A guide to price testing your OF page (including: without losing all your fans)
Buckle up because this post is going to be quite long. Unfortunately for your eyes, there is no short way to explain all of this. So, grab a snack & get cozy!
I’m going to cover:
What price testing is & why you should do it
What metrics you should track to figure out whether or not it worked
What metrics you should use to decide which prices to test
A semi hack for how to do it without losing all your friends
Price testing might be more simple than you think ~
At its core, price testing simply means gathering data to figure out which subscription price is right for your unique page & audience. It’s a concept that’s crucial in sfw businesses, so it’s no surprise that it’s incredibly impactful with OF as well.
In an ideal world, we’d all be able to test out different price points without too much negative consequence and see which price performs best. Best can vary depending on what you’re optimizing for, like:
Which price leads to the most revenue from new subscribers?
Which results in the most revenue from the page overall?
Which price has the best conversion rate?
Which price leads to the least frustrating/annoying subscribers (lol)
Price testing allows you to have confidence in the price that you chose. When you have the data to support your decision, there’s peace in knowing you priced something intentionally & know with some level of certainty that it was a good choice, and that you can always run sales in the future for some additional wiggle room.
Price testing matters because of this scenario: Imagine a girlypop who started her OF a year ago and randomly chose her price at 4.99 because why not. Back then, she had no content and no subscribers so 4.99 didn’t seem good or bad. But a year later, she has 300 media items and she’s super proud of everything she makes. Her conversion rate is 2.89%.
She regrets her 4.99/month price because:
She no longer believes people should have access to chatting with her for just $4.99/month
She believes the quality of her free wall content is far beyond $4.99/month
She wonders if she could make much more money, if she had chosen a higher price instead.
If she had price tested and did a ton of research before setting her price, it’s possible she could have avoided this whole situation. But, I feel like most of us get into OF without really knowing the lay of the land. I mean, how can you? We can read all we want on Reddit and Google but the best experience is first hand experience, since results vary so differently from person to person.
But because of the way OF is structured, there isn’t really an easy way to price test. If you have a free page and turn it into a paid page, all of your current subscribers will be able to see all locked content for free until their subscription ends. If you have a paid page and change the price, all rebills are automatically turned off and a very tiny % of them will renew.
So, how do you price test your OF profile and minimize the amount of fans you lose?
Here are two approaches I think you can explore:
Option 1: Better suited for newer pages or pages that don’t have a ton of fans Mentally commit to a price testing period and know that you will lose all of your subscribers each time you test a new price. This is easiest if your profile is on the newer side, so it doesn’t feel like you’re losing many months or years worth of dedicated fans.
My mentality is: don’t let the fear of losing a few fans prevent you from optimizing your business in a way that will get you many more fans.
Option 2: Better suited for existing pages with a ton of fans that you don’t want to lose Make a second OF page, make the profile page look identical to your existing page: same bio, same photos, same amount of media items. Then, change the price of the NEW profile only, and swap out all of your social media links to point to the new page.
This allows you to test with a profile where you don’t have anything to lose, while keeping all of your fans on your other page. You can continue price testing with just that one profile, mentally acknowledging that while it may suck to lose new subscribers, your existing business is untouched.
My mentality here is: Is it annoying to have multiple pages? Yes. But is it worth it for the great perhaps? Yes. You might find that a different price point makes you way more money. You will not need to maintain two pages forever, since the vast majority of paid subscribers will not renew anyways and you can manually move over your most dedicated fans by offering them something free.
If you already have 2 pages, you have a tough decision to make: do you want to repurpose one page to be a testing page? Do you want to stick with your price even if you’re not sure how optimal it is?
What should you be tracking when you price test?
These are the metrics I suggest tracking for every single price you test:
What is the price?
When did you test this price?
What is your conversion rate?
What is the LTV during a specific time period?
What is your total revenue during your test period?
What would your revenue be if you got 10k OF link clicks? (← replace this number with whatever monthly clicks you get on average)
Note: Ideally, the time period is the same for each test: whether it’s 2 weeks or 1 month.
Here’s a hypothetical example of how that data would look:
In the above image, I would conclude that while the $9 price point had a higher conversion rate, it results in the lowest revenue. The $32 price point has the lowest conversion rate, but has the highest amount of potential revenue. Interestingly, the $15 and $22 price point have pretty much the same end result despite having different conversion rates.
How do you decide what prices you should test?
I suggest making a spreadsheet that works through hypothetical scenarios to help you make your decision. Writing out hypothetical scenarios really helps you see if what you want is achievable. For example, if you see that your dream revenue is only possible with your current amount of impressions if you have a 50% conversion rate, you’ll know it’s not achievable because average conversion rates seem to be closer to 0.5% to 3%.
You can plug in whatever data you want to use to calculate this, but I think works is:
The price you’re thinking of testing
Your average monthly OF clicks
Hypothesis conversion rate
Hypothesis LTV (you can work your way backward to guess this: if you think that the subscription price is where you’ll make 50% of revenue, then just double your test price to get your hypothesis LTV. If you think subscriptions is where you make 25% of total revenue, then quadruple your test price to get your hypothesis LTV)
Then, use the above to calculate
Potential # of new subs
Potential monthly revenue from new subs
Potential total monthly revenue
Here’s a hypothetical example of how that data would look:
This data suggests to me that $22 is the first price point worth testing. If I believe the page will convert at 1.5%, and that the LTV 2.5x the subscription price, it might be the most profitable option!
What do you do after you test your first price?
Once you have enough data to conclude your first price test period, write down your results and see how they compare to your hypothesis. Compare the real numbers to your projections and see if that new information makes you want to change anything about your projections.
Some examples of this are:
Maybe you assume a certain conversion rate, but your page actually converts way better. If this happened, I would update my projection table to be a little more optimistic.
Maybe you assume that the amount that people will spend increases when the sub price is cheaper - but in reality this was not the case. If this happened, I would change LTV to be only slightly higher than the subscription price, perhaps just a few dollars.
How many prices should you test?
There is no right answer here but my intuition says somewhere between 3-5. Chances are, the very first price you pick won’t be the most optimized one, because people behave in ways we simply don’t expect. Data is full of surprises 🙂
To decrease the amount of tests you do, make sure each test is really meaningful. There is no need to test $5, $6, and $7 because it’s hard to imagine that a $1 difference would have vastly different results. Instead, it would be more meaningful to test $5, $10, $15 since the % change between these prices is so high: 200%, then 50%.