Is the Price Right? 3 Key Questions to Ask Before Lowering Your Prices
Have you ever been tempted to lower your price?
Worried that no one is buying because your prices are too high?
If you’ve ever felt that your class, membership or course price was just too high, you’re not alone. The hard-to-resist temptation to change your price in order to boost sales is REAL.
But before you go down that path, I want to make sure you’re making a data-informed decision.
In this episode, I’m sharing 3 key questions to answer that’ll help you understand why your offer might not be selling…without touching your price.
Links from this episode
Buy a copy of Chill and Prosper by Denise Duffield-Thomas (Amazon affiliate link)
Sign up for my FREE Culinary Roadmap and learn how to start a flexible and fulfilling online business.
Say hello to Cynthia on Instagram → @culinarycynthia!
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Cynthia Samanian: If you currently have an offer out there that isn't selling as well as you'd like and you're thinking about lowering your price, don't touch anything just yet. I want you to listen through to the end of this episode, because what I'm going to do here is share the three key questions you have to ask yourself before touching your price.
Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to chat with you about pricing in this episode. Now, before I get into that, I do want to share some fun things that I've been up to and then some not so fun things.
So if you listened to one of my earlier episodes, I think back from January, so earlier this year, I should say January 2023, I talked about the importance of just stepping away and giving yourself some space. And sometimes that means stepping away from your physical work environment. Stepping away from commitments. Family. Whatever it might be. And it absolutely is a privilege and not something that I know everyone can do.
But I had the opportunity this last weekend, it was my birthday and my husband asked me what I wanted and one of the things that I wanted was a night away. And it's funny, I had been thinking about it throughout the week and he was like, you should go. And I'm like, well, no, because you know, our daughter had a cough and I thought, oh, maybe she'll need me. When really like she was going to be totally fine and my husband would take great care of her. And I was in the shower on Friday afternoon and at that point in time, I wasn't going to go. And then I decided, no, I need to do this. So Friday night, I had stayed in one of my favorite hotels in San Francisco. I had dinner with girlfriends before, but I just had a nice evening and late morning to myself. So I didn't spend all night, like watching Bravo, even though if you've know me, you know, that I like some good Real Housewives and all that. But what I did do was read a book that was recommended to me by my friend, Sam, who is the founder of Passionland. And she reads, gosh, like 10 books a week. And I don't. So when she recommends a book to me, and really, really is like, no, you have to read this book, I listen.
So she referred this book to me. I have it in my hand right now. You can't see it, but it's called Chill and Prosper. It's by Denise Duffield-Thomas. And I have to say I was a little unsure about it. I was like Chill and Prosper. This kind of sounds too good to be true. This sounds like one of those books that's just like, get rich quick. You don't have to work that hard. But I really trusted my friend Sam and her advice. And let me tell you, I read this whole book cover to cover in a day. Which is not typical for me. Like, I, I will listen to audio books here and there, but I don't sit and read a physical book honestly ever. It was a fantastic read. I have like 20 neon sticky notes all throughout it, because there was just so much clarity and I dunno just the way that Denise shared information that I had maybe even heard before, it was just a refreshing new approach to thinking. So this book talks about mindset. It talks about your relationship with money. It talks about business models and marketing. And it really I think is a great read if you have been at this for a while. So if you have an existing business and you feel like you're burning the candle at both ends, and you just want to essentially work smarter and not harder. This is it. This is the book. So definitely check it out. I'll include a link in the show notes.
So after that great relaxing weekend, we definitely hit some bumps in the road this week with our girls, we had some sicknesses, we had some sleepless nights, some transitions in preschool and daycare. And honestly, it's kind of par for the course. If you're a parent, or if you remember being a parent of small children, then you just know every week something's going to happen. And I think between reading this book, taking that time away and just going through this last week, it was such a strong reminder of the importance of building a business that supports your life rather than competing with it. I was able to flex my schedule to support my girls and my family when it needed to happen. And just do things that I normally wouldn't be able to do if I was working a traditional corporate job, or even if I had built a business that had me chained to my desk 24 7. Now I'm continuing to work on this and one of the things I learned from this book is asking for help is important. It's a good thing. And I'm trying to incorporate more help in my business.
But what I will say is that I've never felt stronger about the importance of having a life-first business, a business that acknowledges the life you have. Recognizes that you have multiple demands in your life. It isn't just about work for many of you and not making you feel bad about that. Not making that a negative thing, but rather just a piece in the entire picture.
And that is something that Denise talks quite a bit about in the book. She does recognize the fact that this idea of hustle culture and pulling all nighters and living off of energy drinks, that is one way you can build a business. But that is this quote bro mentality around building a business that we all don't have to subscribe to. We can still be successful and do it on our terms.
Okay, so let's move into the meat of today's episode. So I wanted to talk to you about pricing and specifically how you should go about changing your pricing. This episode was inspired by a question that one of my students asked inside The Profit Parfait. This is my advanced program for experienced online culinary business owners. And so like her, there are others in the program who have offers out there. They have classes, they have courses, they have memberships. And she just asked the simple question: should I lower my price for my group classes?
So I figured I would share the advice that I told her, and this advice is going to apply no matter what it is you're selling. I will use the term offer throughout this episode. And an offer is just anything that you put out there that you want people to take action and sign up for, so it could be a class, live or recorded. It could be a course. It could be a membership. It could be one-on-one coaching. You could also even say that a freebie or a lead magnet is an offer, even though they're not paying, they are signing up and providing you with their name and email address.
If you currently have an offer out there that isn't selling as well as you'd like and you're thinking about lowering your price, don't touch anything just yet. I want you to listen through to the end of this episode, because what I'm going to do here is share the three key questions you have to ask yourself before touching your price.
And it will help you get to a place where you are making decisions based off of data, not just how you might be feeling. Because that's the key here. Being a business owner, especially being a solopreneur is an emotional roller coaster. And many of you already know this. There are highs and there are lows, sometimes in the same day.
So it's challenging to just trust our gut or listen to how we feel when it comes to decisions like pricing. Because for whatever reason, if no one is buying what we're selling, I know that it's easy to take it personally. And think that, oh, wait, who am I to think that I can charge x number of dollars for my service. We start to question our value. We start to fall into imposter syndrome. And we stop believing all the things that we needed to believe to build up the confidence to put ourselves out there and sell.
So, what do we do?
We lower the price. We lower the price from a place of fear rather than thinking about things holistically and really considering what other things may be impacting our sales outside of price.
So let's move right into the questions. If you have a pen and paper handy, jot them down. I will recap them at the end of this episode.
But I think you're going to want to take notes, especially if you are in front of your computer or you have a notepad handy.
So the first question to ask yourself, before you change your price is this: are enough people viewing your offer's sales page?
Now why is this important? Okay. Why do I care about how many unique page views your sales page is getting? It's because we need to make data-driven decisions.
If two people saw your sales page last week and no one bought, that's very different than if a thousand people saw and no one bought.
If two people landed on your sales page last week and no one bought, that actually is not a pricing problem. But again, if a hundred people or a thousand people saw your page and no one bought, then we have to keep digging.
Okay. So we need to think about how many people actually see your sales page. Because if you aren't getting enough people to see your sales page, your problem is getting traffic to your page. And that's when you want to work on other activities in your marketing that increase awareness and improve engagement. So if we think about a marketing funnel, at the top we have awareness, then we have engagement and at the bottom we have conversion or purchase. If we don't have enough people coming into the top of the funnel, then we absolutely are not going to have enough people at the bottom of the funnel. Naturally people fall out.
In marketing, we call this the conversion rate. So if you had 20 unique visitors last week on your sales page and one of those people purchased well, that is a 5% conversion rate. One divided by 20. And that's actually a pretty good conversion rate. This is a key metric you need to know.
I hinted at this earlier, but you can calculate your conversion rate, not only for your paid offers, but even for your freebies or your lead magnets. I track this every single week with my Culinary Roadmap. I know how many people landed on the opt-in page to sign up for the freebie. And I know how many people actually signed up for the freebie. And so that's a conversion rate I monitor every single week to make sure that I attract the right people and continue to grow my list through my freebie.
Okay. So now's the time to ask yourself, how many page views am I getting on my sales pages for my offers. And we want to, again, look at unique page views because unique means unique individuals. You don't want to double count someone who visits your page twice because it's still one person.
If you are getting a lot of traffic, let's say you have at least a hundred page views to date on your sales page and your conversion rate is below 3%, it could be pricing that's impacting your sales. But it could also be who you're targeting, how you talk about your offer, what's inside the offer. There are a lot of other things that could be impacting your sales beyond pricing.
So the next question to think about is are the right people seeing your offer? So first we talked about are enough people looking at your offer? The next question is, well, are they the right people? Because you might be getting decent traffic to your sales page. But if it's not selling, it could just be that you're attracting the wrong types of people.
For example. If your course teaches advanced bread baking, but all of your page visitors are beginners. Then there's a disconnect between your offer and the skill level of your ideal student. This can be really common if you talk a lot about beginner skills and strategies on your Instagram but then what you've created for them is too advanced. Hint, hint, I've done this in the past. And that gap of knowledge will absolutely impact your conversion. People won't buy.
In another example, let's say you speak to busy moms. That's your audience. But you present this really massive, bulky online course that has tons of homework and live calls in the middle of the day. Well, there's a mismatch again between your audience and your offer.
So, how do you know if the right people are seeing your offer? This is why I love email marketing. You can actually track who clicks links in the emails you send. So, If you talk about your course, your classes or your membership in your emails, let's say you send an email announcing enrollment opening for your course. Well, when people click on that link that indicates that they're somewhat interested. If people are clicking, but not buying, you can use that click as information to dig deeper. You could reach out to them and ask them to hop on a call with you, gather some insights. Why was this offer perhaps not right for them?
This is a great way to learn more about why someone may not be buying. But I will say one of the things that typically happens is that they all say that the price was too high. Does that mean you should lower it? No.
We're going to learn how to dig a little bit deeper because it isn't always about the amount of money. More often than not it's about the value.
Question three, is this: well, actually it's a two part question. Is it clear what you're offering? Are you focusing on the value versus what they get?
So there are two things here to think about. The first is around clarity. Some sales pages are just super confusing and aren't clear. It should be very obvious when someone lands on your sales page: who your course is for? Why should someone take your classes? What's the purpose of your membership? If you can't answer these questions for your reader or your audience, then they are going to have a very hard time figuring out if this is right for them and if they should pull out their wallet and spend money on your program.
There's a quote out there. I don't even know who came up with this glow. It's been recycled and you used a thousand times, but it is so very true. And it's that a confused person never buys. A confused person never buys. So if someone is looking at your sales page and they just don't get it, they're not going to email you. They're not going to use your little chat widget. They'll just exit out. Right? If someone emails you a question. And that means they're highly motivated and it also probably means that dozens of other people had that same question, but didn't bother to ask which in many cases means that you're leaving money on the table. So you really want to make sure that your pages are clear.
The other thing to think about is this idea that your sales page should focus on the value? Oftentimes sales pages focus so much on the what they got, versus the why it matters.
I see this a lot with class sales pages, right? We're talking like a 90 minute Zoom class. And most of the time it's just a page that has the date, the time, the logistics, the recipes, the refund policy. And that's it. You are missing a huge opportunity to convert people to being students if you don't think about why the class matters. What will taking your class, empower your student to do?
If you're teaching a busy parent how to meal prep, well, are you just listing the class date and time and what you're going to teach them? Or are you highlighting their pain points? Are you highlighting their desires and what the end goal could be for them. Is your class going to help them save time? Is your class going to help them be more confident? Maybe not feel so frazzled in the morning?
People aren't paying you to get three recipes, a replay, a workbook, six modules, whatever it is. They're paying you to experience a transformation.
Maybe it's saving time. Maybe it's saving money, having more confidence, just being happier in the kitchen, whatever it may be. You need to know what that motivation is, what that transformation is that they're craving. And make sure that you use it everywhere in your marketing, especially on your sales pages.
So, how do you know if your page isn't clear or if you're not focusing on the right things? This is a tough one because when you are in your own business and you are in the weeds and you've stared at the same sales page for days, weeks, maybe months. You start to miss that 30,000 foot view. And this is where it can be really helpful to ask someone who's outside of your business.
Now, I don't want you to just ask anyone. I want you to be careful here, because I do know that many of you have leaned on your partners and family members in the past for business advice. And they most likely are not your target audience. They have not started businesses before. And they're just trying to protect you and keep you safe, which oftentimes means, uh, critiquing your work in a way that may not be the most productive.
So I encourage you, when you seek advice to ask someone who has been in the game. They've been in the arena. So it could be working with a coach, a copywriter or a savvy friend who's also an entrepreneur who understands the process. I have people that I lean into, I call them my business besties, and it's really helpful to have those people you can just call up or, you know, share your screen and have them give you that feedback. And I do it for them as well.
So this is when it's really helpful to just have that community around you. We've had people in our program who continue to stay in touch with one another and just tap into each other for this type of support, because it's always easier to look at someone else's business, their sales page, whatever it is, and point out areas of improvement. Rather than like, just looking at your own work. So having fresh eyes on it will be very, very helpful.
Whenever you ask someone to give you that feedback though, they'll make sure you let them know who your ideal student or who your ideal client is. Help them understand what their motivations are, what they care about, what are their pain points. You basically want to prep them so that they can look at that sales page through the lens of your ideal client.
So I talked a little bit about this idea of price versus value, and let's dive into it more. Because again, I ask people, why didn't you buy, why didn't you enroll? Some people will say it's not the right time or the content wasn't relevant for me or whatnot.
But nine times out of 10, probably even more than 90% of the time, they'll just say the price was too high. If I lowered my price every time I heard that my price was too high. I would be selling my program for zero. It would be free. It's a good thing I didn't listen to that feedback because there is more behind someone saying that something is too expensive or that the price is too high.
Now I will caveat this by saying there are people who really want to invest in my program or in other people's programs, but they just don't have the money. And that I absolutely respect. And my whole position is to never put anyone in like a financially dire situation to enroll. I don't think it brings good energy into their work in the program. It adds a layer of stress that is just a challenge for everyone involved. So I'm not talking about someone not having that money in their bank account. What we're talking about now is this idea of something being worth an investment.
So the difference between price and value can be, I think best explained what this example. So $10,000 is a lot of money. Right? For me, for most of you listening, I don't think you would just blindly hand someone $10,000.
So if someone decided to sell you a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I have it right here in front of me, if they offered that to you for $10,000, would you buy it?
No, you wouldn't. Why? Well because the value of that book is probably somewhere between 30 to $40. It is not $10,000, no matter how much you love Julia Child. No matter how much you enjoy the recipes in that book. You are not going to pay more than the value of the book to you.
Now what if that same person said that you could travel back in time and cook with Julia Child for $10,000. Same amount. We're talking $10,000 here. I think many of you would absolutely move forward with that.
And if you didn't have $10,000, I bet you'd find a way. Why? Because of the value. Would you call that experience expensive? $10,000 is a lot of money but is it expensive for you to spend that amount to be able to travel back in time and cook with Julia Child. I don't think so.
We have to think about the price in relation to the value. What it is that you are getting or what it is that your students are getting.
So when someone tells you your class is too expensive, that doesn't mean you run and you log into your sales page software and you lower the price. What it does mean is that you spend more time thinking about whether or not they're the right person for your offer. And if they are, have you communicated the value to them on your sales page?
So to recap the three questions to consider before lowering your price are these: first off are enough people viewing your offer's sales page? Are the right people seeing your offer? And the third question is around clarity is it clear what you're offering and are you focusing on value versus just what they get?
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you have any other questions around pricing, let me know to send me a DM on Instagram. I love creating topics in response to what's on your mind in the moment, so don't be shy. Thanks again for listening and I'll be back here next week with another episode.
