How should you position add-ons?

In 2019, I signed a pricing page contract with a public company.

One primary challenge they wanted to address was their add-on positioning.

Problem: They had high inbound traffic/trials, of which they felt roughly 25% could benefit from this additional adjacent add-on. Currently, they had ~3% adoption. The add-on was listed below each plan tier, but was primarily promoted in-app during the trial and via email.

Some quick definitions when it comes to add-ons.

Complementary add-on: If an add-on is directly connected to the main product line or widely applicable to the main audience, I call this a complementary add-on (I.e. you are an email marketing company, and you offer SMS as an add-on)

Adjacent add-on: If an add-on is a distinct offering relevant to a smaller cohort of customers, say you do business accounting software, but have an HR suite add-on, I call this an adjacent add-on.

Here are the things we tried that were effective and the things we tried that flopped.

What worked…

1) We asked buyers on a multi-step intake if they had the problem that our adjacent add-on solved for. If they indicated yes, on the final sign-up step, we automatically added the add-on (with the ability for them to uncheck it). This led to a 3-4% upfront adoption lift.

2) We removed the add-on description/section from the main pricing plans and had a box for it separately down below. For complementary add-ons, I find it’s helpful to make it as turnkey as possible to add. Have a toggle or some basic option to add directly connected to the plans, “Email is $29/m -> Email + SMS is $39/m”. But for adjacent add-ons, because they are only relevant to a portion of your audience, this adds a lot of noise.

3) We added a sales-assist call. Their current add-on approach was nearly entirely marketing and product-driven. But when we identified the right fit folks and offered a complementary call to help them connect the adjacent add-on (remember this was now being added by default to the right fit folks), we saw a lift in adoption (and stickiness).

What flopped…

4) We tried more contextualized in-app pop-ups. We iterated across multiple different pop-ups in-app at various points where it seemed like it would make sense for relevant customers to get the add-on. But it didn’t work. I think the hurdle is that when customers are navigating the platform, they have specific intent, and interrupting that with a sales pitch, even a relevant one, doesn’t seem very effective.

5) We tried half a dozen copy iterations. We tried positioning related to the benefits, we tried tying it to the capabilities, we tried tying it to why it was differentiated from what their current setup might offer… None of these positioning tweaks worked. I think part of the challenge was all of these copy changes were on the upfront add-on section. What we learned was that we wanted to first assess if they had the problem this solved for, and then we wanted to showcase the value.

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