April 2022
Author: Bryan Belanger
We launched the Grade My Pricing Page service recently and have been busy grading since. Last week, we posted some thoughts on our top 10 tips for a better SaaS pricing page.
There are many really good reasons to focus so much on pricing pages. They are the first and most important landing page for your customers when evaluating your product, and they are your site’s focal point for getting customers to commit to calls to action (CTAs). Whether someone is signing up for your product (freemium version, free trial or paid plan), engaging in a demo, downloading an asset or contacting your sales organization for more information, your pricing page is the place where customers are digitally convinced to shift themselves into your marketing and sales pipeline.
Many blogs focus on the “best SaaS pricing pages” and provide examples of best-in-class pricing pages. These posts vary in structure and content but usually regurgitate the same examples used in other blogs. In our view, these blogs are valuable mostly as a source of web design inspiration for pricing pages. But what’s typically missing is any form of consistent, repeatable framework for how to evaluate your pricing pages, identify and prioritize issues, and translate those issues into experiments you can test in the market.
So that’s what we’ve endeavored to build with the analytical model we are using for the Grade My Pricing Page service. Our approach is focused on both qualitative analysis and quantitative, framework-based analysis of the pricing page.
The qualitative analysis element focuses on a broad brainstorm of opportunities for your pricing page, based on marking it up with notes and thoughts as if you were a professor grading a term paper (bonus points for soliciting help from peers to do the same). At this first phase, the goal is to get the thoughts down onto paper, before refining them in the next phase.
To complement that first phase, the next aspect of our grading approach is a more quantitative and objective assessment of the pricing page. For this step, we’ve built a framework for analyzing pricing pages based on 25 key parameters related to page design, page content, and CTAs and support. We selected these parameters based on pricing page optimization guidance from secondary sources, our own conversations with customers, and our experience consulting with SaaS vendors on pricing strategies. It’s likely that this framework, outlined in Figure 1, will evolve and expand over time, but it has served us well as a starting point for conducting holistic reviews.
The last phase involves comparing the qualitative and quantitative findings, and then creating a list of up to 10 key areas where you can experiment with changes to your SaaS pricing page. (Ten should be considered a maximum such that changes can be reasonably implemented.) After this list is created, we recommend using a simple framework to prioritize those experiments based on risk to your business and level of effort to implement. For example, changing colors for certain CTA buttons would be a low-risk, low-effort activity, whereas changing your packaging entirely would be a higher-risk, high-effort activity. It’s important to level set on the impact of each change and determine how to best go forward.
In Figure 2 we offer a framework to help with those efforts.
We recommend a framework like Figure 2 be used regularly (monthly or quarterly, at a minimum) to objectively evaluate the performance of your pricing page and determine opportunities for experimentation and optimization. By internalizing and committing to this process, you can also bring this model together with your own performance data on website traffic, conversions, activations and other metrics you might track to assess how well experiments performed and update them as required. There are an emerging crop of tools including Salesbricks and Kana that you can consider adopting as well to make the process of updating and refining your SaaS pricing page more agile.
If you’re interested in receiving a pricing page grade from us, sign up here!
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