Have you ever came across a product or company that seemed like it would be what you needed and then couldn’t figure out their pricing? Or maybe their pricing page was just too complicated to navigate?
The pricing page is one of the last pages your site visitor sees before becoming a customer. However, many people give very little thought to how their pricing page is structured.
Whether you are creating pricing pages for WooCommerce products or SAAS pricing pages, there are best practices that work for almost every pricing page you will create.
Let’s look at 14 ways to improve your pricing page design and optimize it for conversions.
1. Sell the Value
When it comes to potential customers viewing your pricing page, one of your main objectives is to convey the value and benefits that your product will deliver on.
Your main objective on the pricing page is to convey the value and benefits that your product will deliver on! #ecommerce Click To TweetEverything on the pricing page, from the headline to each feature, is an opportunity to reiterate what the visitor will achieve by using your product.
For example, instead of “Pricing Page” or “Save time and money” as your headline, phrase the headline as the benefit the customer will receive. HelpScout’s headline is “Happy customers. Happy team. Warm fuzzies.” which conveys the outcome of using their product.
2. Simplify
When it comes to reading through your pricing page, most of your visitors will be making quick decisions. If you have overly complicated descriptions, calculations, and layouts, most visitors will leave before trying to figure out your pricing and plans.
Additionally, most people only skim through web pages. If you have a lot of different elements on the page and make the price or features challenging to find, the majority of your site visitors will leave the site. Take a look at how clean and straightforward StaticKit’s pricing page is:
3. Make the Features Understandable and Comparable
One of the most common mistakes I see is that pricing pages add a lot of different features to their different pricing plans but make it difficult to compare the differences between the plans. When a potential customer is skimming through the pricing page, they want to compare your different plans quickly and easily.
If your plans have many differences and feature sets, you can use the approach TypeForm takes by showing essential features and differences in the primary pricing table and then has a “And more…” link under each, which opens the full plan comparison view.
4. Recommend a Plan
A lot of your visitors will be reading a lot of your information and may feel overwhelmed. Others will be only quickly scanning through the pricing page. In both cases, having a “featured” plan or package can help visitors decide to purchase your product.
In fact, according to a study by ConversionXL, highlighting a plan, such as marking it as “recommended” or “most popular,” helps visitors convert faster and can lead to an increase of both sales and average order revenue. ActiveCampaign highlights their “Plus” plan as “Most Popular,” which helps people who are not sure which to choose to know which plan most people use.
5. Align Your Plan Names With Personas or Outcomes
Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently says that pricing pages should have different plans aligned with customer segments or buyer personas. Even better, to help draw each visitor to the right plan for them, you can name the plan after their segment or desired outcome.
While most pricing pages use “Basic,” “Essentials,” “Plus,” or “Pro,” you could use names that better align with what that plan enables the customer to do. For example, UserList has plans for “Growth” and “Scale.” Check out ChurnBuster’s Stripe plans where they have “Start,” “Grow,” and “Optimize”:
6. Limit Tiers
Having too many plans can be overwhelming and confusing. The average pricing page has 3 or 4 tiers. You want to keep things simple enough so site visitors can quickly grasp everything you offer.
However, you can offer additional plans but not have them featured in the pricing table. For example, Shopify mentions their “Shopify Lite” plan underneath their plans. Similarly, TypeForm and UserList have a little notice for their enterprise or more extensive plans underneath the plans as well.
Pingdom lists both their Enterprise and Starter plans underneath the main pricing table:
7. Show Guarantees or Trials
Once you have the pricing page scannable and easy to understand, it is time to start convincing the visitor that you are the right place to buy from. The first step is to reduce their fear that they will be wasting their money on your product.
If you have any money-back guarantee or free trial, that should be very prominent on your pricing page. Monster Insights realizes how important this is and has an entire section about their guarantee written by their founder:
8. Build Trust in Your Security
Just like in our reducing cart abandonment article, one of the main reasons people don’t decide the purchase a product is that they have concerns with payment security. Trust seals can help show site visitors that you take payment security seriously and ensure that your site is secure. Blue Fountain Media added a trust seal and saw a 42% increase in sales!
Adding trust seals to your pricing page can show you take payment security seriously and can even help increase your sales up to 42%! #ecommerce Click To TweetIn addition to trust seals, your site should use a secure connection through an SSL. Even better, adding an SSL can increase your ranking for SEO. Fortunately, many hosting providers now include SSL’s for free, so check with your site’s hosting provider.
9. Show Social Proof
When people are unsure of what is the right path for them, they look to other people to see what they are doing. In his book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” Robert Cialdini says that social proof is one of the most compelling reasons why people can be persuaded to do something. He goes on to say that similarity increases how effective social proof is.
So, to apply this to your pricing page, you should add some testimonials or reviews from customers to help potential visitors see what others are saying when the visitor is feeling uncertain. The more the visitor can identify with the person in the testimonial, the more likely they will be convinced by what the testimonial says.
Just under their pricing table, Drift has a review that shows the person (Emily), their role (Growth Marketer), and their results from using Drift.
10. Use FOMO
Many visitors will leave your site intending to do more research or think more about the purchase but then never come back. Being able to convince visitors to make the purchase when they are on your site should be a high priority. This is where utilizing their Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
If people feel that there is scarcity, urgency, or exclusivity, they tend to be more likely to take action. Finding ways to add these to your pricing page can drastically increase your sales and revenue. Some examples could include:
- Showing how many are left (Only 3 remaining!)
- Showing the price may change soon (Sale ends tonight!)
- Showing high-profile people who are using the product (Sign up to join people like MailChimp and Facebook who use us to increase sales!)
11. Improve Your CTA
You could spend a significant amount of time optimizing your pricing page, but if the button to purchase is tough to find, no one will buy your product. The CTA (call to action) should be as visible as possible. The higher on the page, the better.
Your CTAs should be something that the visitor will gravitate towards and inspire them to take action. Here are some additional tips for the CTAs:
- Neil Patel says that the text on the buttons should contain “specific language that emphasizes the next action.” Some examples would be “Start Trial,” “Get Started,” or “Join Now.”
- Make the CTA as visible as possible, which includes making it big and as close to the top of the page as possible
- Provide a clue for what will happen after they click the button
12. Add FAQ’s
As your site visitors go through your site, they may have some questions about how your pricing works or how some of your plans may work. If they cannot easily find answers to these questions, some of these visitors will leave your site instead of completing the purchase.
This is where have a section for questions and answers can drastically improve your pricing page. You have probably seen a section of “Common Questions” or “FAQs” at the bottom of a pricing page before, and they are there for good reasons.
There are many places that you can have FAQs throughout the site, and you will want to answer most questions before the visitor gets to the pricing page. On most of the sites I reviewed when writing this article, the questions were limited to questions about pricing and billing.
If you are just starting, try to anticipate questions potential customers may have. If you have been selling your product for at least a little while, you may have had repeat questions that visitors have asked you before completing the purchase. Make a note of all of these questions.
Some example questions would be:
- What happens when the trial ends?
- If I don’t like XX, can I get a refund?
- How do I switch to a different plan?
- How long are your contracts?
- What payment methods do you accept?
Once you have your list of potential questions, you will prioritize them and narrow them down. Most sites have 4 to 6 questions here though some, such as Shopify, had close to 20 as of the time of this writing. Your site visitors are not on the pricing page to read through a book of documentation. Make the FAQs scannable and easy to understand.
13. Make Contacting You Easy
Sometimes, a visitor will go through your site and pricing page and still have questions. They’re sitting on your pricing page considering clicking on the buy now button but still have a few questions. If they glance around and see no contact page, no live chat, and no other form of communication available, they will leave and never return.
If someone is nearly ready to buy and only has a question or two left to answer, you should make it as easy as possible for this person to contact you. The bare minimum would be a contact page linked to either in the navigation or the footer. You could also use a tool, such as Popup Maker, that allows you to show a contact form if the person has any questions.
We have our slide-in set up to auto-open if the visitor has been on the pricing page for a while or when they are about to leave using our exit-intent feature.
If you have the resources, having a live chat at least on the core pages, such as pricing, would be extremely beneficial.
14. Test, Test, and Test Again
A pricing page is never finished. You should plan on making small changes to the page over time. Sometimes, you will find testimonials that are better than the ones you have on the page. Or, you may discover other questions that are being asked more often than the ones you currently have listed.
Once you get the pricing page optimized, you may want to begin running A/B tests, which could be something simple, such as testing a different version of the main headline against your current one. Other times, you can test something more significant such as sending some users to a pricing page, which lists features a different way than the main pricing page.
Through these different tests, you can continue to increase the conversion rate of your pricing page. But, this isn’t the only testing you should consider.
In addition to the automated A/B testing, you should also be manually checking your pricing page regularly to make sure all the CTA buttons still work as well as any other clickable or dynamic section of the page.
It is common enough to see changes on a site break other functionality such as the ability to view the answers to the FAQs. Without manually checking regularly, there could be parts of your pricing page that aren’t working without you knowing it.
Next Steps
Creating a quality pricing page can take some time, but this page can drastically affect how many of your site visitors become customers.
While following all of these best practices will improve your pricing page, there is no replacement for getting out and talking to potential customers. Only by speaking to them about their needs, hesitations, and concerns will you be able to craft the right copy, CTAs, and FAQs. So, get out and show your improved pricing page to your site visitors and start those conversations!
We’ll be exploring other strategies, including A/B testing, in future articles, so subscribe to our newsletter so we can notify you when new articles are published.
![Secure Stable Lead Generation With Popup Maker [ReVerb’s Story]](https://wppopupmaker.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/pexels-yan-krukov-4458386-1200w.jpg.webp)
by Ahoy
