How To Build Pricing Tables that Look Great and Win You More Customers

Color me impressed, but it looks like you've got a product to sell on your website now!

That's fantastic, but hold up a sec before you publish your "Buy Now" button...

Even though you can ditch your clunky pricing table plugin to use Thrive Architect's fully customizable pricing table element instead, let’s pump the brakes to discuss what makes a good pricing table in the first place.

I know you want to jump straight into building an eye catching one with tons of fancy features — like toggle switches and buy buttons that POP — but you should learn how the conversion focused nuts and bolts of pricing tables go together first and work your way up to the visual flare from there.

Shall we take a quick stroll through all those pricing table ingredients? Right then, let’s get started...

When you think about it, pricing tables are just fancy comparison charts for your products or services.

The "Product Column" x "Feature Row" structure of pricing tables is well established, but the psychology behind how your customers compare such offers must be understood if you want them to convert. This section will focus on how to get that psychological framework just right.

Why 3? Two reasons:

First, presenting many more offers than 3 makes it easy to overwhelm your customers with too much choice… what’s called Analysis Paralysis, Decision Fatigue or The Paradox of Choice in internet marketing circles:

Give Barry Schwartz's TED Talk on "The Paradox of Choice" a watch if you haven't already.

Second, if you only have a single offer, your customers may automatically and unconsciously compare your product to that of a competitor.

For example, if you want to sell a single eBook on your pricing table for $37, your customers may start comparing your offer to a similar $10 Kindle eBook. That’s not a favorable price comparison for your bottom line, not to mention that you’re never going to compete with Amazon.com on price.

Instead, you could transform your eBook from a single product into a simple 3 tiered offer. For example:

1. eBook only ($37)
2. eBook + Author’s Notes ($47)
3. eBook + Author’s Notes + Facebook Group access ($67)

Now your customers will be more likely to compare between your products instead of between yours and a competitor.

This is not to say that 3 product offers on a pricing table will always convert better than 2, 4 or 5. That’s impossible to know without A/B testing multiple pricing tables against each other using a tool like Thrive Optimize in the unique context of your own business.

But because avoiding choice overwhelm and encouraging customers to compare amongst your own products should be a top priority, it’s smart to build the first iteration of your pricing table will 3 offers — or at least until you can get some A/B tests up and running to prove otherwise!

Contestants on Bob Barker's "The Price Is Right" game show guess very similar prices based on the first contestant's anchor...even when the odds are against doing so. Note: The winner must have the closest bid to the retail price of the prize without going over.

This same phenomenon is at work when customers compare different products within a pricing table. You can use this psychological phenomenon to your advantage by doing the following 2 things:

First, select one of your offers and present it as your "Best Choice" or "Most Popular" option. This highlighting of a product option helps anchor customers to that price when they start their mental comparison:

Second, you can anchor your pricing by offering a discount for longer period purchases (e.g. annual vs. monthly subscriptions) or different economies of scale (e.g. 1 vs. 5 vs. 15 units): 

You can also use a toggle button feature to switch between different ‘instances’ of your pricing to show monthly vs. annual payment rates like in the Stencil example again:

Now that the psychological foundation of your pricing table has been set, let’s bring it to life with some clear, concise and persuasive copy.

One of the keys to creating high performing pricing tables is to present information in ways your customers can instantly understand. If you make your potential buyers perform too many mental gymnastics to understand your offers, they probably won’t buy.

So next, let's discuss the copywriting strategies you can use to help your pricing table convert better.

How many times have you come across an online pricing table that uses ambiguous names for their pricing tiers?

Being too clever or too cliche (e.g. Bronze, Silver, Gold) with your tier names often makes them ambiguous as to which of your customer segments they’re actually for.

A better strategy is to make your pricing names more clear so customers know exactly which deal applies to their unique needs. For example, the Tettra pricing table shown below uses “Starting”, “Growing”, “Scaling” and “Sustaining” to establish exactly what sorts of teams they’re targeting with each of their plans:

Alternatively, you can use a much more direct strategy and name each of your pricing tiers with the exact benefit customers receive like the following ConvertKit example:

The most difficult part to building any pricing table is presenting your core features in concise and informative phrases that support fast comprehension.

How do you this in a way that doesn’t confuse or overwhelm your leads right before purchase? A few copy strategies come to mind:

First, instead of creating endless lists of features within your pricing table columns, highlight the differences by building on what each offer provides from the most basic to more premium tiers.

Instead of restating the same features in every column, you can write “All the ‘Previous Tier Name’ features, plus:” and then proceed to list out the features unique to the next premium tier. Check out the Avocode pricing table example below to see what I mean:

When a feature list gets too long, it makes it harder for customers to quickly understand which option is right for their needs causing unnecessary friction before your conversion.

I’m looking at you Slack! I love ya, but there’s gotta be a better way...

A second way you can pack more explanatory copy into a smaller pricing table space is by using a Tooltips feature. Tooltips are small popup boxes that appear when your cursor moves over hover elements. You can see a good pricing table example of this from Siteground:

You can use Thrive Architect’s Tooltip feature to do this on your pricing tables too. It works for any element that has a hover state including:

• Content boxes
• Images
• Buttons
• Icons

The Tooltips feature will not work on elements that do not have hover states (like Paragraphs and Headers) or elements that do not have animations (like Backgrounds).

For example, in the Thrive Themes Pricing Table template shown below, you can customize Tooltips to appear over icons in the features section of each offer column:

The final factor every good Pricing Table requires are persuasive CTA buttons that avoid generic phrasing. You can do this by using highly relevant, specific and value driven copy. It may surprise you, but the few words you include within your pricing table buttons matter.

Peep Laja from ConversionXL states this in his own pricing page optimization article. In fact, he says he’s never seen an example of “Buy Now” button copy converting better than more specific alternatives.

So how do you come up with better CTA button copy for your pricing tables?

Michael Aagaard from Unbounce says you should ask yourself 2 important questions:

Question 1: What's my prospect’s motivation for clicking this button?

Answer this by putting yourself in the customer's shoes: “I want to ______.”

So if you happen to be selling online courses on how to speak survival Japanese for business travelers, your customer would probably answer: “I want to learn survival Japanese for my upcoming business trip to Japan.”

Question 2: What’s my prospect going to get, when he/she clicks this button?

You can answer this question by just stating what your customer actually gets — like instant access to your online survival Japanese language course.

Now smash these 2 answers together to come up with a relevant, specific and value driven CTA button copy for your pricing table: “Get Instant Access & Learn Survival Japanese Now”.

Generic “Buy Now”, “Get Instant Access” or “Download Now” buttons just won’t trigger the same sort conversion response in your target customers.

When it comes to the visual design elements of your pricing table, it's important not to get too carried away. If you've built a solid pricing table structure and your copy is compelling, now it's time to use visuals to help direct the eye where you want it to go.

So here's a few ways to help you do that...

One common strategy in pricing table design is to emphasize your recommended product option (often your product anchor) with a contrasting highlight color, enlarged pricing column and larger font sizes.

Wistia does an exaggerated version of this in their own pricing table:

You can also use this same color and sizing strategy for your ‘recommended product’ CTA Button like Highrise does in their pricing table:

Although the design and images you use on your pricing tables are important, it’s even more critical that you don’t overuse them. A little touch of visual POP goes a long way because that’s what will stand out.

Let me show you what I mean:

In the Freshdesk example above, images are used to visually convey which customer segment each offer is for. The FREE service shows a single budding sprout while the Enterprise service shows a thick Forest — and everything in between.

I also give Freshdesk bonus points for adding a single, attention grabbing animation to their “Best value for large teams” Estate plan to help draw your eye to that choice.

Like I said, a touch of visual pop goes a long way to boosting your pricing table design.

Since you’re now armed with all the ingredients it takes to create high converting pricing tables, it’s your turn to put this theory into practice.

I’m curious to see what sort of pricing table you’ll cook up for your next sales or pricing page.

If you have any questions or comments about pricing table design or the new Pricing Table element in Thrive Architect, let us know in the comments below!