[3 min read]

Machiavellian Pricing Cards

See how slightly changing communication could help your conversion

In this blog, we will be discussing how we could make some tweaks to our pricing cards based on Machiavelli’s quote

“it is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

Context

Last week I was tasked with updating our pricing cards on the Superflow marketing website and the internal portal to accommodate for new pricing structure.

What changed?

These are the changes that were made to the pricing structure

Adding 2 more tiers to our offering (making it 5 in total)

Adding a detailed table for comparison

Starting with benchmarking

So I started benchmarking about how pricing works for SaaS to get a feel for what it looks like and I realized for a long time we have been talking about pricing the same way. Take a look at this pricing page by Intuit in 2014

source https://web.archive.org/web/20130502095331/http://quickbooksonline.intuit.com/

and take a look at the current page. How much difference do you see?

source: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing/# (2023)

Honestly, It's not much different - there is a title, price, CTA and list of features :) some may even argue that the 10-year-old cards are clearer and minimal (I'm sure the current team must have some reason to list them upfront).

So pricing pages have not changed over the years, you can follow this checklist and you will have a decent-performing pricing page.

So where does Machiavelli come in?

“it is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage;but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

What caught my eye here was that if given the option to choose between love and fear, you should choose fear, as it is a more powerful way of controlling people.

Adding fear to our pricing cards

To instil fear, we have a variety of social fears to choose from, but FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is the most effective, so we aim to highlight what they will miss. Here is how we performed a simple rewording of the features and benefits of a plan.

So now “Slack Integrations” is “Only Slack Integrations” and “Email Support” is “No Dedicated Support”

Is this better?

The short answer is I don’t know. As we discussed this is a hypothesis that “people might get a higher plan because they would fear not having a benefit that they want” but we will have to test it out to see if it works.

This was the video where I learned about Machiavelli. Yes, I watch videos in the background while working :)