Came a question about pricing:
“Hello Ben, Just have a question. You often charge even prices like $2000 for Low Stress Options and $100 month instead of the advised copy prices of for example: $1997 and $97 month. Why do you price like that ?”
Actually, it’s $2500 for LSO, another round number, and that will be going up again.
But I don’t blame people for asking this question.
I wish more people did as it, if anything.
It shows they’re finally seeing through the so-called AI & TikTok brain fog.
So here goes:
1. It makes zero sense to not differentiate from the great unwashed online marketing asses – especially with your pricing. Copying my pricing or someone else’s pricing is so stupid on a stick and always has been.
2. Round numbers imply high-quality, non-Needy 5-star steak house vs cat food quality-level Taco Bell, or new Mercedes prestige vs used Ford Taurus prestige.
In my opinion:
Probably the main reason most people still assume ending prices in 7’s or 9’s is “the way” is because a bunch of IM goo-roos parroted what Ted Nicholas said, who actually did test it selling his offers, in a totally different industry than most are in, using a totally different media than the internet, and during a totally different time.
Online marketers all then assumed that’s the magic pricing formula.
Then they preached it in their own echo chambers.
Then ran with it without actually testing it or even having the traffic/list size to test it to get a statistically relevant result even if they did test it… with the vast majority doing it just because everyone else does it, and no real other reason.
Just like why they do everything they do in their businesses.
The IM crowd is, and always has been, behind on literally everything.
I’m convinced 99% of direct marketers legitimately are incapable of making a single decision without it being “blessed” by some goo-roo or, worse, so-called AI. If they did, you wouldn’t see them mindlessly using the exact same prices (including their competitors) everyone else is pricing offers at, using the same low quality tools everyone else using, and parroting the same tired info everyone else is parroting without even knowing why they’re parroting it.
Echo chambers is the place where innovation goes to die.
But back to pricing:
Am I saying it’s inherently “bad” to end in a 7 or 9?
No. They can – and do – work just fine.
But I am saying there’s power in differentiation.
And to try to think past retail-level pricing designed to snag, persuade, go after price shoppers who I have no doubt ending on 5, 7, 9 does help get more of.
If that’s who you want to sell to be my guest.
But I doubt someone buying a new luxury Mercedes is going to care or “round down” to the least number in their minds, while someone buying a used Yugo very well might.
Also, yes, I’m obviously well aware I priced Email Players at $97 (back in 2011).
And so have many others after they saw me do it, and for no other reason than than:
“Ben must have tested it!”
No, Maynard, I didn’t.
I didn’t even have a big enough list at the time to get any kind of relevant result even if I did test it. And now, if anything, I use that that price as an example of what not to do these days.
In my case:
By the time this dawned on me how poorly a choice that was for a price, it was already “embedded” in all my lists’ minds, on podcasts, 100’s of podcast interviews, etc… so when I briefly played around with changing it a few years ago, it caused nothing but confusion – marketplace and on credit card bills when they were expecting the $97 due to the above.
If I could go back 15-years when I first launched Email Players?
I’d have priced it at at flat $100 or $101 or $108 or something.
Anything but $97.
Earl Nightingale had it right in the 50’s:
“Whatever you are doing, look around at what everyone else is doing, do the opposite, and you’ll probably never make another mistake again.”
And so it is.
Do ye what ye will with that info.
Since we’re rapping about pricing:
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Ben Settle
