It’s easy to think that more is always better, especially when developing pricing plans for your subscribers. But today’s lesson from Audiobooks.com shows the exception to the rule.
Audiobooks launched a year ago, providing an unlimited number of streaming audiobooks to subscribers for $24.95/month. (We’ll analyze the wisdom of a streaming audio book service a little further down in this post.)
But this month, the site is switching to two pay-by-the-book plans:
- $14.95 for one audiobook a month; or
- $22.95 for two audiobooks a month.
The switch demonstrates how overloading your prospects with options can often work against converting them to paying subscribers. As some A/B tests have found (including this one from this week’s Case Study), simple messaging can convert more than smorgasbord offerings. In this example, offering 25,000 titles is just too overwhelming – this is why specific paywalls work so well for conversion.
But Audiobooks may have simplified too much. Booksfree, which rents out paperback books to subscribers, has a multi-tiered pricing plan to meet almost any subscriber’s needs.
Audiobooks might do well to adopt a more sophisticated pricing strategy such as this one. And while we’re recommending improvements, a streaming service is not ideal for audio or eBooks, which are often consumed during commutes and travel when wi-fi access is spotty, if not nonexistent.
Which is not to say that all long-form, data-heavy content should be downloadable (certainly, streaming video does well). Instead, think of how your subscribers consume your content and optimize its format for that experience.