Show notes:
How much should I charge for a wedding? A question I get asked ALL the time. Today I am talking all about pricing! How much should you charge? Should you discount? How do you raise your pricing? How should you show your pricing on your wedding business website? In today’s episode I am giving you my thoughts on it all!
Want to talk about your pricing questions?
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Transcript:
Becca
00:00:00.320 – 00:42:21.810
Today, I want to talk all things pricing. How do you decide on your pricing, how should you display your pricing, and how do you increase your pricing?
I’m going to cover it all in today’s episode. I’m Becca Poutney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger, and you’re listening to the Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow podcast.
I’m here to share with you actionable tips, strategies and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.
If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you’re in the right place. Let’s get going with today’s episode. One of the topics I get asked about a lot when you’re talking about your wedding businesses is pricing.
So today I decided to record a special episode for you to give you all of the answers to the questions and hopefully help you feel more confident when it comes to your own pricing. So we’re going to look at three areas today. We’re going to look at, number one, how you price your services in the first place.
So secondly, we’re gonna look at how you display your pricing on your website, maybe on your social media as well. And thirdly, we’re gonna talk about what to do when you realize it’s time to increase your pricing. So let’s dive in.
We’re gonna talk all things numbers today. Now, the first thing then we’re gonna talk about is how to price your services.
Now, I am gonna caveat this and say it is a bit of a how long is a piece of string question. Because when it comes to pricing your services, ultimately it’s your business, it’s your decision. You can price your services however you want.
And we see that, don’t we, out there in the market.
You can go out there today to buy a handbag and you can get one from Primark for maybe 3 or 4 pounds and you can get one from, say, Mulberry for 8 or 900 pounds or even more. So what sets these apart?
Well, I guess that we are going to have to say that the branding and the advertising is going to set Mulberry apart and make them more expensive, more aspirational. Also, maybe the quality of the product is better. However, there is still a choice there to make that a luxury item.
So when it comes to pricing in your wedding business, you do have some options because you can go very cheap and you can go very expensive. And that’s kind of down to you and where you want to position yourself.
So the first thing I would say is when you’re thinking about your pricing, the first thing you need to do is decide on your target market. Who are you trying to attract?
Are you trying to attract people who are getting married in their local village hall, who are doing it all themselves, who are potentially very low budget, or are you trying to go after those huge, big budget millionaire one weddings in very exclusive venues? You need to decide whereabouts you’re going to fit in the market or somewhere in between.
Once you know who you’re trying to attract, the second thing you’re now going to do is start looking at the market around you. So if you know where you want to position yourself, you need to look in your area.
Because from country to country, region to region, state to state, pricing is going to fluctuate. You only have to look at the US versus the UK and the prices that people will pay for different services are vastly different.
We’re finding that a lot of the UK services are seen as cheap to Americans because what they expect to pay for a wedding photographer, for example, may be a lot higher than what we would expect to charge here in the uk. So you need to look at the market that you’re trying to sell into.
If you’re trying to sell to couples who are based in Hertfordshire, then have a look around at what’s going on in Hertfordshire and what on average people are looking to spend on their suppliers.
Now, I will give you a warning because when you start in business, it is very tempting to just look at your direct competitors and then just go in win by undercutting them. And this may feel like a quick win and it may get you some quick business, but it’s not really the best way to do things.
When I talk about looking at your competitors, I’m not saying to directly try and undercut them or to match their prices, but I do think it’s important for you to gauge the market that you’re going after and see what’s going on in your region, in your country, in your local area. Now, of course, you can also completely throw this out the window and do your very own thing.
Because if you’re very good at marketing and advertising, you can way out price every everybody else and still get booked. We see that all the time, don’t we? I was reading. Or watching. I shouldn’t say reading. I wasn’t reading. I was watching on TikTok.
Some people blogging and vlogging about these crumbles that are going massively viral. Over on TikTok and Instagram in London, it’s called humble crumble. I think it is.
And they have way out priced the market when it comes to crumble, but it’s working for them because everyone wants to go and have a taste of this crumble. Yes, they’re using great ingredients, yes it’s fresh, but they’ve managed to price themselves at a higher price point.
So it is possible to rip up the rulebook and do things your own way, but it just helps to gauge the market around you and to see where you are. Now, the third thing before you announce any prices is that now you need to do your sums.
And this is the part I think a lot of you neglect when it comes to pricing products and services. Be honest with yourself, when was the last time you actually did your business sums?
Now, for those of you that have ever gone through my Wedding Pro Business Builder program or thinking about it, then this is a huge part of what I talk about because I, I honestly don’t think you can run a proper business without being on top of your finances. If you’re trying to run a hobby and just earn a bit of extra cash on the side, that’s one thing.
But if you want to be serious about business, you have to understand and know your numbers. That means you need to understand how much it’s costing you to run your business and therefore how much you need to charge to make a profit.
The thing is, even if you do no bookings in the next year, your business will cost you to run. That is the nature of it. There will be overhead costs to running a business.
Things like your website hosting, your email hosting, maybe insurances, maybe your paying to be on a directory. All of these costs are in your business whether or not you take a booking in the next year or not. So you have to be on top of the numbers.
So that’s the first thing you need to do is need to look at those overhead costs. The second thing you need to do is look at costs associated with a certain kind of booking.
For example, there’s no point me saying I will sell you a wedding cake for £20 if when I do my sums I realize that the eggs, flour, milk, etc. Needed to make that cake are 25 pounds because I’m already operating at a loss. So you need to look at the costs associ with that individual product.
So with both of those numbers in mind, understanding your overhead costs, maybe your freelance costs, your travel costs, and understanding the direct cost to that product or service, you now know how much at a minimum you need to be charging in order to break even. And then of course, you want to make sure you’re making money on top of that.
The other thing is when you’re doing your sums is you want to look at how hard you want to be working and how often you want to be working. Because you could undercut everyone and say, yes, everyone else is going out for 1000 pounds, 1500 pounds a day for wedding photography.
I’m happy to do it for 100 quid. Or you have to do 15 weddings compared to the one wedding that the photographer has to do for £1,500. If you’re going to charge £100, right.
So you need to think about, do I really want to work that much for that little money or am I going to burn out? So if you know that you don’t want to work like a crazy person, then you need to make sure you price yourself accordingly.
So have you done these sums? Have you actually gone through and worked this stuff out? And if you haven’t, now is the time to go back and start doing these sums.
Because often when people go through my business builder program or I work with people one to one and we start talking about the sums, they realize that there’s some parts of their business that are a lot less profitable than they thought.
And if they want to ever earn some decent money for their family, they’re going to have to do a huge amount of work at the prices they’re currently charging. And often it’s a wake up call to realize, oh yeah, okay, undercutting everyone isn’t the way forward for this.
Unless I want to work all of the hours of the day, never take a break, and have to do 15 times more weddings than everyone else. So those three things together are going to help you start thinking about your pricing. So let me recap those.
First of all, you need to look at who you’re trying to target. Are you going for the high end market? Are you going for the DIY market? You’re going for the mid range market, where do you want to be?
Who are you trying to talk to in your marketing and advertising? What kind of venues do you want to be at? Because you need to pitch yourself at the right pricing level for them.
Secondly, you need to look around at your local market and what people are charging in that market for for that niche. And then thirdly, you need to go ahead and start doing the sums.
Now, this is going to sound a bit counterintuitive, but it is really Important you do this because actually if you do your sums and you work out okay, I can be perfectly profitable at a thousand pounds a time. But you want to go after the luxury market. There is such a thing as being too cheap.
Now I think sometimes I fall into this category and I know that I should charge more because I want to be affordable and I want more of you to be able to work with me. But what can happen when someone sees you as too cheap is they assume wrongly that what you’re offering isn’t as good as the more expensive person.
So if you are trying to go after this high end market and everyone else is charging 10 times more than you, what’s going to happen is they’re going to look at you and think, well, they obviously aren’t as good or don’t have as much experience, so you can actually be counted out for being too cheap. So you do need to put yourself on the right level and you do need to do some serious research into this.
Start looking at competitors, start looking at the people in your market that you aspire to be like and look at roughly where they’re pricing themselves. Look at your own sums and then, then come up with your own prices.
Things not to do though, are to just copy someone else’s prices and packages and do it identically because their wants and desires may be very different to yours. And secondly, don’t just look at your nearest competitor and undercut them by £50.
That’s not a great way to do business, it’s not particularly ethical.
And just think about whether or not you really need to do that, because actually you could charge the same or similar to them and still walk away with the work and be paid properly for it. Once you’ve done all those things and you start putting your prices out into the market, it’s a testing ground.
Now is the time to be testing those prices. See what feedback you get.
Now, if you are getting the wrong feedback, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re too cheap or too expensive, but it could be that your marketing and advertising is not matching your prices.
So if there’s a disconnect between the price that you’re charging and all of your images and the way that you work and how you offer your service, then that will cause people to worry. Just think about something like the car market, right? You have the luxury high end cars and then you have the cheaper secondhand cars.
You have new cars that are cheaper, you have new cars that are more expensive. But we expect as consumers that the advertising the marketing, the experience will match the price tag.
So if we are going for a top of the range, very expensive car, say a Bentley, then we would expect every moment of that experience to be incredibly luxurious. We would expect the interior of that car to be elegant and luxurious because it needs to match the pricing.
If we went to the Bentley garage and they were trying to make us spend all of this money on a car, and yet it was a dirty showroom with no parking spaces, no nice coffee machine, dirty chairs, there would be a massive, massive disconnect there and we would be put off. Now that’s an extreme example, but sometimes the same thing can happen in your business.
If you’re saying, I’m going to go for the luxury market and you’re super confident in that, but your images aren’t reflecting that and your advertising isn’t reflecting that, your website is outdated and not reflecting that, the places that you’re working are not reflecting that, the way that you offer customer service isn’t going above and beyond that the luxury market expects. Then people will just think, I’m not paying for that. So you do need to do a bit of testing and you do need to do a bit of self reflection as well.
The conclusion of that section really is that there is no right or wrong when it comes to pricing. You can price yourself however you want. Now I am going to give you one little example.
I’ve talked about this before, but you may not have heard me talk about it, and that is having the pricing model of just trying to be the cheapest. I really think this is a terrible idea.
Now, we see it all of the time and I’m sure you’ve seen it as well, particularly if you’re in some of these Facebook groups online where you have loads of people in there planning their weddings and people posting really, really cheap offers. Now, sometimes we can look at that and we can feel a bit like, oh, we’re never going to be able to compete with these cheap people.
Maybe we’re too expensive. Well, I’m going to give you an example from a few years ago to show you why you’re not too expensive.
You see, there’s always going to be someone who is willing to do it cheaper than you. Does that mean that they’ve got the quality level of you? Not necessarily. Does that mean they’re properly insured, properly experienced?
Not necessarily. But you cannot compete with people trying to be cheaper.
A few years ago I conducted an experiment myself in order to try and prove this to my members.
So I went into A Facebook group posing as a bride and posted and basically said, I’ve got £500 to spend on my photos, I want full day coverage and all of the digital photos who would be willing to do this for me.
And I was shocked at the amount of people that came back to me and said, I’d like to help you, I’d like to help you if 500 pound is nothing for a full day of wedding photography. So then I went back into another group and did the same experiment with a hundred pounds and I still got loads of responses.
And then I went back into this another group and I did the same experiment and basically said, I’m looking for someone to do it free of charge for experience and a portfolio. And still one or two people said they would do it.
Now obviously I was trying to prove a point here and I hope that that’s come across to you as well in this experiment in that I was trying to prove even if you cut your prices, there will still be someone willing to do it cheaper. And so that is not a good model to look at. There is no point trying to be the cheapest. You won’t be profitable.
If someone is willing to the wedding photos for free, let them. You can’t afford to do the wedding photos for free in your business.
There’d have to be a really good reason for you to want to do that that you can see is going to make you profitable in the future. So one pricing strategy I absolutely would not go with is that one, and that is trying to just undercut everybody.
Okay, so you’ve got your prices, you’re happy with the prices that you’re charged, you’re testing them, you’ve looked at your market and you know you’re happy with the services.
I think ultimately it’s important that you’re happy and confident with what you’re charging because if you feel unconfident with what you’re charging, that will come across. If you know you are worth the price that you’re charging, then be confident with it.
And if someone questions it, then you need to go back and say, well, that’s what I’m worth.
My 10 years of experience, my five years of experience, all of the stuff I do behind the scenes, the customer service, the programs I use, the software I use, if you can justify your pricing, people won’t question it. So once you’ve got your pricing, the next question is, how do we display our pricing on our websites or social media?
Now, I know because I’ve talked about this on stage A lot of times that it’s still quite a controversial issue and some people are. Are still hung up on the fact that we should not post our pricing.
There was a theory back in the day, and maybe it worked back in the day, that you shouldn’t tell people your price until you get in front of them or get on a call with them, because then you can woo them and upsell them. Now what’s interesting is I’m going to go back to the car market again, because recently we went to buy a new car and buy a new car.
I mean, secondhand new car, not a brand new car. I wish if a few of you want to pay me a bit more money, maybe I could get a new car.
But I went into the car garage and we were trying to get this secondhand car, and we were sat down talking to the sales guy and he said to us, and I thought this was fascinating because for me, the car garage is that old theory that people used to say in the wedding industry, get these people in front of them in the car garage. Once you’re in front of the salesman, he can woo you and sell you the car. This guy said to us, car sales has completely changed in this new era.
Now they’re saying, on average, before a customer even walks into the showroom, they’ve done nearly 47 hours of their own own research. Let me say that again.
The car garage man said that the way they sell cars is completely different because on average now, by the time someone walks into his car garage, they’ve already done 47 hours worth of research. So his job, he said, is no longer really about selling the car. It’s about chatting to them about the details that they couldn’t find online.
It’s about seeing if they’ve got availability and seeing how they’re going to finance it. He said that they no longer really do the sales pitch and the wooing because people have done their own research. And he was right.
Because before we went to the car garage, we knew exactly what car we wanted. We knew roughly how much we wanted to pay for it, because we’d looked at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cars online.
So he didn’t really have to sell to us. He just needed to find us the car in the price point we wanted and then we were going to go ahead.
Now, if this is changing in the car market, which is normally the one that people say is the way to woo people, then this is absolutely changing in the wedding industry as well. Know that your couples have done hours and hours and hours of research before they get to the point of reaching out to you.
Therefore, if you have not given them ideas of pricing, they will be filtering you out or you will be getting unqualified leads.
We were very clear on how much we wanted to pay for the car by the time we walked into the car showroom, because we’d looked online at all of the different cars, how much they cost, what changes the car value, all of that kind of stuff. We had done our research, and your couples want to be able to do the same as well.
If you give them no idea on pricing, they are going to be doing guessing, guesswork, or they’re going to be filtering you out. And neither of those things are good.
If they’re doing guesswork, they are basing it purely on the images in front of them and the things they know about your business. This could mean that they think you’re a lot cheaper than you are, or they may think that you’re a lot more expensive than you are.
And by the time you talk to them, you now may be wasting your time on a very unqualified lead. Someone that definitely can’t afford you because you’re way too expensive for their expectations. These people have never planned a wedding before.
On the whole, they don’t understand how much things cost. I mean, think about something outside of your sector. Do you really understand how much it costs?
If you wanted to have a live violinist and a harpist come and play for the day at your wedding, have you got any idea how much that would cost?
If you wanted to have a hanging bouquet, huge floral thing hanging from the ceiling in your wedding venue, and you’re not a florist, do you have any idea how much that costs? And we work in the wedding industry, so couples definitely have no idea how much this stuff costs. So you are going to end up with unqualified leads.
Or as I said, they’re just going to filter you out entirely. If they can’t be bothered to get on a call with you to find out how much something costs, costs, they are going to leave.
How often have you been on a website looking for something, say, car insurance or, I don’t know, something like that, where you want a quote, you want to know roughly how much it is, you fill in all the details and then it says in order to get your quote, you’ve got to get on a call with us or send us your email address. That’s very annoying and we don’t like it. So stop making your couples do that. Okay, enough of my Ranting on pricing. You know what I think about it?
You need to have some kind of pricing on your website to stop these two things happening. Today’s couple couples are researching, researching, researching.
If they’re researching that much to buy a car, they’re researching that much for their wedding day, probably even more so.
Okay, so three different ways you can display your pricing on your website or actually, I’m going to go for four different ways, three main ones and then the anomaly. So the first one is a from price. This is the absolute minimum everyone should have on their website.
I don’t think it’s enough, but if you’re not willing to do any more, please at least do the this a from prize tells your couples the absolute minimum amount of money you’re willing to get out of bed for. This means we’re going to discount anyone who’s looking for an absolute cheap as chips bargain.
Because if you say from 500, from a thousand, from 10,000, then if they don’t even have that as a minimum budget, they’re not going to go any further and you’ve got rid of that time waster. You need to think about what your absolute minimum is that you’re willing to go out for. But don’t be too deceitful in this.
Sometimes I see this particularly on wedding directories where they’ll say from £100, but realistically, nothing in your offering is £100, apart from maybe one thing that you’re happy to do midweek in November. And so you’re still going to end up attracting time wasters if you’re too, too heavy on the from and putting it as a really low price.
So let’s be realistic, really, what are you willing to go out for? The average couple, what is your from price for that service?
If you have multiple services, you can do multiple from prices for each of those services.
But don’t trick people by making it look really cheap because then getting on a call with them and telling them it’s 10 times more than that will just upset them. You’ll lose the trust. And trying to make that sale is going to be really, really difficult.
It’s much better that they know roughly what it’s going to cost than when you get on the call with them, they’re like, oh, it really is going to cost that. Okay, I’m ready to go ahead. So the absolute minimum you should have is a from price.
The second thing, which is definitely my preference over a from price is a range of prices. So a range price. Now I have A wedding planner who does this really, really well.
She has it on her website where she says, for a full day, plan will range between, I can’t remember her, but let’s just say six and eight thousand pounds. Now the nice thing about a range price is it’s giving you the absolute minimum that she’s willing to go out for.
So if you don’t have £6,000 to spend on a planner, you’re going to go elsewhere and she’s going to get rid of those time wasters. But it does give her some leeway within that to be able to adjust the prices depending on what they want.
And she can talk that through with them on the call.
They know it’s going to fall roughly in that range and so then she can explain to them, great, well, if you’re doing it on this day and it’s midweek and it’s this, then I can definitely do it nearer to the sale, 6,000 pound mark.
However, you’re saying that you’ve got 5,000 guests coming and it’s quite far away from where I live and I’m going to have to bring in extra staff and therefore it’s going to be nearer to the £8,000 mark. Okay, so you’re being very honest, you’re being very transparent and you’ve given them a range. Don’t make that range huge, make it like that.
Six to eight thousand pounds, something like that is really helpful. So I am quite a fan of range prices.
I think this gives you a bit of leeway so that you can alter things things and it doesn’t look like you’re just whacking loads of money on for no reason, but you have to be honest with them and you have to be able to explain to them why they’re falling into the range that you’ve told them they’re falling into. Now with a range price again, you can have this for different services.
So the planner I’m talking about has a range price for their on the day services, a range price for their partial plan and a range price for their full plan.
And then I think if they do international destination, they have a from price because obviously the range there could be massive depending on travel costs and requirements as well. So perhaps you want to consider a range of prices. The third one is my good friend Kelly Mortimer’s absolute favorite one.
I’ve heard her teach this one from Stage many times and that’s her. She calls it a pricing ladder. It’s the package pricing model. This is where you have three different Prices, three different packages.
And this does work for a lot of people, right? We see it all of the time when we’re buying things online, particularly if you’re buying software or something like that.
There’s often the basic or free price, there’s the middle price, which most people go for, and then there’s the premium price price. And this can work really well for you in your wedding business. The reason it works is to do with psychology.
People can see a range of things from that information. Number one, they can see your minimum price that you go out for because it’s right there in your lowest package.
But normally that lowest package is going to be really stripped back and doesn’t include many things. The middle price is going to be the one that most people go for.
This is the average booking value that you need to set as your middle price is going to have way more things included than the bottom price. And it’s going to look good value compared the top prize, where you’re going to give it everything and it’s going to be really, really expensive.
Now, what this does is it’s psychology, psychological positioning, because by having a crazy expensive one and a cheap one that doesn’t include very much, it makes the middle package look really, really affordable.
Now, I’ve helped loads of people implement this into their businesses when I’ve done one to ones, I’ve helped venues implement this, I’ve helped individual suppliers implement this as well. And it does work for a lot of people.
Now, I always say, because I get pushback, and I’m sure Kelly gets pushback as well on this, that people say, yeah, but my prices are always all bespoke and unique and they don’t always fit into a package. And I don’t want to sell packages. I understand this is a sales technique rather than an exact science.
So the idea is by having these three different packages, and you can call them example packages, if you don’t want to call them like, these are the packages. The point is it gives you a jumping off point.
So if I’m now on a phone call with you and you’re interested in my services, instead of me saying to you, right, tell me your budget, which no one wants to do, if you get people to tell you your budget, you’re doing well, because most people don’t want to say it because they’re worried you’re just going to sting them if you tell them your budget, instead of asking that question, you can say, have you seen the example packages on this webpage? You can even send Them the webpage live on the call or put it up on your screen. Having looked at that, where is your eyes landing?
Whereabouts do you think you’re fitting in this range?
And then they will tell you because they’ll say we’re thinking we really like the middle package or we’re leaning towards the basic package or we want to go all out with the big package, right? And so you know now roughly what their budget is and what they’re looking at.
Now the beautiful thing about this package price, pricing model and why it works so well is now you can create something bespoke for them. Because if they say we really like this middle package, it’s looking really good in our ballpark range of what we can afford.
But you see that thing up there in that VIP package, that personalized notebook, whatever it is, we’d really like that as well. And so then you can say some, okay, well let’s create you a bespoke package. I’ll give you this plus this item from here which will make it X price.
And so now you can start upselling things from that top package. And it works incredibly well. So to reiterate, if you’re going to go for this three pricing model idea, look at other people’s websites who do it.
Look at software websites because they do it all of the time, see how it works and then think about how it could work for you. And remember, it’s a jumping off point rather than an exact science. Not many people will just buy the package as it stands.
But the idea is you can get an idea of where they sit with their budget immediately. And also you can then try and upsell them things from the higher package.
Now, we’re not expecting to sell necessarily the big all singing or dancing package. You may find someone who’s very rich, that does.
But the point point is you’re putting that there really expensive, number one, to make the middle package look really, really good value. And number two, because it lists all of the things that you could upsell them on top of the middle package, I could talk about this one all day.
I think there’s loads of interesting psychology around pricing on this as well.
But that does work and I’ve helped people implement that and they found it works really well and it makes them feel more confident on the sales calls as well because they’re no longer having to ask about budget and they can just get a rough guide from asking that simple question. And couples are much more open to it and because they’ve seen it already on their website, they already understand how much things cost.
Okay, the final one.
And again, this is a bit out of the box thinking, but I have seen it work, particularly for cake makers and florists, because I understand that for you particularly, pricing is really difficult.
Flower prices change, things are so variable because every wedding wants something totally different that it’s actually really difficult to start giving people prices, pricing ranges. Now, if that is you, one other thing you can do is to show them some examples you’ve done before.
So I’ve seen a cake maker do this before where they basically have a kind of like a gallery page. It’s like a, a pricing estimate page.
It’s kind of like a gallery page where they have like 10 or 15 pictures of cakes they’ve done in the last 12 months. And then underneath they’ve put what that would cost. So pricing guide.
And not necessarily what they sold it for, but what it would cost in today’s market.
Okay, so you would have to update this page probably every financial year because we know that prices are increasing, your prices might increase as well. So we’re not saying this couple paid this much for this cake.
We’re saying if you bought an exact replica of this cake, it will cost you roughly this much money. Same with floral displays. Same kind of thing.
And so this just gives people an idea because again, I’ve got no idea how much a three tier cake would cost versus a ten tier cake versus a cake with sugar flowers. I honestly have no idea.
But by putting those examples on, what happens is couples go, I want a cake like this because they can see exactly how much it’s going to cost, they like the design and they can see roughly what their budget is going to be. So that’s another way you can do it.
The other thing I’ve been advocating for and I’m still pushing and I’m not seeing many people doing this yet, is that when you do a styled shoot, when you do these big fancy displays that you put a pricing guide on the bottom. If you were to recreate this at your own wedding, it would cost you approximately X, Y, Z.
Anything that gives people an idea about how much these different ideas cost is going to help you in the sales conversation down the line. We know people do their research. Research people do it to me all the time.
I had a call with someone just this week who rang me up and they were asking me about my one to one services and I was talking to them and halfway through the call I realized they already knew everything about my one to one services because they had the pricing and the information in front of them. They were just trying to qualify whether or not I knew what I was talking about. It wasn’t about price.
They already knew the price because they’d been on my website, done the research, looked me up, knew how much it cost to work with with me, and then called me. So at that point, it’s not about me trying to say this is how much it’s going to cost and worrying about prices at that point.
They just want to know, are we a good fit? Do we know what we’re talking about? Are we going to be able to be available to help them?
So putting your pricing on your website makes that sales call a whole lot easier.
Let’s recap then the different ways you can put pricing on your website and I’d love to hear from you what’s working for you, what prices are you putting on your website and how is it working in your world? Feel free to reach out and let me know. So different ways you can display your pricing.
Number one, absolute minimum everyone should have is the from price, but make it an honest from price. Secondly, look at price ranges. This is where you say, on average for this service, couples spend between X and X amount of money with us.
Contact us for the bespoke quote. Third one is that three tiered package pricing. It really works better with three.
Again, go and look at the software website sites and you’ll start seeing this everywhere. And the final one is some kind of example pricing guide where you put previous work up and show roughly what it would cost in today’s prices.
I hope by the end of those two sections of this podcast you’re feeling more confident about how to talk about your pricing, how to display your pricing, understanding why you need to price yourself effectively and competitively in the market you’re at, and why it’s going to make your sales conversations that much easier if you put rough prices pricing on there. Now, the other area of pricing I get spoken to about a lot is increasing prices. How do we go about increasing our prices?
We know that prices need to increase over time and sometimes we don’t feel confident to increase them. Now there’s a couple of schools of thought that I talk about with this now.
If it’s just, you know, your annual price rise, the cost of eggs have gone up, the cost of flowers has gone up, the cost of petrol’s gone up, the cost of your editing software has gone up, and you’ve looked at all your numbers like I’ve told you to do earlier. And you realize, realize everything’s going up. My prices need to shift up a little bit.
Maybe it’s kind of inflation, they’re going to go up by 1 or 2%. You should be looking at that every single year to work out whether or not that needs to happen.
If you haven’t increased your prices for the last five years, for example, or even the last three years, go and do your sums and work out, do I need to increase your prices? Because prices are increasing everywhere else.
If you look at your insurance premiums, if you look at the cost of your grocery shopping, they’re increasing. So that’s one reason you might want to do a price rise.
The other reason you might want to do a price rise is you realize your services are probably a bit cheap. And it’s not just a percentage price rise you need to do, it’s quite a chunky price rise.
Now the reason you would do this is if you’re getting fully booked or you’re very popular at the price you are and you want to work slightly less weddings and earn slightly more money. I had a one to one client that this was the case for and they wanted to put their prices up by about £500.
Now that’s a big leap to suddenly go, it’s an extra £500. And they were nervous to do it.
So I said to them, right, once you’ve hit, if you want to get five bookings next year, once you’ve got four bookings for next year in your diary, which I knew was going to happen because they were getting booked all of the time, then let’s at that point move your price up by 500 pound or let’s move it up by 200 pounds, let’s do it in stages.
And the fifth booking that comes in, if it comes in and they pay the extra £200 and you get a couple more bookings where they’re happy to pay the extra £200, then let’s shift it up again by another £100. And we repeated that process until we got it to the 500 pound price increase. They went wanted, no one was batting an eyelid at it.
It showed that what the prices she had before were too cheap because people weren’t even questioning the fact that it was that price.
Now she didn’t announce this price rise anywhere and for her own confidence, like I said, we waited till she was booked at a certain capacity and then we steadily increased it.
And every time she got three or four bookings at that new price, we then upped it again, upped it again until we got to the point where she wanted it.
And now she probably needs to reflect again because if she’s still getting fully booked at that new price rise, maybe there’s another step she could go.
Now if she’d have gone up that hundred pounds and suddenly was losing work and no one was booking her anymore and people were saying she was too expensive, then she could have always dropped it back down. That is an option. You can do that if it’s not working. That’s why we test these things.
However, you do need to understand if you are going to do a big leap price increase like that, you probably will hit a point where inquiries go down, but your overall booking value will be higher. You need to look at conversions, not just inquiry numbers. We don’t need loads of inquiries that are wasting our time.
What we need is really high qual quality inquiries that can afford us and will convert. So if you are going to do a price rise, the that example one is probably one that you kind of do quietly behind the scenes.
And if you want to work one to one with me, then that’s the kind of thing we do each month is we talk these things through. So you’ve got someone cheering you on because often it’s our own heads that get in the way of putting these prices up.
However, if it’s more of this annual price rise that you want to do, maybe it’s the inflation price rise, then here’s how I recommend that you, you do it. The first thing is you’re going to decide on a date when your prices are going to go up.
Now we’ve missed the financial years, there’s no point doing that, but you can choose any date you want to. It may be that you say from the 1st of September my price is going up due to inflation, blah blah, blah, blah.
You decide on that date first of all and make it really clear in your head and tell yourself that is the day you’re changing the prices on your website, your brochures, everything. The second thing you’re going to do is you’re going to tell people that your prices will be going up on that that date.
When you tell other people, that means you have to do it.
So that may be a social media post, that may be an email, that may be telling people somewhere else, but you need to start telling people your prices are rising on this date. Then what you need to do is tell people, and this is a great sales technique that you will honor your current prices until that date, okay?
So for example, if you’re currently £500 and as of the 1st of September, you’re going to be £550, you tell that anyone that books by the 31st of August that they will still get the £500 pound rate.
Any outstanding inquiries you’ve got hanging on, you need to contact them and say to them, I’m honoring this price, but you need to book and pay your deposit by the 31st of August, otherwise it’s going to go up.
What this does is it doesn’t upset anyone that’s already in your zone because they are still getting your original prices that you talked about and you’re giving them the chance and the time to actually go ahead and book.
Now, this may give you some last minute conversions, this may push people over the line to book, but then you have to be honest and do what you said you were going to do. Otherwise it’s not fair on those customers and it’s a sleazy sales technique.
So if you’re saying book before the 1st of September to get this price, your prices have to genuinely go up on the 1st of September and you have to stick to that. Otherwise it comes across as a sleazy sales tactic rather than you being honest and helping them out and giving them the chance to book.
So make sure you hold firm to it and then honor that price for the people that do book before your date, because you were charging that price for before anyway and you’ve given them the opportunity. As long as they do it before that deadline, you will honor their price. So let’s recap that again.
If you have not raised your prices at all for the last two, three, four years, look at your numbers. Is everything going up and your profit going down? If it is, you need to do a little percentage increase on your prices.
So decide on a date that’s going to happen, announce it to people. It could be that you’re not going to do it till the 1st of January, 1st of September, 1st of August, 1st of July.
Whenever you want to do, do it, tell people my prices will be going up for this reason as of this date.
And then contact everyone who’s already inquired or is on your social media and say, if you want to get me at today’s prices, you need to have booked and paid your deposit by 31 August, whatever the day is before your prices go up, then on that day, you need to honor that price change. No one who messages you 24 hours later should get the original price. You should hold firm to the prices and the deadlines you set.
Otherwise people will push your boundaries. Boundaries. And you need to change everything on your website, brochures, etc.
Okay, one final thing that I want to chat to you about in regards to pricing is this discounts. Now you will know if you’ve been in my world any length of time or read my lovely book Done is better than perfect.
That one of my favorite things to say and one of the things I’m best known for is the phrase Disney never discount. If you’ve not heard me talk about this, I actually recorded a whole podcast episode about it. One of, I think it was like episode two of this podcast.
You can go back and listen. But the reason I say that is because I love Disney and Disney never discount. And I want all of you to be more Disney in your businesses.
There are some theme parks out there that you can get a two for one packet of cereal and get into that theme park half the price. You can never pay the actual price and you always end up paying less.
However, if you want to go to Disney, you pay a premium and you get a premium service and it’s worth it, right? So I want you to see your businesses as Disney. If you are the person that’s constantly going, get 50% off, get 20% off, get half price.
Like it does work as a sales tactic, but it will make you look like one of those furniture stores where they’ve always got a bank holiday sale and people will just think that you’re not really worth the full price. You’re only worth a cheap price. And they’ll only look at you because you’re cheap. So you won’t be attracting higher level clients.
You won’t be attracting easy to work with clients. You will be attracting people that want cheap and are looking for an absolute bargain.
If you’re high quality with that, you know that comes right back to point one about thinking about who you want to talk to. Then if you’re happy with that, go for that technique. But for most of you, you’re not.
You want to be more Disney and you don’t want to be doing discounting.
So what can we be doing when we feel like the economy is difficult or we feel like people can’t afford all of the prices and that we need to bring in a bit of a cash injection into our business. Okay, two things. Number one is instead of doing a discount, do some kind of added value, right? Disney do do this all of the time.
If you book by this date, then you will get extra dining credits or you’ll get an upgrade room or you’ll get this, that and the other. So they’re not taking money off what you’re paying, but they’re giving you a bit more for your money.
So if you’re at a wedding show or you want to do some kind of promotion, do an added value offer that’s not going to cost you a lot of money to do, right? There’s no point doing an added value offer that’s going to cost you a lot of time or money because you’re then essentially discounting.
But if there are things you can add on to your package that have a high perceived value but don’t actually take you that long, then go for it.
So that’s the first thing is if you want to do some kind of offer, do something added value rather than, than a big discount, not 20% off, not buy one, get one free. But if you book by this date, you will also get XYZ thrown in to celebrate our birthday month or whatever it is.
The other thing you can do, and I’ve been talking to my members a lot about this, is some kind of very basic, simple, cheaper package that is designed for the lower end of the market.
Now you need to put limitations on this because you can’t just give your same package away at half the price because you need the money, because that is unfair on your other customers and will devalue your brand. But what you can do is give a very basic, basic version of your offer for a cheaper price.
So for example, the example I use a lot is in Kate, is that there was a cake maker that used to do a simple cake to try and rival the supermarket wedding cakes. Now this was very restricted. You could only have it like midweek, I think, or on a, on a off season weekday or weekend.
It had one design, there was no design consultations involved in it. It had choices of flavors, but they were very basic. And you got that cake. There was no.
You could come for a design consultation, you come for a tasting. No, it wasn’t like that. It was a simple cake to rival the supermarket. It was one price, it was a cheap price, but you got that cake.
So is there something, is there some kind of offer you could put on where you create a simple, very stripped back package of what you do.
So for example, if you’re a photographer, maybe it’s a special deal that’s only available midweek and is only two hours footage and digital photos only or something like that. So, so it’s not cheapening your full package where you do the full works.
It’s a very basic version of what you do, but it brings in some cash flow when you need it at short notice. So maybe there’s something you can do around that. That is not the same as discounting your service.
That is not the same as devaluing what you do and giving yourself away really, really cheap. Disney, never discount. You need to be more Disney.
You need to value yourself and your services and also value the clients that have booked you at the property prices.
But if you need to have a cash injection or your things are slow or the economy is struggling and you know that you need to lower your prices somehow, that is two simple ways you can do it. One, is with added value, so same price but give them more for it.
Or two, create some kind of really basic stripped back package, a stripped back version of what you normally do, but take all the frills out of it.
Don’t give them loads of consultations, don’t give them loads of choices over design is very basic and it has very strict limitations that you can have to be clear on and stick to. They’re the ways to bring in money short notice. I really hope that this pricing episode has been helpful for you.
I know we’ve kind of gone in depth in all sorts of different areas of pricing and maybe some of them have been more relevant to you than others, but when I go to events and I speak on stages and I work with people one to one, this is the thing that comes up the most confidence about charging your prices, how to increase your prices, how to bring in money last minute, how to price yourself against your competitors. And hopefully I’ve answered most of those questions today.
If you are feeling like you need more help with this subject, then this would be the perfect thing to do with me.
One to one, I do two hour one to one sessions where you can book me for two hours for just under £400 and we will go through your prices and I will help you have the confidence. Or if you need a longer term solution, we can have an hour together every month. It’s 200 pounds a month with a minimum of three months in a row.
Obviously it needs to work for me as well and I know that if we’re going to only have an hour, we need to have those back to back sessions to get the results.
And I will guide you and walk you through pricing strategy and making sure you raise your prices and giving you the confidence and checking, you know, your numbers and we can do that together. If you’re interested in either of those things. As always, just reach out to me.
We can jump on a discovery call to check if we’re a good fit together, to see what you actually need help with and to see if I can help and we can move forward that way. I hope today’s episode has been super helpful for you. Go out there, charge your worth, be more Disney. And remember, Disney, never a discount.
I’ll see you next time.
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