It can be difficult to come up with the right price for your products or services, especially as is true with so many Internet marketers, if your chief investment is time. After all, if you paid a certain amount of money for your product, you can always mark it up a certain percentage and be done with it. But what if your product is something you spent days, weeks, months, or even years creating? How do you decide what the right price should be? We’ll discuss a few pricing strategies in the following paragraphs to help you to prepare for this area of marketing.
Know Your Customer’s Needs
What is it your customers are really looking for? If your customers are bargain conscious, this will need to play a role in your pricing strategy. This is important to know before you invest so much time or money in your product that you have to price it high just to recoup your investment. After all, if your marketing to customers that need to watch every dime, you want to be able to offer them products that will reflect their needs while at the same time are earning you profit.
Know Your Own Needs
What is it you need to accomplish? Do you need to earn some quick startup money or are you trying to establish relationships with long term customers? Knowing your own needs should figure into the equation of the kinds of products or services you are offering as well as what you are charging for them. Can you afford to sit on product that may not move for a while or must you sell your product just as soon as possible. Assess your own needs as well as the needs of your customers before you even begin the marketing process.
Research Similar Products
Research similar products in your niche to see how they are priced so that you can be competitive with your prices. If you find that in order to recoup your investment and make even a small profit that you need to price your product double your competition’s price, then you may need to rethink the whole process before you lose your shirt. Planning ahead before you invest a lot of time and money in the creative and marketing process will ensure that you are able to make a profit when you do sell your products.
There is no one right pricing strategy that Internet marketers go by, as you can probably see. Trial and error is the way many marketers figure out what the right pricing strategies are for their particular products and services. You may have to try one thing and if it doesn’t work, try another. Research is your best strategy when it comes to figuring out this puzzle though. Do your homework to ensure your best chance of success.
Not only should you be testing your content on a regular basis but you should be testing your prices too. You can do this yourself without using any software by running the same ad, offer, or salespage with two different prices to see which one brings the most sales. Alternatively, you can use Google’s Website Optimizer to test several aspects of your site, including your prices. With this tool, which is free, and can be used with or without AdWords, half of your customers are sent to your website with one price listed (or define any other testing criteria) and the other half are sent to your identical website with only those parameters that you specified changed.
With all the options Internet marketers have for pricing it can be difficult to figure out which price is the right one, especially for those marketers who have no previous experience. Understand, though, that even the most experienced Internet marketers have to constantly test their prices and other aspects of their Internet marketing campaigns to know what is working and what isn’t working.
When you use a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer, your stats are collected and analyzed so that you can easily tell which prices are converting and which ones aren’t.
While you’re testing prices, you might as well test other parameters as well, such as headlines and other parts of your offer. You’ll receive detailed reports that will help you to easily understand which parts of your offer work better than others.
Split-testing doesn’t have to be a dreaded chore even if you don’t use any software to help make the job easier. You can simply list two identical offers with different prices and track your stats to see which offer is converting better. Realize, though, that split-testing, like many other aspects of Internet marketing, is an ongoing process. Once you get the results of your first test, change your parameters and test again.
You may have a great product and still lose sales because it is priced too high or too low so it is important to find just the right price that consumers are willing to pay. Priced too low, consumers may feel that your product is not a quality product. Priced too high, consumers may feel that it is overpriced or they may not be able to afford it. That’s why it is crucial to split test so that you can find the price that will continue to bring sales.