Free Trial Registration abandonment and resume

Question

Dealing with a free-trial registration that REQUIRES a billing page, unfortunatelty (Credit Card info).

There are 3 steps to this registration:

1. Account registration
2. Billing
3. Confirmation - tell us about yourself

My question is, if a user were to complete step 2 (account registration) and then abandon, if the user comes back and logs in (possibly a reach from marketing to bring them back) should they land on the billing portion of registration for they have not completed registration and given us their credit card information?

It does not sound too ideal, but bringing them to their dashboard/home screen without any of that information does not seem to fit business requirments, as well as the "tell us about youself" sets up which type of an account they are going to use.

Answer 1

If billing information is not absolutely required to use some of the product features I would recommend taking user to the product itself without any wizards. Users want to explore your product before they commit to buying it. Not having custom information on the home page would probably provide better user experience than forcing users to go through billing and registration even if they started and left. If users leave before providing billing information that is a sign that they don't want to do it (at least yet) and you might be losing potential customers. It is a bit difficult to answer this question without viewing a complete user journey but based on what is provided I would recommend taking user to the product and not registration. If user clicks something that requires registration/billing, ask them then. There is a good article by LukeW about registration and gradual engagement, quick points:

• Users don't like registration (25% completion rate on large scale app)
• Let users play with product/content first so that they are engaged with your product
• Ask user to register only when it is needed for a certain feature to work

Answer 2

In such case user should be able to land to homepage. But immediately after he decides to make any important action he should be asked to complete registration procedure. So, you can customize homepage specifically for this case to stimulate user for completing registration.

Answer 3

Keep it simple. As soon as they land on the home page without completing 3rd step, ask them to fill the same. But why can't you put that mandatory info in the first two steps only?