Creating deals and discounts without undermining your profit strategy

Monday Money Missive: Black Friday advice part 2

My dear Kindred Spirit,

A couple of days ago, I wrote to you about Black Friday pricing. Today, I'm popping into your inbox to talk about why it's important to know what your goal is when putting an offer out on one of these "discounts and deals" days.

1. Is your goal to get in front of new people, get them on your list and turn them into ongoing buyers?

This is a fine goal. But it's important to know that if you price an offer far lower than what you typically charge, you may bring new people into your world, and on to your list, who can't afford your everyday prices.

I'm sure you've heard, "Customers will find the money for something they really want" and that is true, once. Buyers don’t typically stretch that far in an ongoing month-to-month, year-to-year way. If your goal is to sell to them over and over, offer a discount, but don't slash your usual price too much. 

2. Is your goal to boost your year-end revenue with a cash-infusion of one-time sales? 

This is also a fine goal. Offering a recording of a training you previously delivered live, at a huge discount off of the price of the live course, is the kind of thing that works well here. Why Because it will get your course into the hands of people who never would have ponied up the money for the live course. AND it won't undercut future sales of the live course at all because the people who want live courses wouldn't buy the recorded version in the first place. 

3. Is your goal to give people a taste of your work so that they might buy a bigger, higher priced offer in the near future? 

This is also a terrific goal. Simply take care to make cost of  "the taste" proportional to the bigger program. For example, if the taster is 4-5 weeks long, and the bigger program is 6 months long, the ideal Black Friday price would be about 17% of the cost of the six month program. After the Black Friday weekend is over, the price would go up.

Want to see that in numbers? 
If the 6 month program = $3,000; the Black Friday price for the taster offering would be $510. Adding another 25% to the Black Friday price for the "real" price would raise it to $637. 

No matter what your goal is, it's important to think beyond the Black Friday/Small Biz Saturday/Cyber Monday weekend to be sure that your pricing strategy is contributing to your overall strategy and not undermining it.

to our success,
Laura