Copy Tip 36: Fruit-Based Pricing Strategy
The summer fruits are simply delicious at the moment.
Last week, Mel and I were given bags of nectarines and apricots.
And today at our Rotary lunch, we had a special fundraiser with lots of donated fresh country orchard fruits, tomatoes, cucumbers and free range eggs. (A very generous donation: about a dozen big boxes all filled nearly to overflowing! It helped us raise over $750 for our local Rotary projects).
Well, I missed out on a box in the raffle but picked up one in the auction — so home we came with cucumbers, peaches, plums … and there’s more in that box I haven’t even discovered yet!
Mmmm, stone fruits … it’s a great time of year for them and they’re scrum-diddly-umptious!
Now I bet you’re wondering how that ever relates to copy?
I mean, there IS a connection here, yes?
Of course!!
After 36 copy tips there’s always a connection!
Yesterday we started talking about contrast. And specifically, taking a price and using it in a different way — but still stating the same amount — to help change the perception of the price to your prospect.
I used this very successfully a couple of years ago for a client, just like yesterday’s example.
In that project, I took a $347 subscription and also had the copy: “that’s just $29 per month, or 95 cents per day” — with a picture of coins totally 95 cents. This is the image I used:
That approach helps put the offer in perspective: it was for the education market, and I showed all 3 prices to use contrast: breaking down the price to easily imagine how affordable it would be in a school’s budget.
(And the project worked brilliantly for my client, they loved it! So much so I use the testimonial in the right-hand column at the moment on this website — it’s the testimonial from Michael Grose).
Today, I want to talk about another method of “contrast” that is also used in copy as part of a pricing strategy.
It’s used to show value between two otherwise incomparable products. It’s called …
Apples to Oranges
(This is my fruity connection!)
I first picked up this tip from Dan Kennedy as a great way of minimising the impact of price.
He had an example in his excellent must-read book The Ultimate Sales Letter about using this price minimisation tactic for a series of tapes of a seminar.
Now, as an example, some business-based CD’s can be priced at a fairly small amount of money, just $10 or $15 each in a series.
So if you’ve got a product on CD yourself, but have it priced say at $297 — then comparing it to another CD product (an apples-to-apples comparison) like a $15 CD would not help your cause!
You know of course there’s lots more value in your CD to your prospect than the little cost to make each copy, so to illustrate that high value you can compare the price of your CD package to other things.
For example, if you have three CD’s that each go for an hour and your normal consultation fee is $800 per hour, then if you compare $297 to 3 hours of your time valued at $800 — $2,400 — then you can show a real “bargain” in terms of what the prospect might pay you for hearing the same content in an appointment.
Or if your 3 CDs are based on the recordings of a workshop you ran — you can (as Dan uses in his example in the book) compare the $297 investment in the audio course to:
- the actual ticket price of attending the workshop;
- plus your travel and accommodation costs; and
- plus the time away from your business and family
let alone also including the value of now having the convenience of listening to the material over and over again, in your car, or any place you choose … and putting a value on all of that can easily reach the thousands, again helping to minimise the perceived price of your CDs versus the overwhelming value contained on them.
When you also then use real scarcity, price instalments and valuable bonuses, your price starts to seem much more scrum-diddly-umptious than it might have without using these pricing tactics.
It’s a fair way to use comparison to make the price seem insignificant.
After seeing these pics again, I’m off for some more fruit … yum!
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