It’s not so easy to find pricing pages that are done well. Many of us may not even recognize a good pricing page when we see one.
Patrick Campbell has selected five pricing pages for SaaS companies that “really nail the concepts of proper pricing strategy.” In Lessons from the Top 5 SaaS Pricing Pages he explains what makes them superior.
These pages succeed on three dimensions:
- Clear buyer persona alignment
- Phenomenal use of scaling value metrics
- Being just darn beautiful
Buyer Persona Alignment
All pricing exercises begin with a clear understanding of your different buyer personas. Well-understood buyer personas go well beyond general descriptions on a powerpoint slide. They arise out of an exercise where you quantify and streamline your primary personas.
Persona alignment enables you to design a marketing and customer acquisition funnel. Your funnel will lead each persona to the destination where you can sell “the right product, at the right price, to the right person.”
Campbell explains how Salesforce.com illustrates excellent alignment between buyer personas and pricing tiers. Salesforce has defined tiers of customer persona such that few customers would overlap or fall between the tiers.
Scaling Value Metrics
Once you’ve aligned your pricing with your buyers’ personas, you are ready to assign value metrics to your different personas.
What are value metrics? They are simply the unit that a customer pays for – number of users, GB of storage, number of seats, etc.
Larger customers get more out of your product and they should pay for that value. Smaller customers need less, so you can give them less value and attract them with a lower price.
The idea is that “through usage throttling and feature differentiation,” you can capture customers at all points on the demand curve.
Campbell shows how two companies with very different customer profiles – HubSpot and Insightly – have scaled their value metrics to fit their customer needs.
Beautiful design
Let’s not forget the power of good design to help customers make a pricing and purchase decision. You’ve gone to a lot of work to bring buyers to your pricing page. You’ve made it easy for each buyer persona to recognize themselves and their needs. You’ve grouped your value metrics so that everyone is paying for their value, but no more.
Now make it easy for your buyers to quickly understand your pricing.
Campbell describes several ways that UserVoice and Docusign have designed clear and concise pricing pages. These pages provide enough detail, but not so much that they confuse their customers.
Pricing is a process
Campbell and his team at Price Intelligently return to the same idea over and over again. Pricing is a process. Gather lots of information and data, but assign the decision to one person. Develop the ability to make pricing decisions without expensive and temporary consultants. Make conversation about pricing a regular habit in your company.
With this article he’s shown some useful examples of pricing done right.