Billing Options and Price-Points

Ever asked yourself whether you should offer non-rebilling signup options, or what the right price point for your site is? I’ve done a good bit of experimenting in this area so thought I’d share my perspective. Of course every site is unique, so I definitely recommend testing this for yourself . . . I’ll show you how easy it can be using Google’s Website Optimizer. And to give credit where it’s due, this post was inspired by a thread over at SponsorChat. So for additional perspective check out this rebilling thread.

Rebills are what made online porn famous, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. Nonetheless, legitimate rebills can still account for a sizeable portion of your income, and it makes good business sense – it’s easier to keep a customer than to find a new one. So why offer a non-rebilling signup option at all you ask? There are a growing number of porn surfers who are uncomfortable with online subscriptions – maybe they’ve had their credit card banged by a less than honest site, or maybe they’ve just read someone else’s horror stories. And some surfers just know better than to trust themselves to cancel a recurring subscription. Whatever the reason, you don’t want to lose these surfers – based on my own experience at TheCrossdresser.com many of them simply won’t sign up if you don’t offer a non-recurring billing option.

Non-rebilling signups should never outweigh your rebilling signups. If they do, you are throwing away money by making it too easy for customers to opt out of the rebill. Consider your non-rebilling option a premium service. The market will support a certain upcharge for such a premium service, and you should strive to strike a balance between not losing customers who will only sign up if offered a non-rebilling option, and cannibalizing your far more lucrative rebilling signups. I’ve personally found that the best setup is to offer non-rebilling options only for multi-month signups (maybe 3 months for example). Offer the customer a discount (you are afterall guaranteeing yourself a 3 month sale here), but still make sure you aren’t eating in to your typical rebilling margins (if most people rebill for 4 months anyway, you don’t want to offer a discount 3 month option!). Your other option is to offer single month signups at a premium price point.

Setting price points for non-rebilling signups should be done the same way you set price points for your rebilling signups – by testing! Survey other porn sites in your niche and find out what they’re charging. Set up a base price structure that’s similar (after all there are other smart webmasters out there ), and then set up some options where you charge $5 more per month and $5 less per month. Find out which options give you the most sales, both in total dollars as well as in sales volume (you of course have to decide which if the best metric for your wallet at the end of the day). You might be surprised with the results – I get more sales at a higher price point than I do at a lower price point. If you don’t charge enough for your site, people assume that the quality is crap. Run this test for a couple months though – if you find your rebills falling off at the higher price point, it may be that your content really *is* crap and you can’t justify the higher price point

So I’ve talked a lot about testing in this article, but how do you do it? Google’s Website Optimizer makes it really simple actually. First start by setting up your different billing options in your biller’s admin panel. Most billers will let you set up different billing “profiles”, and then you just reference the correct profile on your join page. Make a copy of your Join page and save it with a new name. Point the reference to one of your new billing profiles. Repeat this for each profile you want to test. Resist the temptation to make any changes to the Join pages other than the billing profile – you want to test the price points and options, not which photo sells better or background color sells better.

Now that you have your Join pages set up, go to Google’s Website Optimizer – one of the tools available from Google’s Webmaster Tools. It’s free, so if you haven’t signed up for these you really should. Select the A/B experiment option – this is by far the easiest (and actually gives you more control, even though Google implies that the Multivariate experiment is somehow better or more advanced). Google will lead you step by step through the process of setting up the experiment, but basically you just add a bit of tracking code to the beginning of each of your Join pages, and then a bit of code to the end of your “success” page – ie somewhere the surfer ends up if they successfully complete a signup. That’s it. Just tell Google which pages you’ve put the tracking code on, and it will start dividing your traffic between the pages and tracking the results for you.