The Perfect Pricing Page

Since we are not Google and eventually need to strip off the beta tag from our service, I am diving into all the typical problems start-ups have. Who is my target audience, what are the unique selling points (usp’s) of Convert Insights, and among that another million little things.

Since we love metrics the proposition is not something we just draw on the back of a napkin and throw out in the world. We test, we research and we combine all expertise that is available and season it with our own herbs and then serve it.

Currently I am working on our monetization strategy of the service and we already figured out the market we will focus on. So next is the different revenue streams, since depending solely only monthly subscriptions is so 2010! With the help of excellent posts and materials provided by Sixteen Ventures (sign-up for the mailing list and you get them all). We will indeed start to focus on subscriptions but have additional ideas (that I cannot talk about yet… sorry).

I am working on our future pricing page and looked at 303 websites, then aggregated all data in them and came up with a list for our pricing page (below). Now here is a little list (31 items) we are going to use for designing our pricing page, best practices for SaaS companies and personal preferences… and of course we are going to test everything.

1. Call to action headline that matches the unique selling points mentioned on the homepage
2. Sub headline will give details on trial, no credit card needed, speed of sign-up or amount of users in system (if the over 10,000), sense of urgency using get started in 60 seconds. Product positioning (what does the product do). Value messaging is also important (man that is going to be a large sub header!)
3. Plans that focus on different markets we are targeting
4. Website design needs only Features, Pricing & Plans, About, Contact and for the Pricing & Plans page we need to remove login (normally upper right) so we do not add distracting elements.
5. Trust element top right (phone-number)
6. High to low or low to high no research on this, so we will go for the common one. 62% of saas companies have low to high pricing page, so we’ll start there and test the high-to-low from the start.
7. Plans above the fold focus (keep small screens in mind)
8. Free bottom left of free plan (if we are going to offer this)
9. Enterprise plan, bottom of plans (right)
10. Positive values in header and subheader (avoid No – like No Contracts, No Credit Card, guess we will go for credit card not needed)
11. Badges (user logo’s) or payment processor logo (in gray not to distract to much.
12. Communicate the differences and not the similarities between plans, you can add “all plans have XYZ”, under plans)
13. Scanable (not to long page)
14. Clear pricing (good contrast)
15. Use color on background of plans to keep focus on vertical. Mouse over background on horizontal is a nice feature.
16. Make bigger plan feel bigger using a visual element in or above pricing plans.
17. Needs to fit website design
18. Important features in F eye tracking line
19. Mention USD not $ (Australian and Canadian dollars look the same)
20. Testimonial under plans
21. Explain how things work billing, 30 days, free under plans
22. Mouse over on features helps people to stay on the page, so we will do that.
23. Little amount of links
24. Impeccable grammar (I need some help from Joshua on this on, since I am horrible there)
25. Call to Actions Orange (we love orange, guess that because if Dutch origins)
26. Blue color gives trust so we will test this with buttons
27. Green associates with wealth (so we will use some in our pricing page, since that is what Convert Insights brings to their users J)
28. Use full screen width for plans
29. Repeat trial under sign-up buttons, so no “Sign Up” but better “Sign Up – for 14 day trial”
30. Add some credit-cards to pricing page as trust element
31. Social Proof (tweets of happy users) or testimonials from clients.

Sites used for this post

• Smashing Magazine blog on pricing pages
• Van de Lay Pricing page trends
• Sixteen Ventures

If you have nice tips to add, let me know in the comments.