Evolving Eventbrite’s trialing experience

Summary

Eventbrite restructured its pricing plans and wanted to offer a trial to convert new users from free to paid. Deciding what to offer in the trial wasn’t in my control—but I did control the narrative and how users perceived our new trial’s value. How do you build confidence, reassurance, and transparency in trial experiences?

Eventbrite’s new pricing structure and plans were more expensive and complicated.

Instead of publishing your event for free like you always did, creators would now be charged a “publishing fee” in order to list their event on Eventbrite. The fee’s price was based on the number of tickets you wanted to sell at your event.

To get around this new listing fee, people could subscribe to one of the Eventbrite Pro monthly plans to waive these fees and publish for free at a certain ticket tier of your choice. Or, you could try our Pro trial. ✨

The Eventbrite Pro trial would waive any publishing fees for events with up to 100 tickets each, free for 14 days. Users would also have access to Eventbrite’s premium suite of marketing tools, the same ones we gave to paying subscribers. All a user had to do was provide a payment method to activate the trial. We wouldn’t charge their card until after the trial was over.

After the 14 days were over, the card on file would be charged and creators would automatically subscribe to our lowest subscription tier at $29 per month.

There were a couple of problems to solve, including:

• Where and when would be the right time to advertise the trial? New and existing users would need to learn more about the new pricing structure in order to find value in the trial (since it waived fees—but creators didn’t have to pay to publish before).

• The value propositions of the trial. What features and elements made the trial stand out? And how could I use content design to highlight those offerings?

• Building trust and reassurance. Trials and payment flows even make me nervous, so I could understand the concern and anxiety creators might have around providing their credit card for something they haven’t even seen before. How could I use content design to provide clear information and alleviate their anxiety?

We tried surfacing the trial in our new creator onboarding flow.

My competitive audit revealed lots of companies showing a recommended plan and/or promotional trial in their onboarding flows, so my product designer and I proposed adding the trial at the end of our new creator onboarding flow. I thought this would be a great way to capture more trial activations.

For our first iteration, I wanted to be as straightforward as possible. I made sure “free” and the 14-day duration were within the title and subtitle for easy scanning. The waived listing fees were the most valuable asset of the trial, which is why I placed it as the first value prop in the bulleted list of benefits. I also worked with Product Marketing to align on copy and make sure the value props they provided me were accurately conveyed in the product content.

But there could’ve been a disconnect here with the language and graphics, because the image highlights our premium marketing tools in action, not necessarily the listing fee, which I listed first in the benefits.

For the popup modal text, I thought it was important to have a shortened recap of benefits, which are summarized in the three checkboxes ☑️. Whenever we take a user away from another page, it’s good UX practice to bring important info along with them (and remind them of the value you’re going to provide them!) This prevents people from closing the modal to read the information again—or possibly skipping this step altogether!

I was also inspired by Apple subscription trials when designing my content. I loved how clear and transparent they were in providing what would happen if I ended my trial. Like, if I would lose all my benefits immediately, or if I’d still have access until the end of the trial period.

But most importantly (and probably to every marketing leader’s disdain): they also told me the last day I could cancel and avoid getting charged.

However, the text I created was very long and looked like a huge block of text, which could be hard to parse. And if a new creator was already seeing a screen asking for their credit card, they were probably stressed—and they might not read all of it, or miss it altogether. I could do better!

But the data came back and it wasn’t working. User research also told us this approach was confusing and too much of a cognitive load for new creators.

While I was following my competitive audit and hoping to capture more trial activations, my hypothesis didn’t go as expected. When we launched the first iteration above, 11,276 trial starts came from the new creator onboarding—but only resulted in 160 new Pro subscriptions. Due to the low conversion rate, we had to change the way peopled opted into the trial.

User research did a study and recommended we place pricing and the trial elsewhere—possibly somewhere further down in the new user journey—where creators would have more context on what these publishing/listing fees where, and why the trial would be more valuable to activate.

When we placed the trial in onboarding, it actually made new creators pause and think too much. Nearly every participant wanted to click the “Learn more about Eventbrite Pro” link to learn more on our Pricing page. Once on the page, they’d start calculating how many events they’d host a month to see if a subscription was even worth it for them and their business. This would take users out of our main experience, and they’d leave the flow entirely.

There was also another problem: even if a new creator activated the trial immediately, they may not create their first event right away. Maybe they’d want to explore the platform more before creating an event.

The trial’s value truly shined when an event was already been published. Because a user would also get access to premium marketing tools—but you can’t market an event you haven’t created, right?

Time is also precious in this 14-day trial—so I explored placing the trial promo right before someone would publish their event. That way, the creator would have more context about our listing fees. Also, if they activated the trial, they’d have a published event whose listing fee was waived AND they could start making use of our premium marketing tools.

So, I placed the trial right before a creator published their event. Creators would get more context about our new publishing fees—and now, they’d also have a chance to waive their fee.

I also made some spiffy content updates to the trial start screen. ✨

To address the “big block of text” issue I created in the first iteration, I chunked the trial process into smaller bits and worked with my product designer to make them into a timeline of events. Now creators could get a step-by-step of how the trial would work. I felt like this approach would instill more trust with our creators, because we weren’t trying to hide anything from our creators. My idea to use a timeline came from Growth.Design’s case study on Blinkist, and how they increased trial conversions.

I also made a distinction between “Due now” and “Due on [date]” to be extra specific, similar to Apple, of when someone would be charged to further instill transparency and confidence that a creator wouldn’t be charged during their trial period.

The final iteration we went with provided some more details about the specifics of the trial based on stakeholder feedback (“publish unlimited events with up to 100 tickets” / “unless you’ve canceled”). We also had to change the dates back to generic “Day 12” and “Day 15” due to engineering limitations. Thankfully, we could keep the “Due on [date]” phrase and the dates in the legal terms, which I worked on with my Legal partner.

Trial confirmation screens were where I got to be more playful. ✌🏼

I used a playful pun and a celebratory tone (“Way to go, Pro!”) in the confirmation screens, because I wanted to congratulate the creator for making the big decision to pay for Eventbrite. 🎉

But I made sure to keep the content scalable for the Pro trial and Pro subscription confirmation screens by following a general pattern for how the content was structured.

This pattern also made it easy for my engineering partners, who only had to swap in a few content strings based on the user’s details: [date], [plan name], [plan amount], [last 4 card digits], and a summary of each plan’s benefits. This pattern worked for edge cases too, like when someone upgraded during their trial, or when someone auto-enrolled because their trial ended.

I also considered many different entry points 🚪

Starting a trial didn’t just appear at checkout. I also factored in multiple entry points in the creator experience that could lead to the trial activation experience, including: the creator homepage, plan management settings, in-product pricing chart, and the email marketing campaign tool.

Don’t forget upsell banners and trial card states on the creator homepage!

The cards above, along with the entire trial experience, were recently updated and rebranded in different colors and with different content that reflected the new trial offerings.

We aligned on a purple color and sparkle graphic so trialing could have a consistent brand across the creator platform. That way, creators would be able to identify a feature as part of the trial, no matter where they were on the platform. By having a cohesive look and design, we not only kept messagng and design consistent, but we also optimized trialing for something like a feature gating/SaaS monetization model, where a common identifier throughout your product is crucial to identify gated features (ex. Canva Pro’s crown 👑).

This work had a huge impact on our revenue gains. 💸

We made $3.62M in revenue from the packaging and pricing restructure in September 2023 after just launching in May. Of that total revenue, about 27% of it came from Pro subscriptions (compared to 17% in August). Flex Unlimited, our highest subscription tier, continued to be our biggest revenue driver, contributing a third ($1,098,405) to total revenue since September. We also saw that events that were published and hosted in a Pro trial saw higher marketing tool usage than events that didn’t use the trial.

With a full-fledged trial experience, we also used growth tactics to increase our metrics. (Small tweaks, big impact.) 📈

We offered an extended 30-day trial to 6,000 high value creators (aka. creators who were in the top 15% of gross ticket funds). Early results showed an increase in average event size and paid tickets published, which drove more inventory to the Eventbrite marketplace. Since launching the extended trial offer, we saw 400K+ paid tickets published on the platform by creators who enrolled in our extended trial offer within the first 2 weeks of launching. We then saw $2.6M total paid inventory posted to the marketplace, and 270k paid tickets sold from these trialing creators.

Here’s how I was evolving trials… 👀

My product designer and I were exploring how we might better guide a creator throughout the trial period—and how the Pro trial could provide more value to creators. We created “trial cards” that would appear on the creator homepage and highlight metric wins a user made by using Eventbrite’s tools, or celebrate creator milestones like selling your first ticket.

I wanted to tie actions to each insight. This would encourage new creators to:

1. Explore more of the product and what we had to offer

2. Increase tool adoption and usage

3. Show (not tell) how Eventbrite was a demand generation platform and the experts of what makes a successful event

We were also considering making trial highlights a permanent section on the creator homepage, which would celebrate wins and track ways to improve a creator’s event throughout their journey (“Your highlights, Your wins,” etc.). We also considered gamifying the highlights by offering kickbacks and rewards if a certain highlight was met.

But I thought maintaining freshness could be a concern. Badges and celebration messages get old quickly, and this section would require a lot of collaboration with my engineering team to map out logic for which rewards would be given and when, as well as sign-off from stakeholders and legal partners to allow discounts.

Ultimately, trial highlights was deprioritized. But I believe—if given more XFN resources—we could’ve built a fun gaming mechanic that would reward creator behavior, show creators the value of what Eventbrite could do for them, and encourage creators to invest in Eventbrite’s paid plans.