Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Growth hacking basics
Lecture: Pricing pages
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0:02
When you've got a bunch of prospective customers using your product and engaging with it,
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you'd like to see them move from prospective into actually paying customers. So I wanted to go over some non-intuitive parts of pricing pages
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that will help you to think past just the basic design of the page. Once again, we'll take a look at a few examples.
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I've used MailChimp as an example throughout many of these videos, and their pricing page is also a really great example as well.
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They only have three options here. Now technically MailChimp has more of a spectrum from free to really expensive paid accounts,
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but they've made the smart decision to keep things really simple on their pricing page. On the left, you've got free, which hopefully by the point
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that people are actually looking at the pricing page, they are already on the free account, so they know where they sit
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and they are probably considering going up to a paid account. And one of the non-intuitive things about the psychology of pricing pages
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is that you want the gaps between pricing plans to be meaningful, it does very little if growing business and pro marketer
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were only separated by five dollars per month, well that will introduce his hesitation- should they go for the less expensive plan
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or should they go for the more expensive one, it's only hypothetically a five dollar a month difference in that example,
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so they may just say I don't know what to pick, and they'll close the browser and say I'll decide on it later, and maybe later is never.
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So what you actually see here, is a huge gulf between growing business and pro marketer, it makes it really easy to make the decision.
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If you're in a large company, chances are you are just gonna pick the pro marketer,
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you know that it's easier to get that larger plan through your procurement and legal team,
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rather than some tiny little amount that could be put on a credit card each month.
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But if you're running your own business, or just getting started with your startup, the growing business plan is probably going to be the one for you.
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So that's the first thing to learn from these pricing pages. Make sure that the difference between the pricing plans is distinct enough
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that people don't have to hesitate when trying to decide; it should be very clear to them which category do they fall into.
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We've also used Zendesk as an example and there is a slightly different model,
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this one might also fit in yours if you're considering a per seat licensing agreement, so for example you multiply each of these plans by a hundred,
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if you had in their terms a hundred agents, while each of these columns doesn't look like it's that big of a difference from one to the other,
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when you're considering per seat, it's going to add up very quickly. One thing that's great about this page is that it shows you
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when you move from left to right, you get every single thing plus new features on top of it. So if you're considering team vs professional,
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you can very quickly see the biggest features that may impact your decision whether you should choose one or the other.
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In the worst case scenario a pricing page would make you decide which features that you want to mix and match make it too complicated to see,
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well if I upgrade from the 19 dollar a month plan to the 49 dollar a month plan, do I actually lose some features?
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This is very clean for deciding what do you need based on the state of your business.
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One thing I don't like about this, but I understand why Zendesk did it, because they have many customers across a wide spectrum,
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but in some businesses you really want people to make a decision that you are in heavily influencing,
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so for example you want to highlight one of these plans the one that is actually most applicable to the vast majority of your audience.
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Dropbox does this with its pricing plan page, where it talks about the most popular plan. It just highlights this one on the left is the most popular,
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so if you're undecided or you're not deciding for a business, you'll just know ok that's the plan that I need to choose.
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Let's take a look at one more example. On Swiftype's pricing their amounts ratchet up quickly,
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and they're really pushing people towards the business class. Chances are most of their prospective customers
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are going to choose business anyway, and they're trying to catch some of the lower and startups with a basic plan,
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and that's why they have it, just in case. But really they're trying to push most businesses to choose that pretty much 1,000 dollar a month plan.
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When you're designing your own pricing page, you know your own business, what is the plan that you would prefer your users to choose?
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If it's a 100 dollars a month, then one way to subtly influence people choosing that 100 dollars a month would be to create a 500 dollar a month plan
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with all the same features plus maybe one or two features that aren't that useful for the majority of your prospective customers.
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That way they feel like they're getting a really great deal with a 100 dollar a month plan, because they're only paying a 100 dollars a month
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versus 500 dollars a month, and they don't need those couple extra features that aren't that big of a deal.
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So that's one way you can subtly influence and guide customers towards a certain pricing plan that's not only going to be something
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that they can't make an easy decision on, they can just immediately put in their credit card or they can decide right there on the spot,
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but also it fits the pricing model that works best for your application and your business.
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If you're just getting started, you may not really be sure about the really large accounts,
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and so that's why a lot of these pricing pages include a custom plan with a contact sales button just in case a really large customer is interested
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in some enterprise features that maybe aren't even built out yet, but they want to explore that through a direct conversation.
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As we are deciding how to put together your pricing plan, and move customers down the funnel from sign up to usage
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to actually paying for your product or service, we should take a look at a lot of different pricing plans that are out there,
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see which ones are closest to your business, which ones are similar to the business model that you've created.
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One way to see them quickly at a glance is to go to pricingpages.xyz, there is a really great list of curated pricing plans,
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that you can scroll through and see how many companies out there are positioning their own pricing.
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Those are some examples of growth hacking and ways to market your business, so you can start to move customers from awareness
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which is hopefully generated by your content marketing, through the evaluation, sign up process,
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getting them using your product and ultimately paying for it. So you can start generating some revenue and keep your business self-sustaining.