Swipe Files - 📂 Pricing pages that convert

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📖 The following is an excerpt from my work-in-progress book, Founding Marketing. It's a (very) rough draft of thoughts, notes, and research... so feel free to reply with your feedback on what I should expand more on and what needs to be clarified. Enjoy!

Price anchoring is the practice of referring to another price that makes the other price point(s) look more attractive. The “anchor” is often the first price point someone sees, although it isn’t always.

How to use price anchoring:

• Show the highest price first: Makes subsequent plans appear more affordable and less expensive.
• Show the lowest price first: This can make higher-priced and more featureful or beneficial plans seem more attractive if the price difference is marginal.
• Compare with competitors prices: More affordable than competitions? Show how much they could save by switching to you.
• Compare with alternative options: Show how affordable your price is compared with building themselves, going on with their current solution, or hiring someone.
• Show the original price before discount or promotion: Emphasize savings and appeal to the bargain-hunter as well.

Making A Recommendation

Some companies take the liberty of highlighting a plan or product offering to viewers. This gets into some murky water, ethically, as there are many wrong and unethical ways to do this.

You can make a recommendation by showing a plan to be:

• The Most Popular: If you do this, show which plan actually is the most popular, not just because it’s a higher price point or the plan you want to push.
• The Best Value: If you do this, elaborate on why it’s the best value. Showing a plan as the Best Value without an explanation will build skepticism with your users.
• The Recommended option: Again, if you do this, explain why it’s recommended. Honestly recommending the most affordable option may help increase the conversion rate to that plan and reduce the number of downgrades and churn.

Pricing naming conventions

The last thing you want to do after crafting a pricing strategy is to name the plans in a way that confuses potential customers and hurts your conversion rate.

As a rule of thumb, your pricing plans should describe either who it’s for or what the feature set is.

There’s no need to get cute with naming pricing plans. It’s best to follow standard naming conventions that help potential customers quickly self-identify which one is best for them and feel confident in their decision.

Here are some standard recommendations for plan families:

• Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
• Basic, Standard, Premium
• Hobby, Business, Enterprise
• Starter, Pro, Elite
• Individual, Team, Enterprise
• Lite, Standard, Advanced
• Startup, Scaleup, Enterprise
• Nano, Micro, Mega
• Bronze, Silver, Gold
• Personal, Team, Enterprise
• Freelancer, Team, Agency

I’d recommend calling any free-forever or freemium plan simply “Free” and any plan that requires a custom quote “Enterprise.” They’re both naming convention agnostic and can be used in essentially any combination you choose.

The two biggest things you want to avoid are using synonymous-sounding names for different plans and using plan names that have conflicting meanings.

Imagine a pricing page where you’re looking at three different plans, but the prices and features aren’t listed. The plan names are Hobby, Micro, and Gold. Sounds ridiculous, right? It’s the same principle for combinations I’ve seen like Starter, Basic, and Business. Or Pro, Premium, and Plus. Without knowing the price or features of each one, it’s virtually impossible to tell how they rank against each other.

—Corey

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