Syed Naimath 8 years ago
The pricing page for VWO eschews conventions.
It doesn’t follow the rules.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the pricing table for Visual Website Analyzer (or VWO).
VWO is a A/B testing tool, letting you conduct split tests without knowing a line of code. The company is entirely bootstrapped, and is highly successful in its target market.
They’ve managed to make more than $7M in revenue. Evidently, they’re on the right track.
What can you learn from the Visual Website Optimizer pricing table, that you can apply to your own pricing charts?
Let’s start with lesson #1!
VWO uses two separate cards in its pricing table.
The first card is further divided into two plans. Both share a common set of features, but vary on the total monthly visitors it tracks.
The second card – highlighted with a yellow background – has a plan that is significantly more expensive. It is meant for enterprise customers.
It is important to understand why VWO does this. From the plans, it is clear that VWO’s customers can be put into two categories:
The first category of users want a simple tool that can help test on-page elements, and different landing pages.
Security, advanced targeting, 24×7 phone support, and extensive on-boarding are not a priority.
VWO highlights this user base in its plan description –
Users of the Enterprise plan, however, need more than just conventional split testing capabilities. These are businesses running hundreds of tests simultaneously, on heavily trafficked pages.
A 2% increase in conversion rate can mean millions of dollars in extra annual revenue.
For such users, dedicated account managers, phone support, advanced segmentation and targeting are essential features. Without it, VWO would be like any other optimization tool.
These features are clearly highlighted on the Enterprise plan card –
The key lesson: choose a pricing table structure that meets your customer requirements. Never the other way around.
VWO doesn’t make its prospects compare features to figure out which plan they should use. They state the target audience for each plan outright:
This reduces confusion while purchasing and makes buying decision easier. That’s a key focus in any CRO exercise.
VWO understands its audience well. They know that many agencies use their service to manage multiple accounts.
So they have has a separate section for such users:
Let’s take a quick look at the VWO pricing page again:
Notice something?
The color blue is conspicuous by its absence. Except for the CTA button.
This is a deliberate strategy to make the CTA stand out. Unlike orange or red, blue isn’t a color that automatically draws attention.
It is, however, the color people associate with business.
As KISSMetrics notes, blue is the color of trust, integrity and peace. Businesses use it because it tells potential customers that they can believe in it.
That’s especially important considering color determines 62-90% of a customer’s response to a product).
A blue CTA, on an otherwise gray and beige page, attracts attention. That the color itself evokes trust, is the icing on top.
The CTA for the Enterprise plan, on the other hand, is green. Green is a natural choice for CTAs since it stands out on most pages, due to the von Restorff effect (i.e. things that stand out are more memorable).
This is why it is commonly used in CTA buttons. Dell, for example, uses green Add to Cart buttons:
Green is also a color you associate with money. Plus, it it pleasant against the yellow used in the Enterprise plan.
The lesson: use a color that people associate with ‘business’, or things that help build customer relations, in your CTA. Also ensure that it stands out from the rest of the page.
If you landed on the VWO pricing page, your eyes would first be drawn to the yellow hued Enterprise plan.
That’s not accidental.
VWO has deliberately used a different color for the Enterprise plan. They want you to look at it first.
Although we are not privy to the actual data, we can postulate why:
Therefore both the highlighted plan’s background, and its CTA, have distinct colors. This draws attention to them before the other plans, which better fits VWO’s plans.
Besides the page headline, the first thing you would look at on this page is the price:
This may be due to two reasons:
Here are the sizes for different elements on the pricing table:
As we can see, there is a nice gradation from 32px to 16px as we move down the page.
This creates a strong visual hierarchy that guides the eye from top to bottom. Visitors notice the price first, then the account limitations, then the features, and finally, the CTA.
By default VWO offers annual billing with all its plans.
They helpfully explain at the bottom, that you save “17% by signing up for a year at a time”.
The question is, why would a SaaS product offer a discount of 17%?
Here are two possible reasons:
Of course, the decision to use monthly or annual billing will vary from business to business. It works perfectly in VWO’s case, but might not for some other businesses.
Basecamp, for example, saw a drop in revenues after introducing annual billing.
Listing features clearly is a necessity for pricing tables.
VWO does this by listing features in each plan with some visual flair through icons:
This is a very different strategy from say, HubSpot, which uses a cards-style table to summarize the features, and a matrix-style layout to compare them across each plan.
HubSpot’s strategy works when you have a lot of features, and they vary greatly across plans.
In such a situation, being able to visualize feature availability makes the buying decision easier.
VWO, however, limits non-enterprise accounts by total number of visitors, not features. It doesn’t matter whether you take the Startup or the Business plan – you get all the features in both the plans.
Using a matrix-style layout would be silly in this case. Two of the three plans are essentially the same.
For the plan that does offer additional features – the Enterprise plan – VWO offers an additional feature list.
VWO also uses icons next to the feature list. This not only adds a burst of color to the page, but also makes it easier to visualize each feature.
It’s important to note that none of the icons are simply there to look pretty – they actually enhance the page usability. Every icon has a distinct meaning, which you can grasp without any textual description.
As the Neilsen Norman Group points out, such icons can make your page more usable. Especially when your audience is from all across the globe.
In early July 2014, mobile internet traffic officially eclipsed desktop traffic.
This means that a large section of your customers will be browsing your site on mobile devices.
To cater to this customer base, you need a pricing table that looks good on smaller screens.
VWO does this by making its pricing tables responsive. On smaller screens, the two cards stack on top of each other, which makes for easy reading.
It is easy to make cards-style tables responsive, as compared to matrix-style layouts.
The latter is horizontal and is difficult to stack. Think about this when you make a layout decision. If a majority of your traffic is coming from mobile, choose cards over matrix-style.
Your potential customers can have fears, uncertainties, and doubts (FUDs), about your product. It is the main reason they don’t click Buy Now on your pricing table.
Addressing FUDs can clearly have a strong impact on your conversion rate. Prospects are much more likely to buy from you when they can trust your product and your company.
VWO manages to do this in three ways:
A. Showcase logos of some of your customers
VWO proudly says that it has over 3,900 customers and shows some of their logos. Not only do these logos add some visual flair to the page, but they are also instantly recognizable.
This is a great example of using social proof to increase trust. Prospects see Microsoft, Dell and CBS, and instantly think, “if Microsoft found it to be good, it must be worth buying”.
In fact, in one case, voice-over marketplace Voices, increased conversion rates by 400% just by adding a row of customer logos.
B.Showcase testimonials from clients
Testimonials are one of the most powerful methods to foster trust, and improve conversion rates.
A testimonial from a recognized authority adds credibility to any page. In one case study, Wikijob saw a 34% higher conversion rate by simply adding quotes from customers.
VWO does this very well by showcasing testimonials from three customers – Microsoft, Uncommon Knowledge, and Cleartrip.
C.Address common questions in the FAQs
Before visitors buy from you or not, they will likely have a few questions.
You can get them to call your sales team to get answer. That’s more often than not, a waste of time for both parties.
Or, address common questions directly on the pricing page itself.
VWO uses an FAQ section to quickly answer some of the most common questions from customers. These questions are mostly related to how the pricing tiers and account limitations work.
In just eight simple questions, VWO addresses the most common customer queries, helping to increase their conversion rate.
That wraps up our analysis of the VWO pricing table.
We hope you learned a lot from this successful bootstrapped startup. The pricing table is one of the most important cogs in your sales machine and by aligning it to your customer’s needs, you can achieve extraordinary success.
Just to recap, here’s what we learned from VWO:
Did you find this article useful in deciding what to do for your own pricing tables? If yes, please share it! Have any comments or additions to our insights? Let us know in the comments below!
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