LinkedIn’s Conversion Strategy Explained, Pt. 2

👋 Henry here, welcome to B2B Growth Insights, where I take my learnings from being at Pricepoint Partners to showcase how the best B2B SaaS companies do pricing, growth, and retention. 

Insights from today’s article: 

• 💰 Breaking down LinkedIn’s paywall

• 📈 How to get users picking annual plans  

• ✍️ Why they’ve built a dedicated subscription onboarding 

A Thank You: My consulting is booked until the end of Jan 2025, largely from this audience. A massive thank you for all the support.

🔍 Breaking Down LinkedIn’s Paywall 

What’s unique about LinkedIn’s Paywall? LinkedIn’s paywall isn’t what we’ve come to expect from B2B SaaS. Despite this it does two things really well; (1) some great social proof at the top, and (2) using a CTA highlighting their trial. 

Why do they do this? The CTA ‘Start my free month’ in particular does a great job at reducing the perceived commitment and getting you to continue on to the next page of the checkout process. 

So what? Airbnb did a similar test a little while back. Just changing their CTA to reduce the commitment led to millions in incremental revenue per year. At scale, even micro-adjustments really move the needle! 

💰 How to Get Users Picking Annual Plans

What makes their checkout page effective? First is their discount if you choose an annual plan, 50% off is strong! The best thing they do, however, is show the amount a user will save if they switch to annual vs just saying 50%. 

Why do they do this? It’s far easier for a user to instantly quantify the value of the annual plan, meaning more people select it. Which is easier to understand?

1. Save $240 

1. $40/month x 12 months x 50% discount 

So what? Getting more people onto annual plans has 2 massive benefits, (1) it supercharges your ability to recycle cash. If the typical payback period is 5 months then LinkedIn is ROI profitable after 1 month and can recycle that cash 6x faster on Day 3 vs Day 180.

(2) Your ability to get users converting to annual also cuts your churn by more than half. Annual plans enable people to try the product for longer, increasing the chance they find value and only have limited windows to cancel their plan. 

What could they do to improve this? Defaults matter. Have the annual plan selected by default instead of the monthly plan. 

😍 How to Get Premium Users to the ‘A Ha’ Moment 

What are they doing? Once a user converts to LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator they’ll get shown a series of screens that act as a dedicated subscription onboarding. 

Why are they doing this? These screens mean you’re increasing the % of people who hit the ‘a ha’ moment, without having to show extra information to users at sign up causing cognitive overload. 

It’s a brilliant example of progressive disclosure and something that almost all freemium products should be utilising. 

So what? Phiture introduced a dedicated onboarding for their premium subscription and saw a 66% uplift on reopening the app, and a 162% uplift on opening a report. 

That’s it for today folks, hope you enjoyed!