Communicating your business’s pricing can be a challenge, especially if you offer clients a range of service packages or bundles.
The right design and content can help you effectively list these packages on your company website — ensuring that customers can find the package that’s right for their needs.
Here’s how successful online brands organize their pricing packages — and strategies you can use to improve your pricing page.
1. Keep It Simple
No matter what services your business offers, you’ll want to keep your pricing page as simple as possible without being misleading or leaving out important information.
Consumer research has found that many businesses — and especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies — create complex pricing pages that can confuse even savvy or well-informed customers.
These pages may steer customers away from a sale, even if the business is offering a product that meets their particular needs.
For some business owners, keeping the pricing page simple may be a real challenge. You may have complex pricing packages or a variety of services available. Restructuring your pricing may not be an option — meaning you’ll need to find ways to make your pricing page as clear and easy to follow as possible.
Fortunately, even if your pricing structure is somewhat complex, there are strategies you can use to simplify your pricing page.
2. Make Comparison Easy
Often, businesses offer multiple pricing tiers. More expensive tiers are upgrades to less expensive tiers, providing added value or additional services. Not every customer will want the most expensive tier — meaning that they’ll benefit from site features that let them quickly compare tiers to find the right value and features at the right price point.
One strategy is to place each of the packages is in a row, allowing visitors to quickly scan and compare each package. For example, see this pricing page from Shutter & Sound, a Maryland-based wedding videographer.
Using four panels, the website lays out each pricing package in a way that makes them extremely easy to compare.
Key information — like the length of the highlight video, the number of cameramen and the available hours of coverage — is presented in each panel in roughly the same location, allowing customers to see how more expensive tiers offer additional value.
The site also uses contrast to highlight the most popular package, drawing consumers to the tier that they are most likely to invest in.
3. Consider Diverging Audience Needs
Many online retailers or service providers are B2M companies — serving both individuals and business customers. They may have diverging price tiers that appeal to these different audience segments.
An effective price page should consider these different audiences and find a way to steer customers towards the price packages that will be most relevant to their needs — and away from packages that they may not need at all. At the same time, the site design should avoid assuming customer needs and hiding information they may require.
For an example of a diverging price page in action, check out this pricing page from Adobe.
In addition to the two pricing tiers available on this page, there are also another two pages of prices for different customer categories. Clicking on the “Business” or “Students & Teachers’ tabs reveals these options while hiding potentially irrelevant plans.
This organizational strategy helps ensure that all customers can find the information they need without overwhelming a visitor with plans they may not be interested in.
If your business offers plans to more than one group of customers — like to individuals and businesses — designing your pricing page like this can help you funnel visitors towards plans that are most likely to be relevant.
Hiding some information but making it clear how to access it can help you organize pricing details when not every plan will be an option for every customer.
4. Eliminate Friction Points
A common strategy for pricing package design is to align each tier with a buyer persona — the representation of a major target segment or audience your business wants to capture.
Organizing your pricing like this will help ensure that you meet all customer needs — and that each package corresponds to a group of customers that has unique or particular demands.
For example, see this pricing page from Streak, provider of a CRM and project management tools designed to integrate with Gmail.
Like many other pricing pages, this page includes a detailed breakdown of the different tiers and how they differ from each other.
This information helps customers make more informed decisions about a purchase, but it also takes up space. Customers that scroll through the breakdown will end up at the bottom of the page, away from the links that will move them further along the purchasing process.
To allow customers to move towards a purchase quickly, the site designers have added some additional links below the price package comparison.
It’s a small detail, but one that eliminates a lot of friction, which could otherwise slow customers down significantly before a sale.
Finding similar friction points in your own site and solving them with changes like those implemented by Streak can help you keep customers moving towards conversion. User behavior data and other information may help you identify these friction points more quickly.
5. Don’t Forget Your Branding
As with the rest of your website, your pricing page is a great opportunity to reinforce your business’s branding. Design elements like page colors, shape language and word choice can all help you communicate brand values on your business’s pricing page.
While many businesses choose to play it safe and keep their pricing page on the generic side, you don’t have to take this approach.
It’s likely that customers who have navigated to this page are already interested in your brand. Showing off a little and restating your brand narrative or values can be a good idea, so long as the page also effectively communicates pricing information.
For an example of how pricing pages can also be great brand ambassadors, see this page from budget solution provider Procurify.
The colors, the pricing package names and the vocabulary used to describe the packages all work together to reinforce Procurify’s brand — which is bright, colorful and little bit quirky.
At the same time, the page still communicates everything that customers need to know about the different packages and doesn’t sacrifice professionalism.
While a more staid and professional look will always work for your pricing page, you shouldn’t be afraid of throwing in splashes of color or interesting word choices like those used by Procurify — especially if you have a brand that wants to emphasize design elements that are fun, energetic or unconventional.
In any case, it’s important to keep pricing page aligned with the rest of your site, even if you don’t want it to act as a brand representative. Keeping the colors, fonts and word choices consistent with the rest of your site design will help you avoid confusing customers or creating a pricing page that feels disjointed from the rest of your web presence.
6. Don’t Leave Anything Out
In some cases, it may be necessary to not publish certain pricing information directly on your website. You may provide quotes or project-based pricing, for example, and can’t really offer an accurate estimate of how much the average customer will have to pay.
If you do have pricing packages ready, however, leaving this information off of your website — or selectively omitting certain packages or tiers — can easily frustrate and confuse potential buyers.
The inclusion of all available price packages on your website is essential. While you may want to highlight or prioritize certain tiers or packages, it’s important that customers can see all of their options at a glance.
Even if you choose to gate certain tiers behind navigation bars or similar elements, as in the Adobe example listed above, it should be obvious that there is additional information on the page that visitors can access..
Transparency like this will help make your brand seem more trustworthy, build customer confidence and encourage customers to further research your business.
7. Align Tiers With Buyer Personas
A common strategy for pricing package design is to align each tier with a buyer persona — the representation of a major target segment or audience your business wants to capture.
Organizing your pricing like this will help ensure that you meet all customer needs — and that each package corresponds to a group of customers that has unique or particular demands.
Otherwise, you may risk creating tiers or pricing packages that don’t really have an audience. These packages will take up valuable real estate on your pricing page, as well as other resources.
Essential Strategies for Pricing Package Lists
How you list your pricing packages can have a major impact on your business’s average customer journey. Simple strategies can help you ensure that the design of your pricing package lists helps customers move forward, towards a conversion.
Easy comparison of different packages, pages that consider diverging audience segments and effective branding will all help you make the most of your pricing pages.
