Proven pricing strategies to increase conversions

Pricing is a very important part of your offer. How to optimize it?

Anchoring effect

The anchoring effect is one of the most know biases regarding price. Whatever price we see first, we base our perception of value for the product on it.

This is not only true for price but also true for all numbers on your page. Dan Ariely did research and asked students to write down their social security number and them asked them to bid for various items such as a bottle of wine, a book and a trackball. Those with high social security numbers paid up to 346% more than those with low numbers.

So just by thinking about other numbers, this influenced price perception.

This effect bit me in the ass one time. I have a side project where I sell an online writing course, and before mentioning the price I mentioned the worth of bonusses like an ebook and writing tool. This was worth LESS than the price of the full course (seemed logical to me). My sales went from 10 a month to 0. The bonusses devaluated my product. Lesson learned.

Decoy effect

Knowing the anchoring effect you can create a decoy price or product to push your customers into another direction.

This is an image I made after I set my mind to buy medium popcorn, but ended up buying the large one. Because it was 'only' 25cts more.

Make the visual price look smaller

• Remove the $ or € sign if you operate in only one country or with one currency. The price looks visibly shorter and thereby cheaper. (proven in A/B-tests: 2 times). Testing tool Convert.com concluded the same.
• Remove the numbers behind the full number. So 5,00 changes to 5,-. Same principle, the price looks visibly shorter. This worked for Guessthetest. Also you can make the numbers after the digit smaller, so 5,00 becomes 5,^00.

Product line-up

• The most common product line-up is three products next to each other. But in some cases two or four products next to each other work better (I've proven this one time). 
• Order of product line-up: do you order your products from low to high price, or from high to low? Experiment to find out what works for you.

Discounts

• Close discount code fields for less distraction (sending your visitors away to find a code) and more conversion. See the gif of Nike.com.
• Show discounts in percentages when the value of the product sold is lower than 100.

Premium products and services

• Premium products or services often don't benefit from making prices look cheaper of having discounts or discount codes. Taking them away or making them less visible can increase your conversion rate.
• Also placing pricing down on the page or funnel, or make prices bigger (this worked for telco KPN.com) can help.