3 ways you might be slowing down upgrades

I designed a website that raised $300k+ in donations the day it launched.

It was for the Sandy Hook Promise, and while the moment absolutely called in a lot of people, it was also an opportunity I knew I couldn’t screw up.

The unfortunate truth is that even the people who are motivated to fund something can still get lost on their way there.

What I did on that project was clear the way so visitors could only do two things: sign a pledge and donate.

The team originally wanted to add a lot of other pages—you know, to make it look like a website. But data-informed experience had taught me that would mean more clicking around and therefore, less pledges and less donations.

Since then, I have been called in by many more teams to help them recover lost revenue from bad design.

It’s wild how much revenue you can lose (or gain) once someone starts subscribing. That’s why today we’re looking at 3 ways you might be slowing down upgrades.

📣 Want to grow your reader-funded support? Join us for our Scaling Subscribers mind meld. Next session is Monday, July 1 at 2:30pm Eastern and it’s free. RSVP here.

3 ways you might be slowing down upgrades

🐢 You’re making people log in first

Guest checkout exists for a reason and the reason is that when you add more clicks, more steps, more let-me-find-that-password, you lose money.

This is quickly becoming my primary beef with the Lede platform which is that they make you log in…even to get on the newsletter. Lede, if you’re reading this, I’m standing by to help you fix this.

The fix: Enable guest checkout and let people give a credit card with only their email address (like beehiiv does on their default checkout below). Guest checkout is long established in e-commerce. Demand this from your tools!

🐢 You’ve added extra fields

I’ve run hundreds of form tests over the years across different industries and it’s fairly universal that less fields = more money. Don’t get in your subscriber’s way by adding more for them to do before they pay you.

Full address is the biggest culprit in checkout usually, and unless you’re shipping something, you should hide it. Stripe and other payment processors can run a fairly solid fraud check with only a zip code.

The fix: If you want some info about your new subscriber, ask for it AFTER the transaction. Hide all optional fields if you can or again, demand this from your tools! Have them call me. I’ll gladly help them reduce friction.

🐢 You’ve got too many options

People can only choose from a maximum of 4 options (as we covered in our pricing series). 3 is more typical and 2 is even better.

That means don’t add too many tiers and don’t combine your subscription and one time tip jar widgets.

The fix: Select a maximum of 3 pricing tiers and use a toggle to show monthly vs annual. Ideally, you’d highlight one tier to draw their attention and that tier should be your middle cost one.

I’d also recommend a test to remove the free option that some newsletter tools add onto this screen (beehiiv, Substack and Ghost all do this). I don’t see a benefit of adding that there as people either come in ready to pay for your publication or they need more convincing than one screen.

Our takeaway

You may not be running a tech company but the tech tools you choose for your upgrade flows and payments can actively prevent your revenue.

Keep the three blockers above in mind when selecting tools and have a look at what you can configure yourself (or better yet, turn off and hide!) The simpler, the better for your upgrade path.

An invitation

I’m keen to run more tests on upgrade screens as it’s the easiest place to add more money to your recurring revenue. Readers who make it to that stage are the most motivated to pay.

I believe beehiiv has the best design for this page and I want to see if that’s true by testing it against Substack and Ghost’s defaults.

Want to test it with me? Reply and let’s do it. I work on a sliding scale from very cheap (for teams) to free (for solo writers) if you let me publish the results here.