The surprising bit here is that dropping the requirement for a credit card had no effect on conversions or trial signups. I've only ever read the opposite, and my own testing at Improvely matched what I've read: the trial signup rate more than doubled when a credit card wasn't required.
At the same time, the extra people signing up were not good leads. These new users rarely completed the steps to start using their account, those that did submitted more support requests, and the conversion rate to paying customers at the end of the trial was more than halved.
I ended up putting the credit card requirement back in.
I too am surprised by this. Another benefit of requiring a credit card is that you prevent abuse of the trial system. Obviously this applies more to some businesses than others. For instance, we are setting up a VPN business right now and considering a free trial option. In that case, it seems like it would be necessary to require a credit card so that users could not keep signing up for the free trial with different email addresses.
You're probably going to have to go a step further; something like Sift Science or MaxMind MinFraud along with automated SMS/voice verification of a unique phone number per trial. There isn't a carder in the world that wouldn't love to use a VPN service that offers free trials. They want the VPN to use as a proxy when testing stolen credit card numbers on other ecommerce sites... and they have plenty of cards to use to sign up for free trials with you first.
This is definitely true and something I've experienced running a proxy service with 500+ clients. Fraud percentages are WAY too high right now. We're solving it by simply checking the billing address vs. IP geolocation. Hopefully that helps.
It's probably because their free plan already didn't require a CC. I think there's a big difference between "no access" and "CC required", but less of a difference between "free access" and "CC required for upgrade".
I think he meant that the actual conversion to a paid customer. Of course you will get more sign ups (we saw the same at Usabilla), but that doesn't mean those additional sign ups will convert into a paid customer.
We have seen as well that there is less dedication from a customer when they sign up without a credit card. People sign up and forget about it, because it isn't paid anyway (even when you send them regular update emails). When requiring a cc for sign up the user is more motivated to actually trial the product and see if there is a fit.
It basically shifts the drop by sign ups from the actual users who want to use your product for a longer period.
Above is all from B2B experience. B2C can be totally different.
Yeah I could do a whole other article on how we shifted from minimizing friction on the sign up form to actually increasing it. If it's too easy to sign up for your service it's hard to tell if your marketing actually worked and you have qualified leads or if you just have a bunch of people that "clicked here".
At the same time, the extra people signing up were not good leads. These new users rarely completed the steps to start using their account, those that did submitted more support requests, and the conversion rate to paying customers at the end of the trial was more than halved.
I ended up putting the credit card requirement back in.