the product design team’s expertise in user testing to continuously improve the freemium channel.

Product usage data is key for sales/marketing automation that fuels freemium

Always ensure that key data on product usage is available to understand which customer behaviors and characteristics predict that they are good candidates for becoming paying customers. This will make the sales and marketing automation which keeps CAC low more efficient and effective.