How do you ensure that you get more sales from your pricing page? In this article, we’ll share some pricing page best practices for creating high-converting pages that boost your revenue.
Picture this: You’ve spent a few minutes browsing a website. As you look around, you get more and more excited about the possibility of buying the product or service. Then you click through to the pricing page… and suddenly doubt whether you should go through with it. You click away and don’t come back.
We’re willing to bet that all of you have experienced this at some point.
And your customers have, too. Once customers are sold on the value of your product to them, their next step is to visit the pricing page. And if the price scares them away, you may never see them again.
Let’s be clear. Your pricing landing page has one job: to get visitors to take action.
So, if your pricing page sucks, you’ll lose a lot of potential revenue. In contrast, a well-optimized pricing page will make visitors want to buy, even if your product or service costs a bit more than they expected.
When it comes to designing any web page, simplicity is the best approach. That’s why one of our most important pricing page best practices is to keep the page simple.
One way to simplify your own pricing page is to remove all unnecessary page elements, like top navigation and sidebars, so there’s only one main area to focus on.
Simplicity also wins with pricing page copy. The SaaS DNA project found that ease of understanding is crucial for visitors, so the best pricing pages for SaaS companies are often the simplest.
They recommend that you make pricing page copy crystal clear, so visitors know the benefits they’re getting, and the price they’ll have to pay.
We get it; it’s tempting to put as much information as possible on the pricing page to help make the sale.
But this can work against you. When people visit your page, they’re already thinking about buying, so just give them the information they need:
More than that can be overwhelming and make them think twice about buying.
Address the FUDs
FUDs are fears, uncertainties, and doubts. They’re the factors that can keep visitors from buying unless you deal with them on your pricing page.
One way to handle potential objections is to be upfront and answer the questions that visitors have, you can do this on-page via a FAQs section. To do this, check with your customer service and support departments to find the most frequent questions, then write answers and include them on your pricing page.
One thing visitors worry about is what happens if they buy your product or service, then find they don’t like it. Highlighting a money-back guarantee for digital products (like the one on our pricing page, shown below), or user-friendly returns policy, for physical products, can help allay this fear.
When visitors reach your pricing page, they’re asking “what’s in it for me?” That’s why one of our pricing pages best practices is all about highlighting the benefits for your visitors. In other words, your page copy and pricing tables have to deliver by focusing on their bottom line, rather than yours.
MailChimp’s pricing page is a great example. It gives a brief description of what users get at each plan level and how it helps them achieve their goals. And the plan names also match their buyer personas, which we’ll look at in a later tip.
There’s no doubt about it; human beings are hardwired to act on urgent situations. And the fear of missing out (FOMO) takes this to another level. Use FOMO marketing and urgency messages on your pricing page and you give visitors more reasons to take your offer.
You can trigger FOMO by:
You can show urgency by:
And you can combine both tactics with a time-limited offer, like a sale on your pricing plans, this can be done easily with a countdown timer, making your visitors eager to take action.
One thing pricing pages that convert have in common is that they build trust with visitors. It’s an essential part of marketing. The only thing is: it matters how you do it.
As an ethical marketer, you’ll want to let customers know there’s a fallback plan if they don’t like your product or service. But it turns out that too many warnings can work against you by turning visitors off before they even choose a plan.
Instead, put your trust builders naturally on the page. These include:
As we said earlier, some people are ready to buy the minute they land on your pricing page. Make it easy by placing the call to action (CTA) in a highly visible location.
In other words, don’t bury it underneath the pricing table; put it near the top where they can see it immediately.
You can always have another CTA further down for people who need more information, and a third for those who want to read the testimonials and FAQs first. A good CTA will:
Buyer personas are an essential part of any marketing strategy. That’s because they help you relate to your visitors like real people by outlining their key characteristics and interests.
Ideally, your buyer persona will include information about:
When you understand your audience, you’ll be able to create plans and packages that really meet their needs.
Start implementing this tip by creating your buyer personas.
Analysis paralysis is exactly what it sounds like: spending so much time considering options that you find it hard to make a decision. That can happen to visitors when your pricing page has lots of copy, which we mentioned earlier, or a lot of options, which we’ll get to in a while.
You can also reduce analysis paralysis by structuring your page so that your visitors don’t get overwhelmed. In the best examples, pricing page headlines appear near the top, with minimal copy and an early call to action. Other information appears lower down the page.
Another way to reduce analysis paralysis is to get visitors to commit to a small action first. That can be as simple as clicking a button to show they’re interested in your product demo or free trial.
A key tip for subscription plan page design is to make it easy for visitors to compare what’s on offer. This is related to the advice given above about making the page easy to understand.
One way to achieve this is to communicate the differences between the various plans on offer. For example, you might list a bunch of features in your entry-level plan, then, instead of listing them again for other plans, focus on the new stuff people get. Or you can make the comparison even easier by focusing on one core metric that’s important to them.
You know one of the most common marketing tactics used in every industry? Price anchoring. It’s about showing people a high price first so when you display a lower (but still high) price, they won’t run screaming for the hills.
According to psychology, most people tend to accept the first piece of information they see (the anchor) as the basis for judging and making decisions on other information.
So a key pricing page best practice is to have one package priced higher than the others – and make it visible – so that all other packages seem reasonable.
Some even recommend showing your plans from most to least expensive, as Convert does below:
Research shows that this keeps people on the page longer. However, an analysis by Process.st showed that most companies don’t do that. In fact, 81% of SaaS companies order their pricing pages from lowest to highest. You’ll have to test (see our last tip) to see what works best for you.
If there’s a package you really want your visitors to buy, use design to make it stand out on the page. You can do that by:
One of the key pricing page best practices is to ensure that customers know what they’re getting. You can do that by focusing on the customers’ stage or growth or a particular outcome they’ll be able to achieve. For example, as we saw earlier, MailChimp’s plans are New Business, Growing Business, and Pro Marketer, with appropriate images.
Some companies play it straight, but you can also have some fun with the plan names and show some of your brand’s personality, it’ll help your visitors to remember the plans, too.
Charm pricing, also known as psychological pricing, is about the power of prices ending in the number 9. Most studies, though not all, show that this type of pricing significantly outperforms round numbers. In fact, a recent Gumroad study shows that in some cases conversions double.
Of course, round numbers have their place, too, especially if the decision is likely to be driven by emotion. But for logical decisions, 9’s definitely a charm!
Try testing 2 versions of your pricing page with and without charm pricing and see if it works for you.
There’s no doubt about it; free trial marketing increases sales. In its 2016 SaaS Metrics report, Totango found that 16% of companies get more than half their business this way. In addition, 62% of companies get at least 10% of their business from free trials.
One reason this works is because of the endowment effect. This means that once someone’s owned something, they value it more, and don’t want it taken away. That’s exactly what a free trial offers.
Having users pay upfront for a period of time is good for your revenue. The trick is to make it good for customers, too. One way to do that is to discount the annual plan so there’s an incentive for visitors to take this option. GoToMeeting uses this strategy for its plans.
You can also use some of the tips given earlier to make the annual plan stand out so it’s more appealing to your visitors.
For online shoppers, the world is their market, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy to spend in every currency. In fact, most online shoppers prefer to see prices displayed in their local currency, so they know exactly what they’re going to pay.
Your options for this are to manually price products for different versions of your website or to have this happen automatically via an app. For example, if you’re using Shopify, you can use a currency conversion appthat’ll do the hard work for you.
Using live chat is a great way to support visitors and turn them into customers. The research shows that 38% of people became customers because they had the opportunity to ask pre-sales questions.
Live chat will help you figure out some of the pre-sales objections so you can address those in your marketing, and reassure customers that they are making the right decision.
Use this list of live chat solutions as a starting point for implementing this on your own pricing page. Provide telephone support, too? We’ve got you covered with the best phone systems and VoIP providers on the market.
Testing is an essential component of any good marketing strategy. It’s what helps you make decisions based on data and not guesswork.
That’s why one of the most important pricing page best practices is to test. Test your page layout, your pricing, your copy, your headline, your call to action – everything you can test.
