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Creative Pricing Strategies:
5 Easy Tips for Offering Your Clients More Buying Options
When I was a kid, I used to love going to our small lumber town's only Chinese restaurant. I think it was called the Canton Gardens. It wasn't so much the fake little paper lanterns or the fortune cookies (those were the days when fortune cookies still told your fortune instead of doling out lame advice like, "Good fences make good neighbors"). It wasn't even the Chinese lettering on the menu headers, though later I would fall in love with world languages.
Know what made it so exciting? It was the delightful fact that I could choose the pieces of my meal, putting them together in a package that suited just me. You know, the "one from column A, one from column B" thing?
In the real, grown-up world, offering buying packages can work just as nicely for our customers.
Being able to choose the features and components they want and realizing some savings in the process is a win-win. Your customers buy more of what they really want and you can increase your sales-if the choices are attractive enough.
5 tips for offering your customers more buying choices
1. Establish value of individual services first. It is difficult to show the benefits of purchasing the whole set unless you have established clear value for the individual products or services first. Introduce packages or bundled services after your customers recognize the quality and usefulness of each product or service.
2. Provide choices. Whether you offer packaged services or allow your client to put together the set of services she most wants, offer a range of options and prices. Three is a number that works well, with a low-medium-high pricing structure and choices for every budget. Or try the Chinese menu strategy, letting your client choose a certain total of services from different categories.
3. Choose simple, but appealing names. "Good," "better," and "best" are not only boring, they don't help people emotionally connect with your service. McDonald's advertises their "Happy Meals" for kids. Brown Bear makes it fun with its "Bear Essentials," "Beary Good," and "Beary Best." You get the idea.
4. Throw in added value at no extra cost. For our current Wordpress blog promotion, we are adding a new WordPress blog theme, valued at $79, at no extra cost to our clients. We still get the design fees, so throwing in a new theme for free is worth it if it makes our clients happy.
5. Consider a "new client" package. Try luring prospects over to the customer side with a reduced price new client package with some of your more popular basic services.
For more marketing advice, visit our Cat's Eye Marketing blog.
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