# 30-day premium trial next to a free plan: more paid upgrades

- Outcome: Won
- Page type: Free trial (SaaS)
- Elements: Free trial, Plans
- Date shared: 2015
- Test run by: [Emaze](https://liftarchive.com/practitioners/emaze/)
- Commentary by: LiftArchive (our analysis, not theirs)
- Original source: https://marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/b2c-model-for-b2b-conversion
- Page: https://liftarchive.com/test/emaze-premium-30-day-free-trial/

Adding a 30-day free trial of the premium business plan, alongside the existing unlimited free plan, increased paid conversions with a low cancellation rate. emaze, an online presentation software company, made the change, and it was published as a MarketingSherpa case study. No numbers were shared, and this was a before-and-after change described by the company's CMO, not a split test.

## Result

**more paid upgrades**

- Paid conversions: increased, according to the CMO. No figure was given.
- Cancellation rate on the trial: described as low, also with no figure.
- Treat this as a directional signal only, since it was not a controlled test.

## Control

emaze offered an unlimited free plan. To try the premium business features, users had to pay first.

## Variant

emaze added a 30-day free trial of the premium business plan next to the free plan, so business users could try the paid features before buying.

## Why it likely won (our reading)

- Business prospects said they wanted to try the premium features but would not pay just to test them. A free plan with fewer features did not answer that.
- A time-limited trial lets buyers see what the paid plan adds, which a permanent free plan can hide.
- Business users can often pay on a company card as soon as the trial proves its value.

## Caveats

No numbers were reported, and the result rests on the CMO's account of a before-and-after change. emaze was also segmenting users and changing its upgrade emails around the same time.

## How to run this test

- Hypothesis: If we offer a time-limited free trial of our paid plan alongside the free plan, then more business users will upgrade because they can test the premium features before paying.
- Primary metric: Free-to-paid conversion rate
- Guardrail: Trial cancellation or refund rate
- Guardrail: Revenue per new account
- Guardrail: Free plan sign-ups
- Who should test it: Freemium SaaS products where the paid plan's value is hard to judge from the free plan. It may not help if your free plan already shows most of the paid value, or if your buyers need a sales demo anyway.

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Credit: Emaze ran this test and owns the result. Summary and commentary by LiftArchive (https://liftarchive.com/test/emaze-premium-30-day-free-trial/).
Usage: Free to use, quote and build on, with credit and a link: name the practitioner or organization that ran the test and link to its LiftArchive page. The results belong to the practitioners who ran and shared them; the summaries and commentary are LiftArchive's.