Should you announce that you’re raising your prices?
I love getting listener suggestions and this one came from Chuck Johnson. He’s raising his prices (yeah) and wanted to know if he should put the new prices on his website with a disclaimer that they’re going up on a certain date. Want to hear the answer and how you might approach this when you raise your prices (something I addressed on another podcast episode)?
Listen to this new 7-minute episode and find out.
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Below is a full transcript. If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or contact me via text, use the short form on this page, or call 732.422.6362
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– Should you raise your prices? Yes! I’ve addressed that another episode. Should you notify people that you’re raising your prices? Listen to this episode and find out. Hey, thanks for tuning into this new episode. It’s kind of a follow-up to the one that I did that was very popular on: Should you raise your prices now? Chuck Johnson, who’s a listener here; Thank you Chuck; Gave me a suggestion. He said he already is transparent about his prices. He puts them out there on his website. He’s going to be raising his prices. Should he say when he puts the new prices on the website, that these go into effect on a certain date? And it got me thinking there’s many ways that you could handle this situation.
First of all, I applaud him for the transparency. Not because I’m saying everybody should do that, but he’s taking that method thinking, well, if they like what they see, like what they read, like what they hear and the price fits into their budget, they reach out. He’s not going to have price objections at that point. And a lot of my clients and listeners who have reached out to me have said that that’s their feeling on it. Is they’re putting the prices out there. Now, I think you need to do more than just put prices out there for transparency, because you need to give them reasons to contact you after they’ve seen the price and not just shop you around against other people without giving you a chance.
So let’s go back to Chuck’s question. If he’s already being transparent, the prices are there. My suggestion was no don’t put any notification when you raise your price, put the new price on the website and that’s it. Anybody coming from today is going to see that’s the price. However, give advance notice to people that you’ve already been in contact with and say, “Hey, love to work with you, love to make your wedding great…” In his case, maybe as an entertainer, “I’d love to pack your dance floor and see you guys having a great time on your wedding day and you and your guests. Prices are going up on such and such a date. If you book me before then the old price applies after that point, if I’m still available, the price will be this.” So that would be a way to do it. And I said, don’t give them any more than maybe two or three weeks. You want to create a sense of urgency. If you’ve already been in contact, you’re not saying you have to get married within the two or three weeks, you’re saying you have to book me within that amount of time. So that’s what I would do in that case.
Now, if you’re not being as transparent on your pricing, if you’re putting a price range, I would say, do the same thing. Just change the price range online, notify the people that you’ve already been in contact with. One-on-one notify them and say, “Hey, our prices are going up on such and such a date. If you book us before this date, the old price supplies. After that date, if we’re still available, the new price will apply.” Create the sense of urgency, create the sense of scarcity the same way. If you have not been putting your pricing on your website, then you don’t have to do anything as far as the website goes, but I would still do the same thing with notification of your customers to create that sense of urgency. That, “Hey, if you like us and if you’re still thinking about it…”, maybe this is the thing that would get them over the hump there with that.
So this is not a question of, should you be raising your price? This is if you’re already decided to raise your prices, how do you go about notifying people that the prices have gone up? Anybody you haven’t spoken to doesn’t know what your prices are. So I wouldn’t alert them to the fact that, hey, we just raised our prices. I wouldn’t do that. Don’t say, hey, we just raised our prices. This is what our prices are, that’s it, going forward, that’s what our prices are. And you are the ones that have this ‘curse of knowledge’ that you know the price is going up. So you don’t bring that baggage with you into a conversation with someone that you’ve not given any price into yet. So only the people that you’ve already spoken to, only people you’ve given a quote to.
And this actually leads me to a little side subject. When you’re quoting people, you’re quoting them based upon your availability at that moment, you’re quoting them based upon your prices at that moment, give somebody a quote. If you have to give them a proposal in writing, either in email or in messaging or in actual writing, then put an expiration on that. There’s another discussion here about whether or not you should be holding dates for people. I don’t believe you should ever hold the date without having a deposit, because if there is no deposit, there’s no skin in the game for them and so why not hold the date? If I tell you no, you’ve just locked up that date for somebody and there’s no commitment on their part. If you want to give them a time that they can change their mind, take the deposit and say, if you change your mind within three days, or if you want to go seven days or something, then we will give you your deposit back, that’s fine. But they’re showing you a commitment that they really are interested and please don’t make it a $50 deposit unless your price of what you’re charging is hundreds of dollars and not thousands and more, you want to get a commitment on their part.
So if you want to give them a chance to change their mind, you want to make that there: “Hey this is a refundable deposit within 72 hours” or within seven days or five days. I like shorter because you want them to make a decision. If they’re really interested and they do need to think about it, or they need to confer with someone like, “Oh, I really love you, I think I want to do this I just need to talk to so-and-so.” And especially if you’re a solo-preneur where you can only do one wedding on that day at a time, or if they want a particular person from your multi-op. So if you’re a photographer or a video or a DJ or whatever, and they want a specific person, that person can only do one wedding that day, say “Listen, if you want to do this, give us a deposit, it’ll be refundable within five days. And this way, you know that, Shelly or Chris or Dave, or whoever will be available within that time, if you decide to go forward, great.” And then whatever your contract terms and additional deposit is. And if you decide not, that’s fine, but this way you haven’t locked yourself up for too long, but you’ve given them the peace of mind that if they really do want that person, unless something changes, they’re going to get that person.
So should you notify people your prices are going up? Yes, people you’ve already spoken with, give them that sense of urgency. Should you notify people that you have not spoken with and highlight on your website? I don’t think so. I don’t think you should say, hey, our prices are going up unless you’re trying to do some sort of a promotion where maybe from a wedding expo or maybe through Facebook ads or something like that, where you’re sending out emails or you’re putting out an ad and saying, “Hey, prices go up on, November 1st or December 1st or whatever it is. If you have a meeting with us before then you can lock in the old price if you decide to choose us.”
So once again, Chuck, thank you so much for this suggestion. I hope this helps you guys. Yes, the one thing I did not address was, what if you have a starting price on your website, because I don’t like starting prices on websites. And if you listen to one of my other episodes, you’ll hear that. So keep the suggestions coming. I do listen to them and I do record them.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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