Landing pages are not a new phenomenon. In essence, a billboard is a landing page. It is designed to bring new clients to a specific business. But the online billboards are much smarter since they have interaction. Any page where visitors land on your site is a landing page!

If you want to increase traffic to your site and convert it to clients, you need to create a landing page that works. It should be recognized as useful by search engines and help visitors make contact with you.

The doorway to your business

While it is advisable to put effort into the first page of your site, the home page, you need to put even more thought into the pages that actually catch the traffic. It can be one or more pages that work as the doorway to your site since they pop up in search results or are linked directly from other places online.

You can also use landing pages that are not located on your main site. Regardless of the address of your landing page, it needs to have a structure and design that leads to action. Here are some very important points to consider when you want to build a landing page to catch new clients and form new connections online.

Why should you use a landing page?

To begin with, you might not be completely aware of the actual use of a landing page. Isn’t a killer webpage with modern and attractive design enough? Well, if that killer webpage kills off most of the visitors and pushes them on to other sites, it isn’t doing much for you or your business.

The landing page function is simple – it is there to bring you more business. Whether you want to sell a book, get people to attend your classes, or offer plumbing services is not important. The idea of this page is that it will create a sale or form a connection between you and a potential client.

Your home page could certainly do this beautifully, then it is indeed a great landing page. You could also use platforms like Facebook and other social media to build a landing page where you catch traffic heading for the products and services that you offer.

The landing page is clear-cut, it focuses on the target, and if it is well designed, it gets the job done!

Create a landing page

Now that you understand that you must have a landing page to fuel your business online, you want to know how to make one. You can always use services like Fiverr to get the page built for a reasonable price. If you’d like to work on the design yourself, there are plenty of great landing page creators for beginners and pros alike.

Using a landing page creator, you can drag and drop elements and shape the page to look just right. If you work with WordPress, you will also find the tools you need to help you create a great doorway to your business.

The tools available are also made to create mobile friendly websites that look great on smaller screens. You get a page that will look great on small and big screens alike.

Building the page right

Once you have a landing page creator or other tool, you need to know how to build the page to work for you as effectively as possible. Here are the main things you need to consider:

Picture and headline

If your potential clients are from an English speaking country, they read from left to right. It means that their eyes will fall in the top left corner as they surf into your site. Your landing page should have an attractive picture or logo in the upper left corner, and then a headline right next to it, or slightly below, that catches attention.

 

Pictures are very important, especially at the top of a landing page where you don’t want to stuff the area with too much text. People aren’t always looking to read all the nitty gritty details of your service or product. If they are, they will scroll down below the fold to learn more.

Since only about 90% of your visitors will scroll down to read more, you need the top half of your landing page to make it clear why they should make contact or order!

Opt-in

The landing page should have an opt-in placed at the top right of the page. This is where the visitor can share personal details to get more information or order your product. The opt-in needs to stand out and have colors that attract. Use a color wheel and pick the color that is the opposite of the main color on the page to get the best effect.

Make sure to put an opt-in below the fold if you are planning to fill it with more text. If you don’t, people might forget about contacting you even if the content they read creates interest.

Use a few bullet points to catch your audience

The top part of the landing page can also have some powerful bullet points. These are meant to stimulate the visitor to buy or ask for more information through the opt-in. The bullet points can shortly describe the advantages and benefits of your product or service.

Below the fold

While you want to keep the top part of your landing page as clear as possible, you can get more detailed below the fold. Anything that demands scrolling down on the page to be seen is below the fold.

Text is very important since it shows Google and other search engines that the page has something important to offer. In fact, there is the famous SEO saying that “content is king.” In the text below the fold, you can expand on your product, give examples of how it works, show more pictures, and embed some useful videos.

You should also use this part of the landing page to include important keywords in order to get more traffic from search engines. Make sure to use many sub-headings and to keep the paragraphs short. A lot of text in big blocks makes it hard to read, especially for mobile surfers.

A mobile friendly landing page

This is a must! The global mobile population is constantly growing and today people use their smartphones to browse and buy online. There is a greater need for mobile friendly websites than ever before. If it is hard to see what your page is about on a smaller screen, it will convert poorly on phones.

Make sure to use a theme that is meant to work just as well on mobile units as on a regular computer screen. You might want to use a very simple opt-in where there is only space for the visitor’s name and email and then a button to make contact.

A better conversion rate from the page

A better conversion rate means that more people that come to your landing page take action. They should fill in your opt-in form, order something, or contact you by email or phone. To make this happen, you need to have:

• Great content
• Easy navigation
• Clear graphics
• A page that radiates trust

If you are not a writer, hire one! The content must be attractive, correct, and clear. Easy navigation usually comes as a result of the measures described above where you keep the top part of the page clear and use many sub-headings under the fold. Graphics need to be clear and this will enforce the trust your landing page should convey by making it clear who you are and how to get in touch with you.

Use campaigns, offers and events to make more visitors take action. If they get a benefit from filling in your form, like a discount or useful information, they are more likely to do so.

Maintain your landing page

The best landing pages can work for years without any changes. Regardless, you might want to maintain your page with updates such as new campaigns and other things that can attract new clients. You should also learn more about SEO and how to promote the page so that it will show up in the search results for relevant keywords and phrases.

Don’t be afraid to try new things! Change colors and update the copy and see how this affects your conversion rate. You’d be surprised to see how a little change can lead to greater results in a short time.

If you follow the guidelines above and make sure to use well written content, you have the ingredients for a page that can make the difference for your business online. By adding your own experience and trials to this, you should arrive at the best possible landing page.

Maximizing the number of sales you make is a fundamental part of running a store. This applies to online businesses just as much as brick and mortar ones. If you have an eCommerce website, boosting a website’s eCommerce conversion rate is something that’s definitely in your best interest.

What conversion rate should I aim for?

Don’t burn up too much concern over “average” conversion rates or what rates are reported in your niche. You can always take aim at improving your conversion rate and making it better than it is now.

Frankly, there are so many variables in play that it’s not really fair to try and make an “apples to apples” comparison between any two eCommerce sites. The quality of inbound traffic – something that can vary hugely according to lots of different factors – plays a major role.

In the very roughest terms, conversion rates are typically around one to two percent.

Good images matter

If you forced me to choose the absolute most important factor contributing to online product sales, I’d probably go with image quality.

An eCommerce site that worked solely with images, including no product descriptions whatsoever, could probably work – albeit not as well as a combined site. The reverse isn’t true: an all-text online store simply wouldn’t make sales.

Every consumer has a fundamental, deep-rooted desire to see what she’s buying before she makes a spending decision. Quality photos of your products are absolute necessities for making sales. Don’t try to make a single photo do all your selling work, either! Offer multiple angles, in-context shots, and high-detail close-ups.

Use compelling words

Not to undercut the previous point, but you need to pay attention to your product descriptions too. Product copy plays a vital role in the sales decision; prospective customers need to have information before they commit to purchasing. Clarity is better than persuasive deception here. You don’t need hype if you have full information. Let the facts speak for themselves.

Do you want short or long product descriptions? Frankly, you need both. The long, complete description is there for the on-the-fence customer, giving her enough facts to talk herself into buying. Your shorter version should concentrate on the essentials: Who needs the product, what they can expect it to do, and what makes it notably good.

In your longer description, make it your goal to provide answers to every question a buyer might possibly ask. Remember that a customer who’s convinced will just skip past the rest of your copy and head to checkout; a customer who has questions or doubts left is going to leave your store.

If your products come to you from outside manufacturers, do not simply regurgitate the product descriptions the makers hand you. Personalize your descriptions and make sure your customers know why you, specifically, recommend the product in questions.

Making use of videos

Images are good, but in the future video is increasingly going to supplant them as the selling tool of choice.

Producing product videos can be expensive and it’s impossible to tell for sure whether they’re going to help make more sales. Start off small by creating videos for a few of your products and see if they make an impact on the bottom line.

Customization equals ownership

Customizing a product is a fun process, and it has a surprisingly powerful effect on sales. Specifying the details of a product makes it feel like your own even before you click that “buy” button.

I learned the true power of customization when I bought a new laptop from Dell in 2008. It took me the better part of an hour to customize my ideal laptop using their website’s powerful options. The computer I wound up buying cost significantly more than any of Dell’s ready-made configurations. I got a powerful computer and a powerful lesson.

If it’s within your power to offer customization of your products, strive to do so. Customization translates into more sales!

Free shipping boosts conversions

Free shipping is becoming the rule rather than the exception in online commerce. Some retailers put conditions on free shipping, requiring customers to jump through certain hoops to “earn” it. Others simply give it away for free to all their customers, like Nordstrom. Online customers have certainly noticed.

According to research conducted by E-tailing Group, fully 73 percent of online customers consider free shipping to be a “critical” decision-making factor for online purchases. 93 percent of those surveyed said that free shipping encouraged them to buy more.

To go into further detail, high shipping loomed large as the most frequently given reason for an unsatisfactory online shopping experience. Shipping costs (i.e. the lack of them) are the biggest advantage that brick and mortar retailers have over their online competitors.

On average, orders that qualify for free shipping have an overall value 30 percent higher than their cost-incurring equivalents. The site 2BigFeet enjoyed a clear connection between free shipping and conversions: Dropshipping charges for orders over $100 boosted their conversion rate by an astounding 50 percent.

“Free” versus “cheap”

Chris Anderson, author of the book “Free,” offers some insight into the dramatic difference this distinction makes. Amazon has a global reach, and the company has seen sales boom in every country where they extend the offer of free shipping. France is a particularly important example. The company was initially unable to offer completely free shipping to French customers, charging a token 20-cent charge instead. In this case, “cheap” utterly failed to create the same sales-boosting magic as “free.” Sales remained largely stagnant until Amazon finally offered the people of France truly free shipping – and then they came up.

If you must charge for shipping…

Your business model might make it impossible to completely waive shipping fees. If you have to charge for shipping, make sure you mention it up front. Flat-fee shipping is also preferable to more complex calculations; customers love simplicity.

The real killer to your conversion rate is the surprise shipping fee that inflates the price of your products right at the end of the transaction. Based on the survey mentioned above, nearly half (47 percent) of customers will abandon a purchase if they only learn about additional shipping charges at checkout.

Abandoned shopping cart

A lot of online customers get close to completing a purchase before getting cold feet. The result is an abandoned shopping cart. The number of carts abandoned in online stores is constantly rising.

According to Forrester data, nearly every online shopper (89 percent) has abandoned a cart at least once. This is really a measure of growing consumer sophistication; more and more customers are comparison-shopping and abandoning deals when they find better ones.

Following up

A simple follow-up email is a great way to reduce your abandonment rates. An effective anti-abandonment campaign can pay for itself many times over; SmileyCookie discovered that a decent campaign enabled them to recapture 29 percent of the carts their customers abandoned.

The great news is that many integrated eCommerce web development platforms (e.g. 3DCart, Volusion, and Magento) have built-in abandonment tools. Even if your preferred platform doesn’t offer this functionality, it’s likely that reliable add-on software can add it.

This is a guest post by Sheryl Davis. Sheryl is a digital marketer at Glew, an ecommerce analytics software provider, where she focuses on helping online stores understand and act on their data.

Are you frustrated with your conversion rate even when traffic to your storefront is up? Are you asking yourself why more visitors aren’t buying your products? You aren’t alone. Many stores struggle with converting their traffic to buying customers.

Let’s look at five specific places in Google Analytics that hold clues to help you solve this problem.

Clue #1:  Bounce Rate

Click on Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. 

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate is the percentage of sessions during which a browser left a website from the entrance page without going to a second page. Having a high Bounce Rate can be an indicator of pages that need additional work. Lowering your Bounce Rate increases your chance of successful conversions.

Refocus your content

Look at pages that have a high Bounce Rate as well as a low Average Time on Site. Why are visitors leaving quickly and often? Are they looking for something else? Is there not enough content on the page to get them to stick around? Product pages can often be the worst offenders of a high Bounce Rate. Add a link to a blog post that features the product, show a video of someone using the product, curate a collection of customer photos, or incorporate links to product manuals or reviews.

Encourage users to keep clicking

Browsers are lazy. Don’t assume they will do the work to look around for places to keep reading. Without cluttering up your design, drop as many avenues as you can to keep them on your site. A great way to keep browsers clicking is through the use of a sidebar. Does your company have a unique story to tell? Include a link to a page about your company’s story. Are new collections debuting soon? Link to a preview of new designs to come! And don’t forget about content that was posted months or years ago. Since blog posts can keep a long shelf life in organic search, there should always be a quick way to get to recent content.

 

Clue #2:  New vs Returning Visitors

Click on Audience > Behavior > New vs Returning > Click on New Visitor. Filter further by adding Secondary Dimension > Source / Medium. 

Why is this important? 

This table will show a breakdown of visitor type by traffic sources.  Study channels that are driving new traffic (good) but are failing to bring in traffic that is converting (bad). Remember new traffic is useless if it isn’t driving conversions.

Paid Channels

Ensure your advertisements are bringing in more revenue than is being spent on ad dollars. This feels obvious, right? It’s surprisingly easy to overlook the revenue these channels contributed and instead focus on brand awareness metrics such as followers, visits or shares.

Double check that sales from paid channels like Google Adwords, Bing Ads, AdRoll or Facebook Ads are adding to your bottom line. Running ads should increase new visitors to your site, but without sales they are draining money away. Cut out advertising from costly channels with a poor return on ad spend and instead focus on organic methods.

Organic Channels

Organic traffic is good – simple as that. Organic traffic is any traffic that comes through a non-paid channel. The most common types of organic traffic are organic searches, referral traffic or traffic derived from your social accounts.

Since this traffic is free, having more of it isn’t an issue. Instead use this table to find areas of opportunity. If visitors are finding you for the first time from an organic method, add a Call to Action on the pages they are landing on. Referral traffic that is brining in new visitors can be a great place to look for future partnership opportunities. Bloggers are constantly looking for products to promote or sponsor, so use this table to understand what is working.

 

Clue #3: Search Queries 

Log in to Google Analytics and go to > Acquisition > AdWords > Search Queries.  

Google AdWords is a computer program. It can’t always distinguish nuances in language or differentiate between words that have multiple meanings. An easy and actionable way to lower junk traffic is to use negative keywords in Google AdWords. Negative keywords exclude unwanted traffic from people who are searching for an item unrelated to your offering.

Here is an example: Say you own a store that sells belts for men’s and women’s fashion. Negative keywords would eliminate searches for conveyer belts, seat belts, black belts, the Asteroid belt or even Belt, Montana.

Google AdWords is smart, but it won’t be accurate 100% of the time. Go through the search queries that brought traffic to your site. Take out any keywords that drove irrelevant traffic and enter those as negative keywords in Google Analytics. See a guide on how to do that here.

 

Clue #4: Exit Pages 

Click on Acquisition > Behavior > Exit Pages.

An Exit Page is the ugly stepsister to a Landing Page. It’s natural to spend more time focused on what is working rather than evaluate what isn’t working. But Exit Pages illuminate exactly where and when website visitors move on from your site empty handed.

Sort this table to see which pages have the largest amount of exiting traffic. (Most likely your homepage will be the first page, this is normal.) Similar to strategies on lowering Bounce Rate, work to build avenues for capturing visitors and keeping them engaged.

• Implement a popup with a discount code that will appear when a user starts to exit
• Provide links to webpages about your story and company
• Drive users to blog posts that feature hot products
• Show commonly purchased together items on the bottom of every product page
• Include a sidebar that offers links to upcoming releases
• Create stronger Call to Actions that heighten sense of urgency
• Ask for browsers to join your mailing list so you can sell to them at a later time
• Add a chat feature that will come up within your site to answer questions
• Use retargeting advertisements to later target browsers with the exact product they were viewing

All of these strategies work to hook browsers into sticking around and entice them with offers to convert.

 

Clue #5: Mobile Browsing 

Click on Audience > Mobile > Overview. 

According to research done by Custora, during the 2015 holiday season, smartphones and tablets drove 30.4% of online sales.

Can you afford to lose out on 30% of shoppers? Without a responsive storefront mobile browsers will leave en masse.

Tips for Not Losing Mobile Shoppers

Troubleshoot your entire checkout process by making sure your storefront, shopping cart and payment gateways have a responsive design. This can be as simple as pulling up your iPhone, or simply dragging your browser to be as skinny as possible and going through the motions of checking out.

Make sure buttons and links are large enough that a user can click on them on a tiny screen without tapping on a different link.

Eliminate any “hover” options on your site. Since tablet and mobile phones don’t use hover technology, this simple fix could have a drastic increase in your bottom line.

Reduce image file sizes as much as possible. Google provides a powerful free tool that shows a breakdown of what is slowing down your site speed on both mobile and desktop displays.

 

Final Note

Google Analytics can often feel overwhelming and daunting. The most important thing is to go in with a goal in mind and look for actionable ways to use the data provided. Stay focused on your goal of increasing conversions and use these five clues to start solving problems and continue reeling in sales!

 

 

 

It doesn’t matter how many years of product management you’ve got under your belt, when it comes to defining pricing strategies for your product, you’ll always face unsolvable dilemmas.

I’m sure that you’ve come across some of the dilemmas mentioned below:

• My product is awesome. Should I charge more than my competitors for it?
• My product is Great. Should I charge less than my competitors for it?
• My product is Wonderful. Should I blow my competitors out of the water by giving it away for free (and pray I’ll be able to monetize it somehow later)?

I’m sure that you see a common thread here – since you’re not working in a vacuum, you have to consider the competition, or should you? Sure, competitors, especially those who’ve been there before you, are a force to be reckoned with and should influence pricing.

But, if you think that following your competitor’s price is a good pricing strategy, you’re going to hit a brick wall sooner than you think. As we all know, even if products are close in terms of features, they’re never the same in terms of quality, investment, design, costs, research, and all the other pretty lies we tell ourselves to create some distance between us and the competition.

Don’t get me wrong; I  think that surveying competitor prices and strategies is a great way to conduct that initial benchmark, but that’s where it should end. Unfortunately, there’s that real chance that your competitors are stumbling into the same numerical darkness you’re in right now, and they don’t have a clue.

That’s why you need to find a pricing strategy that is ideal for your product, brand, and company — Easier said than done, I know.

With the exception of highly competitive markets in which competitor prices should be a factor, you have to price according to the value you provide to the customer.

The ideal price according to Kissmetrics should be:

“Just high enough to need consideration but low enough to still provide plenty of value.”

This means that you need to price higher than you think (since we have that annoying tendency to undervalue our work, time, and self).

So how do you measure the value you provide to your users? By using that value-based pricing strategy of course! This strategy allows you to capture the value you provide to customers and translate it into prices.

4 Steps To Implement a Value-Based Pricing Strategy

According to the Price Intelligently blog, implementing the value-based pricing strategy is a four step process:

1. Identify and analyze your buyer personas
2. Survey your existing users and quantify value
3. Analyze the data
4. Rinse and repeat

After several iterations, you’ll have the prices you’re looking for.

Now that you know everything there is to know about how to price your SaaS product, it’s time to apply the strategy that will help you to sell it.

But first, I need to let you in on a little sales people secret; it doesn’t matter if your prices are right (or wrong). The only thing that matters is how you present them to your users. I pulled together nine strategies here that have proven themselves in the past.

These strategies work because our brain has a history.

In our primordial past, fast food chains and whole foods were not available; we were hunter-gatherers living off the land. This activity required heavy pattern recognition capabilities, which allowed us to survive, helping us to identify predators lurking in the shadows, and sweet fruits hanging from trees.

Pattern recognition in our brain reacts automatically to patterns we know, allowing us to reduce cognitive strain on our brain and save our cognitive resources for actions that matter.

When our brain identifies a pattern it recognizes, it quickly interprets its value and determines whether it’s good for us. Offers with freebies, simple structure, and visual aids go a long way since we naturally tend to go for the low-hanging fruits.

That’s why we need to offer our prices in the most digestible way possible. We need to remove potential objections and positively influence our potential user’s decision-making process.

To get you some live data, I asked eight CEOs the following five questions:

1. What is your pricing strategy today?

2. Did you ever test other pricing strategies?

3. If the answer to “2” is yes – what made you choose one over the other?

4. Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product?

5. If the answer to “4” is no – how did you choose the price for your pricing strategy?

Each pricing strategy will be explained prior, and you’re the one who’s going to decide what’s right for you, shall we begin?

1# Pricing Strategy: Free Trials

I’m sure that you visited an Apple store in the past 5-10 years.  Did you ever ask yourself why they allow you to touch the products on display there?

When you touch/interact with something, you get a sense of ownership over it and are more likely to purchase it. Nike uses this strategy as well; allowing users to customize their sneakers on the site before they purchase them; car sales people have been doing it for more than 100 years.

Most people think of free trials as a chance to take a swim without getting wet, but the reality is that they’re being tricked – free trials are the ultimate way to attract users to use your products and connect them with it and your brand.

In addition, the limited time users have with the product creates a sense of scarcity, and at the end of the period, users must make a purchase decision or lose access to those awesome features your product provided.

Now, you’re probably asking yourself should you go with a 14 or 30-day trial. Since you’re into conversion, I’m sure that you know the answer already – you’ll have to test it!

Moz.com CMO, Annette Promes, had this to say about their free trial offers, it’s tried, tested and tiered.

What is your pricing strategy today? 

We strive to price our products so that we are delivering excellent value to our customers in exchange for their loyalty. We want customers to feel confident that our tools will improve their visibility online before they buy.

To that end, we will offer a variety of try-before-you-buy options to potential customers, depending on the specific product. These range from the ability to check, for free, how your online business listings are represented with Moz Local (our platform to increase visibility in mobile and local search) to a 30-day free trial for Moz Pro (our complete SEO toolset) to the ability to run a free content site audit with Moz Content (our software to audit, measure, and discover content relevant to your target audience) to a free audit and analysis of your social presence with Followerwonk (our tool to help you connect to influencers and to discover tactics to grow your Twitter presence).

We offer different “tiers” for most of our products, as well, to allow customers to only buy as much access in a month as they need.

Our products are available to purchase month-to-month (no contract or time commitment) or annually, with discounts offered for the purchase of an annual plan.

Did you ever test other pricing strategies? 

We have, and will continue to do so. We’ve tested changing the length of our free trial periods (from 2-weeks through 120-days); we’ve tested the pricing tier (within a product) at which we even offer a free trial; we’ve played around with the size of the discount that we offer for folks buying annual plans (from 20% to 30% or more percent); we’ve tested bundling products together and offering discounts for doing so (For instance, buy Moz Pro and Moz Content together and get a discount); we’ve tested the access limits that we set at each pricing tier within a product; we’ve tested monthly vs. 6-month vs. annual plans; and we’ve tested gating access to certain features at different price tiers.

What made you choose one pricing strategy over the other?

Generally, customer feedback and our own analytical data. We have regular conversations with customers through our Customer Advisory Board, surveys, in-person feedback interviews, social media, and through our customer support team. We also look at customer behaviors during our tests to see what combinations of features and price points really resonate with customers, and we adapt accordingly.

Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product? 

Yes! We’ve done very specific pricing surveys (most recently last fall) to both current and former customers to understand from them not only what price they would be willing to pay, but what features and functionality they most value.

2# Pricing Strategy: Freemium

If free trial is perceived as taking a swim without getting wet, freemium is walking on water with the ability to look down in, and dive at will/paid.

When you price your product with freemium, you allow users to explore the basic features of your product, experience the UI/UX, and if they like what they see or, need more functionality to get the previously mentioned value, freemium allows them to purchase easily plans, etc.

Like the above free trial, they get a sense of ownership over your product, unlike free trials, it lasts forever!

When it comes to freemium SaaS models, there are a lot of pros and a lot of cons. You need to understand where you’re going with this to see if freemium is the right plan for you.

On one hand, freemium is a wonderful tool to onboard people quickly. On the other, it’s tough to change user behavior patterns once they’re acquired, especially if the customer expects not to pay for the product or has no use of the premium features.

We all remember the cautionary tale of Evernote with their 3% conversion to paid.

There are additional reasons why not to go with freemium (summarized excellently in this wonderful post). Having said that, there are a lot of companies who hacked freemium quite successfully:

Co-founder, Mike Chang told us about Sniply’s interesting take on the Freemium model.

What is your pricing strategy today?

We run Sniply under a freemium model where we offer a free plan with a bunch of free features, but we also offer a number of premium plans involving advanced features and usage at higher volumes.

Our pricing plans scale based on three core variables: volume of clicks per month, number of brand profiles, and number of team members. This allows us to charge more for users deriving more value from the product while keeping costs low for users just starting out.

When releasing new features, we often introduce them into the free plan and assess the feature’s popularity. Based on how frequently they’re used, who uses them, and overall user feedback, we then decide if the feature should stay in the free plan or moved into one of the premium plans.

Did you ever test other pricing strategies?

Our pricing strategy is always an evolving process. Currently we price based on the three core metrics: volume of clicks per month, number of brand profiles, and number of team members. Previously, we’ve tested the strategy of releasing all features for free, but charging exclusively for number of click-through conversions, which is similar to a pay-per-click model.

Under that model, we found that our users actually derive a lot more value from the product than mere click-through conversions. Many of our users find great value in the brand exposure and the ability to provide a branded link experience. This made charging solely for click-through conversions less ideal, since it neglected our entire value proposition of brand awareness.

Through a number of experiments, we began bundling our features based on a combination of click-through conversions along with branding tools such as visual customizations.

What made you choose one over the other?

We learned that products often deliver more than just a singular value proposition. Therefore it’s important to deploy a pricing strategy that takes into consideration all angles of our value proposition. Some users may use Sniply for click-through conversions, but some use it purely as a branding tool, while others use Sniply to empower their retargeting campaigns.

We chose our new pricing model over our old pricing model because the previous one was only focused on pricing based on click-through conversions, whereas our product delivers so much more than just that one thing.

A solid pricing strategy needs to take into consideration the different users who use the product, but also the different ways they use the product. We try to bucket our users into major categories, and also do the same for the most common use cases. Once we had the trends laid out, we then planned our pricing strategy accordingly.

Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product?

Sniply is one of the very few companies that offer a Name-Your-Own-Price option. We have a custom plan section on our pricing page, which allows our users to pick and choose the features they want, a-la-carte style, and name their own price.

Our team then reviews these submissions and we discuss to see if the request is fair. It’s difficult to craft perfect preset plans that fit everyone, which is why we offer this custom plan approach. Even though we may be able to categorize users according to the most common cases, there will always be outliers with special requirements that our preset plans don’t fulfill.

Not only does our custom plan approach allow us to capture users who would normally turn away, it’s also one of our most powerful tools for assessing how much users are willing to pay for our product and our various features.

Since our custom plan option allows you to choose features and name a price, we’re able to collect a tremendous amount of data around how much people are willing to pay for certain feature sets. This information is collected and analyzed over time to help us make better pricing decisions in the future.

Elie Khoury, CEO of Woopra uses the Freemium strategy to identify potential paying customers; this is what he had to say:

What is your pricing strategy today?

Our current pricing strategy is a freemium model where the free account has all the features enabled but has a limit of 30,000 actions per month. We believe that 30,000 actions per month is the threshold between a very small business who needs a free plan and a potential paying customer. We enable all features on the free account, rather than limiting feature access, because we want those customers to fully experience the product as it was intended to be used.

Did you ever test other pricing strategies? What made you choose one over the other?

Yes. We tested a 30 day trial for a while, but we found that it was a poor model for us since we wanted to give customers as much time as they need to set up their account and get familiar with the product, test it, etc. We don’t want to pressure customers to make a decision in 30 days if they’re not ready at that point.

Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product?

No

So how did you choose the price for your pricing strategy?

We are constantly evolving our pricing strategies by testing and studying the market to understand how we can best serve our customers. A lot of factors need to be taken into consideration, especially How much value we’re bringing to the customer, and our margins so we can operate and grow.

3# Free or Custom/Premium Plans

Another popular pricing strategy, it uses a principal called “limiting choices.”

If you’re thinking about placing seven plans on the page with hopes of giving your users a plan that fits, think again. Contrary to common belief, people don’t like to choose from multiple options. Sure, the plan needs to be a close variant of what they need, but it doesn’t have to be an exact match to be chosen as the plan they proceed with.

Remember I told you about that brain of ours and how it likes to identify patterns? What I didn’t mention is that too many options might cause it to overanalyze, or even freeze due to analysis paralysis.

In addition, too many choices can cause decision fatigue, something that might cause customers to stop filling forms, drop from shopping carts and reject upsells.

That’s why limiting your user’s choices is the best way to go.

Provide two or three plans tops, if they want more, offer them the ‘contact us’ option or lead them to a dedicated extended plans page.

Dr David Darmanin, CEO and Founder at HotJar, told us that it’s important for them to get new users in first with free and pro plans (Pro priced at $29) and then scale up with larger businesses. 

What is your pricing strategy today?

We have priced Hotjar on the lower end – with lower data points offered… the reason is that we want to make it more accessible to everyone… and then scale up data points for larger businesses. We took the ‘sampling’ approach to make the data still useful if you don’t collect all your data points.

Our strategy is to offer ‘value innovation’. More quality and value for less price. It’s the strategy referred to in ‘blue ocean strategy’.

Did you ever test other pricing strategies?

Yes – we have now started testing another axis of pricing… offering automated daily recordings (not manual).

What made you choose one over the other?

It’s another axis of pricing rather than a replacement.

Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product? How did you decide the price for your pricing strategy?

We are planning to do value comparison. We chose the lowest friction ‘no brainer’ price to start. We could have gone higher… but it was not worth the risk since we wanted to be very aggressive with taking over the market.

Matthieu Vaxelaire, CEO of Mention.com, keeps it simple, separating website and custom pricing.

What is your pricing strategy today?

We have 2 types of pricing, transactional (public) pricing you can find on our website and custom pricing based on customer specific needs.

Did you ever test other pricing strategies? What made you choose one over the other?

Yes, we used to be a freemium tool, than we moved to a single strategy based on transactional sales with no custom pricing.

As our solution gets more powerful we attract larger customers so we offer custom pricing.

Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product? How did you decide the price for your pricing strategy?

No. The decision came from the value we create.

4# Pricing According to Active Users, % of Use or Features

How do you offer real value to your users?

Is it by serving them 1, 5, or 100 user plans? Or by pricing per active user, the real metric that matters both to you and the user?

I know that you know the answers to these questions, but there’s an inner conflict within you – I can sense it from here.

You think that providing a set number of users justifies your package price. We all know that fewer users = less money, right?

Well, it doesn’t work that way. Some customers who don’t use their user quota or % of service (and most don’t), will move to smaller packages and share their user/pass with colleagues. There’s also that chance that they’ll leave your service because they feel like you’re not providing the value they were expecting.

In all these cases, you’ll lose imaginary users and real customers!

Jeff Morris, VP Product Marketing at GoodData decided to free customers from unnecessary user charges, allowing users to scale with the product feature that they need.

What is your pricing strategy today?

We offer a SaaS subscription to our platform.  The variables are a platform operation fee that accounts for the number of unique use cases or data products deployed in the platform, and the number of (and features enabled in) analytic “workspaces.”   Workspaces are analytic packages that include an agile data model, defined users and roles, analytic data isolated for those users or their organization, and the calculations and visuals for those users.

We have chosen to eliminate common practices of licensing based on number of users, number of servers and amount of data consumed in the platform.   Our model focuses on driving widespread and successful adoption of our solution–we grow as our customers grow, without penalizing them for that growth.

Did you ever test other pricing strategies?

Yes, we have tried many other strategies:  Charging by user is too restricting for customers, and does not encourage analytic adoption.  Charging by data volumes was unpredictable and discouraged expanding analysis, which also stunts adoption.

What made you choose one over the other?

We chose a value-based model that is designed to grow as our customer grows.  This model matches our preferred use cases in support of ISVs who embed our product within theirs, and in support of creating Enterprise Analytic Publishing and delivery of data products that allow enterprise organizations to unlock the value of their data by sharing it with customers, partners and subsidiaries.   Our model now encourages adoption and usage, and creates predictability within our customers and our own business model.

Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product?

Yes, we regularly test our price points with customers, especially using our Customer Advisory Board.  They resoundingly rejected per-user pricing, which was one of the drivers for us to drop that as a lever.

Paul Campbell, Founder of Tito’s event management software, takes a % out of sold tickets and helps free ticket events to stay free.

What is your pricing strategy today?

We follow the Amazon Web Services model: an on-demand usage fee based on a percentage of the value of each ticket our customers sell. Customers can also opt-in to pay a setup fee or a “reserve” fee to reserve a lower rate for a period of time.

Did you ever test other pricing strategies?

We experimented with fixed rate pricing in the past, but it was hard to strike a balance and ultimately some or other customer would be punished … so a percentage based model just works out the most fair.

We also experimented with _lower_ pricing and we found our prices were too low … we didn’t need to offer such steep discounts.

What made you choose one over the other? 

Ultimately we realized we were needlessly leaving money on the table and making building a sustainable business harder on ourselves. We upped the prices and nobody complained (we kept our existing customers on the same rates they had been on)

Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product?

We often enter into discussions with our customers, and some of our customers prefer to pay less because they don’t feel they would get the full use of all of the features we use. Other customers feel like they are getting far more value than they pay. It depends!

How did you decide the price for your pricing strategy?

Even though we did talk to customers, ultimately, we chose pricing based on the fact that we feel we have a premium product. We wanted our initial offering to reflect our belief that we have a very strong product. We offer the ability to get better rates tied to a commitment, but we chose premium pricing for what we believe is premium service.

#5 Start Up Pricing

I’m sure that this one is going to interest all the SaaS start ups out there.

As a start up, you need to know from where to start? What’s the best pricing to get customers on board when there’s no awareness to your service? Or even worse, when you need to educate the market?

Many start ups offer their product during the beta stage for free, but when you go out of beta, you need to provide a price tag that will:

Keep all the users you’ve gained onboard.

Won’t scare new clients.

There is no one strategy that can tell you what’s right for your start up, finding the right pricing strategy is a journey that begins during your beta when you interview customers and it never ends, you’ll always have to test your pricing strategy!

Sujan Patel, Founder and CEO at ContentMarketer told us an interesting tale about how his company found their current strategy, he also gave us a warning that it might change in a few days ☺

What is your pricing strategy today?

We’re charging $9/month for each of our products: Connector, Notifier & $19/mo for Marketer (our email finder tool). My strategy now is to charege the lowest amount possible to get market penetration. Our products help marketers promote content and since content promotion is something not that widely adopted we’re using the low price to reduce the barrier to entry. We also launched Connector & Notifier products as free tools to gain exposure and test the market. People loved it and begged us for a few more features, so we asked what they’d pay for them, added them and made the products paid at $9/mo.

Did you ever test other pricing strategies?

Yes, we tested many price points and strategies..hopefully our strategy is the same by the time this article goes live Last March when ContentMarketer.io was in private beta we tested charging $999/year for a managed service + our software & $99 a month. At launch we tested $49/mo but a few months later found out that $9/mo & $19/mo worked best when we got people to sign up by offering a 50% off discount for expired trials. It turns out at $19/mo tell us all the time that our prices are too cheap for the value but at $49 no wants to fork out the cash. Go figure

What made you choose one over the other? 

Adoption and net growth. Our goal is to build tools to help marketers and we’ve got a few more products up our sleeves, so in order to do that, we need to get the right volume of users.

Did you ever ask your users about the price they would be willing/want to pay for your product?

Yes at every step of the way we asked our users. We surveyed them on our homepage and made pricing only available via email so we can test price points.

6# Comparison Tables

This one is an oldie, but a goldie.

Almost all of the above companies are using it.

I’m sure that you saw pricing pages that have plans organized according to available features, or pages that emphasize features instead of prices, these comparison tables are everywhere and for several good reasons.

It’s the best way to compare plans feature wise.

It’s intuitive and well known, potential clients know for what to look and where.

It’s an excellent way to focus users on value instead of the price!

How does it focus users on value instead of price? Through a cognitive bias called the framing effect.

Remember the above-mentioned pattern recognition capabilities we all have? Well, framing is one of the ways our brain finds patterns in the world around us. This bias focuses the potential customer on contextual focal points that frame the value they receive in a more appealing way.

How is it more appealing?

When you increase the size of the users each plan provides instead of the price size, the framing effect kicks in.

It also happens when you reduce the font size of the price and increase the fort size of all your features.

When you create a list that shows how features influence the user positively (97% SLA instead of 3% Change of failure).

As awesome as the framing effect is, it can’t shield your users from another effect that lurks in shadows of these comparison tables.

Framing works great when there’s a free vs. premium plan, in this way, potential customers can see how a premium plan adds value compared to the free. However, when using the framing effect to compare between several plans, it focuses users on the wrong frame, the negative one.

Why? Because when people are asked to compare they mistrust almost automatically, focusing them on problems that might pop rather than the value gained from each package. Comparison activates conscious decision making and negates the effects the framing effect.

#7 Annual Plans

As with the comparison tables, almost all of the above companies use this strategy.

You know that your potential customers are looking for a deal, even if your product is a great fit your customers would love to get some discount on it. But giving them an automatic discount can cause a lot of problems in terms of brand image and perceived value.

That’s why you need to give a discount that will feel like a win-win situation, purchasing an annual plan with a two-month discount fits the bill. There are so many benefits to both you and your customers in an annual plan that you just can’t afford not to offer them!

It secures a customer for a year (or 14 months if the extra two months are framed as a 12+2 months bonus).

It shows customers that there’s a serious company that can provide support and value for more than a year, and that has done so before (The inner dialog explains that to the customer: “Hey, I’m sure they have a lot of customers if they offer an annual plan.”)

And of course – with annual commitments, churn goes down! (but it doesn’t mean that you need to stop your investment in retention, au contraire).

Summary

Finding the right pricing strategy for your SaaS product is not so simple as many startups think, so you need to work hard until you find the right strategy that suit your product, your audience and your market.

Which SaaS pricing strategy did you like? Have you any personal favorites to add? Please share in the comments below!

 

It all started when I wanted to buy a new Mac. I went into a store, checked a few models and decided on the new Macbook Pro. I got an attractive offer and yet I still wanted to check the price at the official store, where I saw the exact same model but at a 15% increase in price.

Eventually, even though the price was higher – I pulled out my credit card and made the purchase at the second store.

Sounds irrational? Absolutely!

Well, not exactly.

We all love to buy low cost but somehow we always end up paying a little more in return for peace of mind. We want to know that we made the right decision, we bought at the right place, from the right person and that we got full value for our money.

In other words, we want a sense of confidence. We want to believe the salesman and feel secure with the business and product.

As a marketer you should always keep in mind that trust is one of the most important parameters that affect the customer’s decision to purchase and in many cases can influence customers to pay more.

In fact, It doesn’t matter how low or tempting your price is – if you don’t give your potential customer the feeling that you are reliable and that buying from you is safe, they will not hesitate to buy from the competitor even if it will cost them more. So, if you would like to optimize your conversion rate and have already tried various sales or cut off prices and nothing seems to quite work – it’s probably time to move on to something new.

How to Easily Create Trust and Build Confidence in Your Website

This post will talk about how to increase the trust of your website users. We will focus on the content that needs to be displayed, but no less important on the way it should be presented.

We will try to understand how to write and how to combine elements that will achieve the goal and will encourage the user to continue to the next step and perform the desired action – Conversion!

In order to gain trust, one needs to keep in mind the 2 major aspects – the textual and the visual.

Increasing Trust With the Right Words

The words you use have a lot of impact on customers.  They present you and your products, they differentiate you from competition, and they create interest around you. Therefore, when used properly, they have a number of functions:

• Grab the user’s attention

• Tempt and convince that this is a worthwhile proposal

• Inspire confidence in you and in your offer

Needless to say that without the third stage – your efforts will be in vain and the visitor will move on to your competitor.

So what words should be used?

It’s a good question and the answer is very simple – use the words that your audience uses.

It requires you to do some research and get to know your users well, their needs, their desires and their dreams.

If a visitor comes to the website, reads the content on it and still feels confused – you probably didn’t understand his Jargon well enough, your offer may have been a bit too vague or the benefits of the offer isn’t clear and prominent.

If you are not using the right words, your visitor will read your offer but will quickly come to the conclusion that your product isn’t going to solve his problem.

Therefore, be sure to speak at his eye level, make sure to use wording that your visitor is familiar with and most importantly – show him that you think the same way, that you understand him and the problem he is facing, and that you are able to solve it and make it easier for him.

These are the things that will make him open up to you, want to listen to you, and this is also how you’ll gain his trust.

Optimization tips and highlights using words that build trust:

• Research the internet to find out how users describe the problem that you’re solving. Quora is a good place to start.
  For example, if I sell dog food, I will go to Quora and check which terms people use the most in order to describe the ideal dog food for them.
  In this case, I see that the word “diet” is mentioned 27 times out of 20 comments, and, therefore I will change my title from “The Tastiest Food For Your Dog” to a slightly different title: “XYZ (brand) – Diet Food For Healthier Dogs”:

• Writing everywhere that you are the best and that your products are of top notch quality – won’t quite do the job. Focus on “why”, give reasons, elaborate and explain. Find your unique value – that’s what will make the visitor realize that you really are the best for him:

• Instead of writing that you are the best, focus on the benefits of the product and not its features. Put the focus on the customer, i.e., what benefits will the customer get from using the product and not what the product does:
  
  

• In other words – this TV does not have “4K SUHD and a curved panel”, but rather this TV will “dispel any moment of boredom and give abundance and diversity so that with a click of a button you can choose your favorite programs”.

  (There’s no need to panic from long titles. They work).

• Do not overdo it and beautify reality. It is important to be transparent and provide accurate details.

• Ask yourself if you are trustworthy? does it seem too good to be true? and if so – are you committed and able to deliver all you have promised? Would you believe yourself (if you were on the customer side, of course …)?

• Try to anticipate what questions might cause hesitation at the prospect, and then answer them to eliminate resistance in advance.

  For example: How much does the shipping cost, how long does it take to arrive, whom to turn to if there’s a problem, what is the return/refund policy, is there warranty, is the website secure and so on.

  Most of these questions revolve around trust. The more you prove transparency and provide more information – the more the user will feel confident to buy from you.

• Most importantly – do not try to hard-sell. Offer a real value to the user. Create an image of experts and thought leaders in your field and avoid sounding too much like a pushy salesperson.

How to Boost Sense of Trust Using Visuals

In the previous part we learned how to build trust using words, and now we will learn how to do this using visual elements.

It is likely that before people read what you have to offer, they will examine and judge you according to your website visibility.

That’s how it is. First, they look at the vase and only then at what’s in it.

If you think about it for a moment, it is not something unusual. After all, this is how we behave in reality. We are drawn to beauty, order and cleanliness. These are things that leave a positive impression on us and contribute to our sense of trust.

A messy and sluttish shop will not give us the desire to buy in it, it will create fears and doubts that will turn us away and send us looking elsewhere. Therefore, it is very important to keep a friendly and pleasant website display.

Make sure to keep a spacious layout of the elements, a solid line both in design and content, use appropriate colors and use images you took and not ones that were downloaded from a free stock photos website.

To the bravest among you, I recommend using a real face image (yours or your employees’), so that your visitors can “really” get to know you and feel closer to you. The effect on the sense of trust is tremendous.

Look at the screenshots from BlueHost – one of the world’s largest storage servers today that handle more than 2 million websites. Which of the pages would you trust more?

If you chose the second option – you are not the only one. The lady there looks more real and convincing and the design looks cleaner and modern.

In the second design there’s less text and less emphasis of “UNLIMITED” stuff, however that is actually what make us trust it more. Bluehost also uses the color blue as their main color which is known for the psychological effect of trust and stress free.

More on optimizing trust using visual means:

Testimonials -

Almost every quarter there is a new research about the growing importance of users testimonials. Even if the customer don’t really know those recommending – they will perceive them as the recommendation of a close friend or even an acquaintance and will be affected by them in the process of acquisition.

Since users testimonials are so important, you should consider adding a platform on your website for leaving comments and opinions about products, so that anyone who wants to give his opinion on the purchasing process, the quality of the product and other aspects that relate to the purchasing process will be able to do so.

When your potential customers read reviews from people who have already purchased from you in the past (assuming that their experience was positive) – the purchasing process will seem to them much more natural and safe. It is easier for us to take action if we know someone has already done it before and was happy with it.

Logos of leading customers - When customers see that the largest and most successful companies in the market have chosen to invest their money in your product – it makes them feel more relaxed and increases their sense of security.

The customer will think to himself, “Wait, these are big companies must have double checked and know what’s best for them. If it’s good for them – why shouldn’t it be good for me?”

This is exactly the feeling we want them to feel.

When you present these companies on your website – it will tell a lot about you, it will push your position and make the potential customer feel that buying from you is the right decision. After all, a big and reliable company has already done it before, and if a big company did it then why shouldn’t the customer?

Secured purchase signs - Securing credit cards is perhaps the biggest concern of buyers today. If you want to be provided with sensitive details, such as personal information or credit card details, you would have to remove any concern about possible security bursts.

Make it clear to the users that their privacy is important to you and you do everything needed in order to protect it. Ensure that their data is well protected and you will not pass it to a third party. In addition, a relevant symbol of security will significantly enhance the sense of security, but be careful and do not overload in such!

Absurdly – excessive “reliable elements” can actually create the opposite effect and lead to suspicion.

An additional example can be found in the next screenshot that complies with all the rules perfectly – usually the biggest abandonment on e-commerce websites, occurs at the registration stage and afterward when filling the credit card details.

This website successfully transmits high confidence, especially in the first stage, using a clean design, highlighting the ease of buying (using Paypal / credit), the highest security, the business partners and eventually the awards the website has won.

There is no doubt that it makes the user feel he’s in good hands and will fill in his details, even if later on he would abandon the process, they will have his email address so they could send him reminders to return and complete the purchase.

FAQ page – we actually touched it a little earlier. We spoke about the importance of answering the user’s any possible question in advance in order to avoid hesitation.

Once you have consolidated a list of questions, provide them a solution and devote a special page on the site which will be easy to access, prominent and clear.

Here is a great post from Jason Shah that explains how to create a great FAQ pages that converts.

Contact Us - If you’ve done all this and feel your user still has doubts or something is not quite clear to him – show him that he always has someone and somewhere to turn to.

It is very important to place the contact buttons in prominent areas on the site and particularly on the payment pages, in order to remove as many obstacles as possible on the way to the purchase. You can provide a phone number or e-mail address, but the priority is to operate an online chat such as Zopim, LivePerson or Olark where you’ll always have a representative at any time for any question.

The sooner you answer – the more the customer will remain “hot”, therefore it is important to have a fast response.  Additionally, the possibility of instantaneous communication proves you really are there and that you are reliable, which provides you a few more trust points.

Summary

As you have noticed, building a reliable landing page requires a lot of thought and effort, but eventually it pays off big time.

You need to know your audience better, speak their language, create value and show it to them, as well as design and incorporate elements that make the visitor feel that you are the best choice for him. Once you do that, you will see how your conversions begin to soar.

There’s no doubt – trust is what converts visitors to customers, and this is the difference between a successful business to a business which is struggling for each transaction in order to survive.

And we are sure which side you want to be on…

Do you have any more tips that can improve the user’s trust on a website? Share them with us in the comments below.