Freemium Summit Notes & Data
Freemium Summit Notes
Last week, I attended the Freemium Summit. It was a fascinating event with successful companies sharing insights on functional marketing models. Below are my takeaways. Reflecting on the speakers’ points, these businesses seemed more similar in nature than I expected.
When to leverage a Freemium marketing strategy
An effective distribution channel doesn’t exist: this is true for those businesses targeting the small and medium business software market or...
Incubment or monopolistic competition is driving up customer acquisition costs: LogMeIn faced Microsoft, WebEx and Citrix with 1% their marketing budget.
Variable cost is low: ensuring the cost of servicing each new free customer is de minimus is key to quickly building up a large installed base.
Key lessons
Generally, user conversion rates to paid products vary from 1-4% across sectors. Across small and medium business software, social and mobile gaming and music, paid upsell conversion rates were fairly constant. Many companies found that cross device usage of a product was the best correlating factor to paid upsell.
Free users are assets, if you can control the cost: Free users build network effects and user mindshare that are useful for later upselling and refer a friend incentive program .Evernote measures revenue per active member per month as a key performance metric (KPI). In month 1, a user will generate $0.02 per month. In month 24, an active user wil generate $0.75. Focusing on upsell and building value drives enormous revenue opportunities. As for referral marketing, Dropbox’s two sided incentives offer increases conversion rates by 60%!
To survive, companies need to focus on the metrics that matter - revenue metrics: Wordpress has some impressive usage figures: 250M monthly visitors across 100M blogs. But the key metrics are the ones that drive activity and consequently revenue: 400,000 daily posts and 200,000 paying bloggers.
The company’s team must focus on revenue. 30% of DropBox’s staff, like many other successful freemium companies, are focused on paid conversion funnel optimization. We discussed this last week.
Organic funnel is the key to driving large sales: 90% of YouSendIt’s enterprise sales come from organic/individual upsell.
Paid users’ demographics will differ than the customer base as a whole. Pandora One, the premium version of Pandora, skews heavily toward males 30+ where the site’s audience is 50/50 female/male and broadly distributed across age groups. Understanding the needs of a demographic who is willing to pay was essential to their success.
Marketing effectively on a low budget is essential. Pandora discovered how difficult it was simply to increase awareness of a paid product. It took time, product refinement and demographic selection to be effective. YouSendIt relies on a naturally viral product: a large file generally is delivered to four people.
Conclusion
An enlightening event, the Freemium Summit demonstrated that the free marketing strategy can be incredibly effective and drive significant revenues across sectors. If you have questions or need additional data, let me know in the comments.
