Hey y'all! Next Thursday, I'll be co-hosting a webinar with Casey Hill. In it, we're going to dig into the DoWhatWorks data and cover four pricing page tactics that consistently drive conversions, including: - The Right Number of Plans ​ - Pricing Plan Subheaders that Sell - Clear, Action-Oriented CTAs ​ - Sign-Up Form Optimization ​ If you're working on a PLG product, we'd love to see you there. Register at the link below: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jmhWBrduQ0SEIjG7oDhLAQ#/registration Until next time 🫡 Rob

The majority of pricing pages make this mistake and it hurts revenue ⬇️ Instead of building affinity, they use their plan-tier subheader to give a generic product description. Under a “Pro” or “Growth” plan, you’ll see lines like: “Optimize operations with data and customizations” “Connect work across teams” “Build and manage automated AI-powered workflows” None of these help me quickly identify which plan is best for me. Your plan subheader should simplify the decision-making process. Companies like Notion, Shopify, Docusign and Asana do a great job of creating instant affinity: Shopify says, “For solo entrepreneurs.” Notion says, “For individuals to organize personal projects and life.” Straightforward. Asana’s Advanced plan reads: “For companies that need to manage a portfolio of work and goals across departments.” If you’re a team planning to use Asana across multiple departments, that line immediately guides you. But what’s the actual impact of these changes? In 2019, I was hired by a public company to optimize their pricing page. We ran numerous A/B tests, but one impactful change was strengthening the affinity in their plan subheader text. Overall conversions didn’t change meaningfully, but we did shift ~2% more conversions from lower-tier plans to the middle plan (our primary goal), which led to a substantial ARPU lift over the next few quarters.

I spent the last few weeks exploring this question, digging into the data, and talking to teams. The Black Friday offer itself in SaaS is fairly uniform: 30-50% off annual deals (for the first year). Over 80% of the BF offers I encountered were in this format. So what did I find? Summary: For VSB/SMB focused SaaS with an average annual contract value below $8,000/year and a churn rate above 3.5% MoM, running a Black Friday deal on your site is likely beneficial. What I found about these deals is the following… 1) BF site promotions convert best as a pipeline accelerant. The best application is to take interested, but price-sensitive customers, and get them over the line. As such, running retargeting to a page with the BF offer is ideal over just showing the BF offer globally. 2) They are good for cash flow (especially if churn is high). By running the promo, you lock in the customer for a year. We find that high churn brands (SMB focused brands with churn of >3.5% MoM) benefit from the additional time to establish value. 3) Churn is +8% (annually) in customers who take BF deals (and closer to +15% for cold traffic that takes BF offer). A major contributing factor here is the large price hike once a 50% discount falls off in year 2. The majority of brands I am looking at or talking with only offer the BF discount for year 1. 4) They hike up on-page conversions. We find that brands see anywhere from a 3 - 8% increase in annual purchases from BF site banners and homepage promotions. 5) No change from promotion countdown timers. Looking at dozens of promos with a countdown time and without, I saw no statistical difference in lift or subsequent churn vs. a regular banner without. Have you run a Black Friday banner on your website? What was your data on it?

Rippling recently wrapped up an interesting A/B test on their demo form ⬇️ They wanted to know if a center-framed form or a right-aligned form + content on the left would win. At DoWhatWorks, we find that the isolated form on page (vs. form + additional side-by-side content) tends to win. Besides Rippling, we see this from Zendesk, Brex, Elevenlabs, and dozens of others. Having tested this myself (and studied heatmaps), and talking with teams that have seen lift with the center form, I think a lot of this is tied to time-to-completion. With the additional content, folks spend more time digesting your framing and looking at your talking points (and potentially even seeing flags that worry them, like 4.4 stars on a social proof icon) before they get to form fill out. Obviously, with any of these trends, there is a lot of nuance (what is the traffic source, how does it vary by industry, how do multi-step forms factor in etc.). In addition, for individual tests like this Rippling test, when there are more variables changed at once, that can muddy things. But this is where having a large data pool across dozens (even hundreds of tests) on the same website elements can help us reduce the noise and increase the signal. Have you tested this on your demo form before? What did you find?

I looked at the top 100 software companies and only one of them does this... Mailchimp offers a quiz on their pricing page to highlight the best plan for you. I know folks are skeptical of this. They are concerned the quiz will upsell. But I am bullish on this for a few reasons… 1) If a prospect wants to manually select the best plan themselves, they can. This is just an option, one that a person like me would prefer to take to shortcut the process, but nobody is forced into the quiz. At the end of the quiz, Mailchimp also has a summary section where they detail why you were recommended that specific plan based on the features and specs you requested. 2) Pricing, especially for multi-product SaaS, is complex. This is a way to simplify things for users. I think we are moving in a direction where all these quiz inputs could lead to an AI-prefilled prompt that gives a nuanced and in-depth answer as to what plan is best, and the result could be embedded on your pricing page next to the plans, so you don’t have to leave the page. Instead of “Find my Plan” it could even say “Ask ChatGPT what plan is best for me". 3) The way we interface with websites is going to change. We are moving towards a world where a prospect goes to a site and types their intent into an LLM-style input box. The input then creates the site experience from the exact intent and questions the prospect has. That world I envision would naturally move towards pricing being pre-selected based on needs/preferences, and I think prospects are going to get used to this style of interfacing (in the same way that most users today are comfortable with a single LLM output versus having dozens of links to browse through when they search something on Google). Do you think in the future consumers are going to get more used to typing in their needs and getting a single output (LLM style) versus browsing (Google classic style)?