Service as a software companies had better put their best SaaS pricing pages forward if they hope to stay on top of the competition.
The thing is, it’s not easy developing the perfect pricing page, no matter what type of service you offer.
You may wonder if you should have a free plan. Or, you may want to price your SaaS low to gain an initial market share before you ramp things up. But what if your low fees equal low-quality in the eyes of consumers?
At the same time, if you price your SaaS too high, you may lose out to those keeping to a strict budget.
If your SaaS pricing strategy has you scratching your head, not to worry. Here are some tips to consider when creating the best SaaS pricing pages for your organization.
— Want to develop SaaS pricing pages that attract more users and push more conversions? Sign up with Crazy Egg’s free 30-day trial and try the SaaS before you commit! —
What is a SaaS Pricing Page?
A software as a service pricing page is precisely what it sounds like. It’s a page that describes the various SaaS services and their monthly fees. To see an example, take automation SaaS Zapier.
The company offers four tiers of pricing that give its audience much to consider before they sign up.
Is this the best pricing strategy?
To determine if that’s the case, we would need to analyze Zapier’s business model, cost per lead, and ROI, among other metrics.
However, based upon first impressions, this appears to be based on standard software pricing strategies, and the company has done a good job. There are even prices for teams and companies as opposed to individuals, giving consumers plenty to options to satisfy their automation needs.
Here’s another by Salesforce. Notice how the colors pop and draw you in. And, like Zapier, this company has managed to create various tiers for individuals, businesses, and the goals customers would like to achieve.
Does your SaaS pricing page look like these examples? If not, that’s okay.
There are many variations when it comes to SaaS pricing strategies.
Sadly, most software as a service companies only spend six hours on their pricing pages. If that’s the case for your organization, you might want to reconsider making your pricing pages a top priority.
Key Benefits of a Well-Designed SaaS Pricing Page
When your SaaS pricing page is optimized to the fullest, you’ll know that it’s perfectly targeted for your buyer persona.
The page will reflect the true value of your software as a Service company and should keep your customers subscribing and using your service every month for years.
On the other hand, if your pricing strategy is lacking, you won’t sign up as many subscribers, your conversions will suffer, and your organization may go under.
No pressure, right?
However, you can be sure that your pricing strategy is the best it can be, and the page it’s displayed on, by following in the footsteps of the best SaaS companies in operation today.
Examples of the Best SaaS Pricing Pages
We’ve already covered two good examples of pricing pages that you can emulate. Here are a couple more. Choose the best one and create a pricing page template that you can then use for your SaaS organization.
#1 Headline
Take a look at Hubspot’s headline for their marketing hub platform. If you’re in marketing, growth is exactly what you’re after.
So, the headline “Your Inbound Platform for Growth” might just be music to a marketing manager’s ears.
The company drives its pricing strategy home further by adding that customers can start using the service absolutely free, then upgrade as they go.
#2 Billing
Mailchimp has an exemplary billing model that is very straightforward. You can sign up absolutely free for the first 2,000 email subscribers. Once you start growing, you pay the minimal fee of $10, and then $199 for the Pro version. This way, much like Hubspot, Mailchimp helps you scale without breaking the bank.
#3 Freemium
Trello, the SaaS organization and productivity platform, has offered a freemium model since its inception. That means that users can sign up for no money down and use the site forever, or at least until they’re ready to gain access to all the bells and whistles that come with the premium model.
This pricing strategy works well because Trello is essentially putting its money where it’s mouth is. It’s showing people just how good the platform is by offering it free-to-use. The SaaS company, like the others on our list, allows you to scale at your own pace.
To make things even more convenient for customers, Trello gives premium users a choice between monthly and annual billing. In this case, customers can pay $9.99 each month for an annual membership as opposed to $12.99 for monthly billing. By committing to a year, users can save as they begin taking advantage of all the benefits the premium model offers.
#4 Features
Collaboration platform Basecamp has definitely done its homework when it comes to its SaaS pricing strategy.
Using a simple diagram, the company shows how it offers much more than five other competing platforms, all while saving big. Instead of paying $170 and change for Slack, Asana, Dropbox, and Gsuite, Basecamp offers all of its incredible features for a low flat fee of $99.
How to Set Up Your SaaS Pricing Page
Now you’re ready to develop your own effective SaaS pricing page. First, you’ll need to learn how to price SaaS software. Then, you’ll take your pricing and add benefits and other important details in an easy-to-read and understand page.
Here are some more tips to consider.
Keep Options Simple
Take a page from the SaaS organizations above and don’t go crazy with all your tiers, prices and strategies. It’s best to use the KISS strategy, and that’s to keep it super simple.
Whether you have a freemium model, two pricing tiers or you have tiers for individuals and businesses, ensure that your pricing page isn’t too cluttered. The information should be easy to comprehend at a single glance, much like Basecamp’s pricing page above.
You don’t need to study the entire page to get the gist of the company’s message. You only need to look at the two boxes, compare, and realize that Basecamp is the far better deal.
Give Your Customers Resources
This point is about providing maximum value to your consumers. Look at this example of an SaaS pricing page that does an excellent job of building hype before customers buy.
Your pricing page should offer plenty of information to customers so that they can select the best subscription model to suit their needs.
Bill.com does this quite well. The company first lets you know which of these four pricing strategies is the most popular. That alone might help you make a good decision by choosing the corporate tier.
If the corporate tier doesn’t suit your needs, Bill.com offers an incredible list of benefits under all the other tiers. This leaves customers feeling as though they are receiving maximum value. The company goes a step further by offering a range of transaction services for those who sign up.
This pricing page is not only informative, but it gives consumers the necessary resources to select the pricing strategy that suits their goals and budget.
Furthermore, the company invites consumers to request a quote if they’re interested in the Enterprise model. If consumers get confused or lost at this stage of your sales funnel, they may bounce and you’ll never hear from them again.
If you give consumers the option to contact sales, ask your sales bot a question, or you provide a FAQ page that lists the answers for the most asked questions during the sales process, you can go a long way toward developing maximum value and breeding customer loyalty as you earn more sales.
Use Mental Triggers
As a digital marketer, you may be accustomed to using mental triggers to push the conversion. The same concept applies to SaaS pricing pages.
Close.io is excellent at using mental triggers on its pricing page. The headline draws in consumers with its promise of closing more sales deals faster, and for less money. The company then builds value by driving home that the CRM is modern and comes complete with email and phone calls built-in.
Notice how all the call-to-action buttons are green? That’s a psychological trick to get people to proceed. After all, doesn’t green mean go?
Finally, inside all of those CTAs is the beautiful phrase, “Try for Free,” allowing consumers to test drive the CRM before they commit.
All of these tactics combined make for a powerful SaaS pricing page that you might be wise to copy and tailor for your needs.
Encourage Upfront, Annual Payments
Earlier, we discussed how Trello offers both monthly and annual pricing strategies. By selecting the annual billing model, consumers can save nearly $3 per month.
Not only that but clicking the buy button once is much better than having money taken out of the account every month. You can mention this on your pricing pages to further drive home that an upfront annual payment is far more convenient.
Offering an annual pricing strategy works for your benefit, also, as when you bill monthly you give consumers too many chances to cancel. An annual subscription will lock your consumers in for at least a year, giving you a nice bump in revenue over any monthly model.
Key Tips to Create the Best SaaS Pricing Pages for Your Business
When you’re ready to develop your own SaaS pricing strategy and accompanying page, ensure you keep the following in mind.
- Learn More About Your Audience
When you priced your SaaS, did you first check with your audience to see if they’d pay that much? This point is incredibly important, as your consumers are going to decide in a split second whether your pricing matches your service’s value and falls in line with their budget.
- Tailor Your Pricing for Your Consumer
If you’re unsure how your consumers feel about your pricing strategy, why not ask them? Surveys are a terrific way to gauge the needs and budgets of those who fall within your target audience group.
When coming up with effective pricing, decide how much value your audience is going to get from your SaaS. Will they be using the platform a couple times a month? If so, that might warrant a lower fee than a platform that will be used daily, such as a sales CRM.
However, don’t think that your pricing strategy needs to remain set in stone. You can always test your pricing to see if it matches the needs of your audience and if you are getting maximum value for every lead you close.
- Keep Your Options Simple
You have many options when it comes to developing your SaaS pricing pages. There are individual pricing strategies, enterprise strategies, and some SaaS organizations choose both.
Make sure that all the information is easy to access. Offering tabs that users can click to separate the individual from business pricing tiers is an effective way to compartmentalize and present the information clearly to consumers.
You are also encouraged to test the layout of your pricing pages. You may decide to add more benefits or remove some, add new pricing tiers, or an entirely new level of tiers, such as those for Enterprise customers.
Nothing you do on you pricing pages needs to remain. Only when it works should you keep using the strategies you have in place. Testing is paramount, however, so that you can improve your pricing pages over time.
- Offer Currency Conversion Information
Don’t assume that everyone using your platform uses U.S. dollars as their main form of currency. For that reason, make currency information readily available on your SaaS pricing pages.
Hubspot does this nicely by offering a range of options for consumers who may reside in other areas of the world.
Offering currency conversion information keeps you from limiting your audience and you’ll be seen as providing greater value for those who do prefer to use another currency for their SaaS transactions.
- Use Consistent Branding
Your pricing page should use the same colors and logos as all the other elements of your web presence. This prevents customers from getting confused, and it makes your pricing page look like less of an afterthought.
Instead, make your pricing page grand and help it stand out with bold colors that match your brand’s color scheme.
While you don’t want your SaaS to look like you’re all about money, you do want to make it apparent to consumers that you’ve spent a lot of time considering your pricing strategy and developing a pricing page that works.
Leverage Psychology
This point is more about pricing page design, which means that the layout, colors, and interactive elements of your pricing page all need to work together for maximum effect.
Study the color wheel and determine what color combinations you can use that match your branding and create the psychological triggers necessary for your audience to convert.
Your calls-to-action should be in bold colors so that they’re easy to see, and your benefits should be listed in order from least valuable to most valuable, as that’s how people tend to read.
You can also leverage psychology with copywriting. Ensure that your headline speaks to your consumers’ needs, whether they want more sales, to grow their operation, or more efficiency with their day-to-day processes.
You are then encouraged to use copywriting to create calls-to-action buttons that demand to be clicked. Try for Free has been used by quite a few brands, so that might be a CTA phrase to test once your SaaS pricing page goes live.
Make the Action Obvious and Urgent
The last thing you want is for your consumers to click the buy button and nothing happens. Be grand about the fact that your consumers just put their trust in you.
Whether you’re blasting an autoresponder email, presenting your consumers with a thank you page, or you plan to send them something via snail mail, make sure consumers are aware of what’s about to happen.
Just as your pricing pages should never be an afterthought, neither should the next steps after the conversion. Let your consumers know that you’re pleased they chose your company for their software as a service needs, and that you can’t wait to deliver more value in the coming months.
For added value, consider offering your converted a whitepaper or some other download they can use to get the most from your SaaS offering.
A/B Test Your SaaS Pricing Pages
Once again, your SaaS pricing pages don’t have to be perfect the moment they go live. Instead, you are encouraged to test every aspect of your pricing pages until you find the right combinations of elements that attract the most interest and push the most conversions.
A/B testing means that you’ll take two identical pricing pages, then you’ll change the headline of one, for example. By sending those two pages to the same audience, you can see which headline fares better. You can A/B test headlines, images, layout, prices, benefits, calls-to-action, and every other element consumers may see.
Take Advantage of Crazy Egg Testing Features
One of the best A/B testing platforms for SaaS companies happens to be Crazy Egg. The SaaS was one of the first to offer the innovative technology known as heatmaps, which provide you with a visual representation of how consumers act once they’ve landed on your website.
You can use heatmaps to see if visitors to your SaaS pricing page are scrolling to the CTA. If not, you’ll know that some element of your site above the fold needs work. These elements will need to be tested to determine where the roadblock happens to be.
The good news is that Crazy Egg offers A/B and multivariate testing, along with site recordings and site snapshots, all tools that can help you develop the most effective SaaS pricing page to suit your audience.
Conclusion
You have a lot to consider when developing a SaaS pricing strategy and the accompanying pricing page. By showing you a few examples, you should now have a better idea of how to develop your own page to suit the needs of your consumers.
By developing a pricing strategy that matches your brand value and the needs of your consumers, and by leveraging psychology and keeping it super simple, you can develop a pricing page that competes with even the best of SaaS brands.
Finally, never stop testing your pricing pages so that you can determine if your pricing, tiers, benefits, and other elements are the most effective for your organization goals.
When you want to take your SaaS pricing pages to the next level, sign up with Crazy Egg’s 30-day free trial. With heatmaps, snapshots, recordings, and A/B testing, Crazy Egg is a must for SaaS brands that want more from their pricing strategies and pages.
