Bill Wilson (5:16)
All right, everybody, this is it. The ultimate roast of B2B pricing pages. So I'm going to take you through a couple things today. I will try and make it as quickly as I, you know, get through it as quickly as I possibly can so that we can get to these great pages. But there's a couple things I want us to dig into. And the first thing is, like, what's the purpose of a pricing page? Now, we all know it's just to put our pricing on it, but really, if we look at our good friend here, good, better, best we can see, you know, a classic kind of layout. But what are we trying to do? And from my perspective, it's these four things. We're really trying to help the visitor understand what they're going to get and then who it's for. And probably the most important job of a pricing page is to be that clear and make it immediately obvious who it's for and what it is. The second thing we need to do is really start to build the visitors confidence and reassure them that they're making a good choice. And we can do this in a number of ways, which we'll dig into. And then we need to really show them their options. Like, we need to make sure that the offers are very, very clear and that they understand how to make a choice. So we really need to guide them towards the right option. And then finally, we need to make them take some kind of action. Right? This is what they're here for. It's like we need to get them to convert. That's the whole point. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to take you through these four sections as it relates to a pricing page, and the things that I think make the most sense around how to do some of those things. Now there's probably a lot more and Corinne and Emily will have lots of things to add to this, but I'm going to take you through each one. Okay, so the first thing is we need to focus clarity and we do that in a couple of ways. So here I've got a pricing page over on the right hand side, if you can see it there. And I've got a few things outlined here that you absolutely have to deal with when it comes to clarity. The very first thing is the main page heading and I see way too often people saying pricing, pricing plans, pick the plan for you or something along those lines. Don't do that, just put your value prop there. This is probably the second hardest working page on your website. Make it work. Like we all know the pricing pages for pricing. You don't need to tell me twice. So tell me what it is and you know who it's for. So that's to me is the number one thing that I see on pricing pages that did just get wrong. And then the next thing is around package names. And I'm really not a big fan of the generic package names that we all pick. It is very, very common. But I think we can do better as a group, you know, as a group of marketers, I think we can come up with better names for these packages that give a hint, just a hint as what it's for or who it's for. And if we can do that, I think combine that with the subheading right underneath it to really drive home who it is for and what they're going to be able to do with it, I think is probably the ultimate pricing page hack. You know, we absolutely, if we can get those things right, a lot of other things get really, really easy. So that's what I think about, you know, sort of the very first three things on a pricing page you need to nail are those. The next thing around clarity is the feature descriptions themselves. I see a lot of people use a lot of jargon, a lot of made up names, clever, cute things that they've come up with. Don't do that. Just keep it really, really simple and keep it in your customer's language. You know, if they understand the acronym and it's something they use all the time, use it, no problem. But if it's something you guys have created and you have to explain what it is, don't do it. Just spell it out, get it out there. I know that space is tight, but that's why this is hard and really, really important. So feature Descriptions have to be just right. Now, I like to do a jobs to be done test. At the end of all this, it's like if I can look at a package and understand the job that's trying to get done, then I think we've done a pretty good job of laying out the clarity for packaging. So that is all the things I think that you need to take into consideration with clarity. Now, of course, it permeates the whole page. There's lots of other places where everything has to be clear, but these are the big core pieces, I think. All right, the next thing we have to do is start building the confidence. People need to land on this page, start to feel that they're going to make a good choice. And we can do that in a couple of ways. I think there's three things that we really need to dig into and that is risk reversal, social proof, and of course, support. Those three things I think are crucial to helping people build confidence. And the very first place, just like in Clarity, the very first place is that page heading. So right underneath the page heading you have that subheading. Make it risk reversal. If you've got a free trial, say it. If you don't require a credit card, say it. If you have a money back guarantee, say it. Put it all right there. Don't make people guess. And I think it really helps immediately start to build that trust. So I think that's a big miss that I see a lot on pricing pages. And of course we need logos. Now. Everybody's like, I don't have a big, a lot of brand name logos. That's fine. Just put up the logos you have. That's still social proof. And in your industry that may, you know, may make sense. But more importantly to those logos is you need to have testimonials from people inside those companies. And I think if you are going to have testimonials, the number one thing I think you should do is make sure you have a photo, a really great quote, the name of the person, the title and the company. Make it as real as you possibly can. People love identifying themselves on these pages. They land on a page, they're scrolling down, they see, hey, I'm Bob, director of operations for a construction company. And there's another Bob on the pave that's also on the page, that's also a director, operations at a construction company. This is the right choice for me. Now if you can do it, I like to have a testimonial, at least one for every package, whoever that package is. Targeted at. I like to have one for every package. And on top of the testimonials, we can bring in third party reviews. And this comes with everything from badges from Capterra and you know, G2 and all that kind of stuff. Maybe a feed of reviews that are coming off the site. It's a little different than testimonials. Testimonials are company supplied, whereas the reviews are kind of coming from a third party. So it kind of gives a little bit of arm's length confidence that starts to build and then finally we get into that sort of support piece and the objection handling around well, how do I know this is for me? And I have all these questions surface every single question you've ever received about a subscription in your faq. What happens if I upgrade during the middle of the month? What happens if I go over my usage? Do you have a discount for nonprofits, et cetera, et cetera. Put all of that stuff in the faq, try and head them off at the pass and then finally make it really, really easy to get a hold of support. I really like having a chat bubble on a page because I think you can make it context aware and you can actually start surfacing questions or answers to pricing or even just the call to action. Start a free trial right there in the context aware chat. So people really want to feel like they can get support before and after the sale. So the next thing we're getting into is packaging. But before I do, I just want to say this. If you can nail the clarity and the confidence, you can have some shaky packaging and some shaky action stuff. But if you don't nail those things, it doesn't matter how good your packaging is and how good your calls to action are, it's not going to matter a lot. So really, really focus on that clarity and the confidence and then work on the packaging. The next thing I would say in terms of packaging, how do we make it really obvious how people should pick the right ones? And that is not to inundate them with every single feature you have in your product, but that is to show them the top three to five features for each of the plans. That one make it different from the other plan, but also are the most important thing for that audience. I see way too many pricing pages with just mile long feature comparison grids. And I think it's uncalled for. I think if at that early stage when someone first lands on the page, if you think about a first time visitor, they're just getting acquainted with this stuff and the next thing we hit them with is every single feature and every little checkbox we have. And then they're just lost in analysis paralysis and they get overwhelmed and it's just too much. So my suggestion is take all those kitchen sink features, package them up in a really beautiful pop up lightbox with sticky headers that scroll and the whole works with the prices, make it a really beautiful experience and just put it in a separate place. And that way the people who really want to go deep can go deep and the people who don't don't have to. And the people who do go deep, when they hit that X, they're right back where they left off and they can keep going down. The journey you've laid out for them on the page goes without saying. That feature list should be in priority order. Make sure that the most important features are at the top and keep driving the differentiation. Because the cross sell and upsell, you've got to keep moving that. And not everybody's going to start at the base plan. Especially if you got a good, better, best, you want people to pick the plan that's right for them. No matter where it is, it might be the best plan. The next thing I want to talk about in terms of packaging is value metrics. And this one's a little bit shaky sometimes, but really it's about how do you charge, not how much you're charging, but how you charge. So a value metric has to be a couple of things. One, it has to be incredibly close to your customer, the value your customer gets. So that's the first thing, it has to be very, very close to that. The next, it has to feel fair and familiar to them. They need to already measure this thing inside their business. And third, they need to be able to predict it. So in pricing, if you can get a great value metric, a lot of the other work becomes a lot simpler. It doesn't become easy necessarily, but it's definitely a simpler, straightforward line about how you actually position yourself. Because if you can align your pricing metric with your customer success, then your whole job is to try and make them as successful as possible. So that's how I look at value metrics. They should be surfaced right at the top. Make it very, very obvious. Some people have a couple of value metrics, make sure those are surfaced at the very, very top, and then we talk about pricing itself. Don't hide anything. Get your pricing on the page. I don't care if it's a starting at number or if it's every single plan. Make it incredibly easy for people to understand how I'm going to scale with your product and all the different charges that possibly could be there.