AI and its more recent cousin genAI is eating the software world. At least, that’s the talk in town, but as a SaaS business, what can you do today that will have a tangible impact on your SaaS sales? Product-Led Growth was the hottest trend before genAI, and in the age of efficiency, a lot of SaaS players have moved from heavy sales-led motion to automated self-service ordering from customers - certainly at the SME end of the spectrum.
But can you go further? Can you automate the full creation of pricing package and offers, the creation of purchasing experiences, the administration of self-service? Go from the raw material of ideas to the finished product? Let’s dive in.
Pricing dynamically
Is there a place for dynamic promotions and pricing in SaaS? Should company A pay a different price from company B and should that be automated? Well there’s certainly places where this already exists and is commonly existed. British people will pay in British pound a price that might be different to a US company buying a subscription in $. If you’re talking to a sales person, they may give you a promo code or have access to a special deal, or there may be a flash sale happening for Black Friday. Some of those things are transparent, some are hidden behind the scene.
But what about full automation, personalised pricing for you as you hit the pricing page? Truth be told, this is hard to do at acquisition. If the prospect isn’t logged-in, you don’t know much about the prospect usually. The pages are usually highly public, so lack of transparency could backfire.
It doesn’t mean you can’t experiment. Generating alternative layout for pricing can be powerful, especially if you have many tiers or add-ons to sell. Where it gets more interesting is when you have more data on your prospect. Could you create dedicated pricing page that marketing can use deeper into the funnel to better convert a free trial on a specific tier or a specific bundle for example? Where AI can play a role is helping you figure out when you should push those dedicated experience and to whom.
First things first though, you’ll need to be able to generate those pages and make sure the plumbing (checkout, payment, tax, invoicing can follow). Could you use genAI to create 100s of different pricing pages variations and have a AI personalisation model to automatically route the prospect to the highest-converting experience for them? Maybe. The tech is there. But it’s still hard work to put together. There's a lot of pipes to take the raw data and spit out magic.
Dynamic Checkout
The checkout is ground zero. This is where intent needs to meet action. A great checkout can make a massive difference, boosting conversion by double-decimal points. But what’s a great checkout? Well as it turns out, a great checkout isn’t the same to everyone. It needs to be dynamic.
A core part of the checkout is obviously the payment method. Should you should Direct Debit at the top in the UK? iDeal in the Netherlands? Should you show PayPal in Italy? Should you hide some of those options? Those can be difficult decisions for a business to decide on, even more to put the analytics infrastructure to measure the impact
However, a checkout is a lot more than just payments. Identity, tax, address, pricing information, terms and conditions, and mandatory auto-renewal information will all play a role. Regulated products such as SMS and telecom bundles may require additional data capture. It can be challenging to provide a frictionless experience while capturing the right data, not making it too easy for bad actors, and managing unhappy paths such as payment failures.
While AI is already playing a role on the checkout security front by detecting likely bad actors and stopping fraud, we are still some way off to seeing checkout UX being dynamically updated via AI to maximise conversion. It doesn’t mean you should be content with your current checkout or settle a one-size-fits-all checkout. The technology for dynamic checkouts is already here. Limio Modular Checkout allows you to set conditions on what appears to subscribers based on what they are purchasing and where they are. Go A/B test different checkouts, especially if you are a global business.
Interested in delivering dynamic pricing pages and checkouts for your SaaS business to optimize your conversion rate? Get in touch at Limio!