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Design and Evaluation of Personalized Free Trials

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  • Hema Yoganarasimhan
  • Ebrahim Barzegary
  • Abhishek Pani

Abstract

Free trial promotions, where users are given a limited time to try the product for free, are a commonly used customer acquisition strategy in the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry. We examine how trial length affect users' responsiveness, and seek to quantify the gains from personalizing the length of the free trial promotions. Our data come from a large-scale field experiment conducted by a leading SaaS firm, where new users were randomly assigned to 7, 14, or 30 days of free trial. First, we show that the 7-day trial to all consumers is the best uniform policy, with a 5.59% increase in subscriptions. Next, we develop a three-pronged framework for personalized policy design and evaluation. Using our framework, we develop seven personalized targeting policies based on linear regression, lasso, CART, random forest, XGBoost, causal tree, and causal forest, and evaluate their performances using the Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) estimator. We find that the personalized policy based on lasso performs the best, followed by the one based on XGBoost. In contrast, policies based on causal tree and causal forest perform poorly. We then link a method's effectiveness in designing policy with its ability to personalize the treatment sufficiently without over-fitting (i.e., capture spurious heterogeneity). Next, we segment consumers based on their optimal trial length and derive some substantive insights on the drivers of user behavior in this context. Finally, we show that policies designed to maximize short-run conversions also perform well on long-run outcomes such as consumer loyalty and profitability.

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  • Hema Yoganarasimhan & Ebrahim Barzegary & Abhishek Pani, 2020. "Design and Evaluation of Personalized Free Trials," Papers 2006.13420, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2006.13420
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Davide Proserpio & John R. Hauser & Xiao Liu & Tomomichi Amano & Alex Burnap & Tong Guo & Dokyun (DK) Lee & Randall Lewis & Kanishka Misra & Eric Schwarz & Artem Timoshenko & Lilei Xu & Hema Yoganaras, 2020. "Soul and machine (learning)," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 31(4), pages 393-404, December.
    2. Paul B. Ellickson & Wreetabrata Kar & James C. Reeder, 2023. "Estimating Marketing Component Effects: Double Machine Learning from Targeted Digital Promotions," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 42(4), pages 704-728, July.
    3. Walter W. Zhang & Sanjog Misra, 2022. "Coarse Personalization," Papers 2204.05793, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2024.
    4. Adam N. Smith & Stephan Seiler & Ishant Aggarwal, 2021. "Optimal Price Targeting," CESifo Working Paper Series 9439, CESifo.

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