Problem
SMS API pricing is complicated. It's made up of per message fees, carrier fees, phone numbers costs, feature costs, and tiered volume discounts.Twilio was getting a lot of sales inquiries to further understand pricing and any available discounts. As a response the pricing team added lower tiered volume discounts. While adding the discounts to the site we took the opportunity to revisit the SMS pricing page to try and make it more comprehensible.
Solution
I worked with a product manager to audit the current experience and track down relevant stakeholders. One of the challenges we ended up encountering was that different stakeholders owned different aspects of SMS pricing. We hosted a feedback workshop to get a better understanding of the needs and opinions of all the stakeholders.
Unfortunately there wasn’t time to test the page due to a quick deadline so I updated the design based on our audit and industry wide best practices. My goal was to simplify the page as much as possible given the constraints that the pricing model could not change and all information must be shown on the page. Some of the key changes included:
Working with content to update the headings and descriptions to clearly specify what pricing information is in each section and how the pricing in the section fits into the greater pricing structure
Rearranging the page so that the volume discounts for the per message fees and phone number fees show up underneath the normal price
Adding example numbers to the volume discount tiers to eliminate some of the mental math
Shifting the primary CTAs on the page to be sign up oriented rather than sales oriented
Removing redundant and unnecessary information
Results
The updated layout resulted in a 10.4% increase in sign up conversions.
While I am proud of the changes that were made, I still think there is room for improvement. After launching I ran an unmoderated usability test on the page which found that the structure is still confusing. My hope is that the research can help inform and prioritize bigger changes to the pricing structure.
