Transcript of Episode

Leah Gervais: Hey you guys. So today we are talking about pricing, how to know what to price, how to price better, how to raise prices, et cetera. And this is inspired by a conference that I went to last week for active campaign. So a little bit of background. If you guys are not familiar with me and our active campaign, then you might not know that I am a huge, huge fan of the platform active campaign. It is an email marketing platform for online businesses or often businesses, really anyone that emails, which is pretty much any business today, but it’s so much more than that. It’s really a way to manage your customers, your subscribers, your audience, et cetera in a really, really smart and automated way. And I have been obsessed with active campaign since I started. I have done lots and lots of trials of different types of email marketing and have come to just really believe that active campaign is the best out there. 

And as such, I have become kind of an active campaign partner and I say kind of an active campaign partner because the real partners of the people that aren’t kind of but that are totally partners are people that are digital marketing agencies and they do all the marketing on behalf of their clients. I don’t do that. I don’t do “done-for-you” work. I do “do-with-you work” or I will teach you how to do it so that you do it yourself. But nonetheless, I helped my clients learn ActiveCampaign, learn, you know, marketing and I highly encourage them to do it on active campaign. So that’s why I was at this conference last week. And so I wanted to share a few of the takeaways from it and some of the really powerful and effective things that I learned. Uh, and a lot of that revolves around pricing. 

And for those of you that are are in a little bit more of an agency or done for you or any, anything like that where you could do freelance-esq work, like hourly work or outsource work, this is going to be a really beneficial episode for you because it came from that type of work with them. So let me just take a sip water and we’ll get going. And so when we think about pricing, we’ll actually, let me back up a little bit. When we think about email marketing, I’d love to hear from you guys that are watching. Why do you, do you send emails in your business? Give me a little emoji if you do. When we think about email marketing, I think the most common mistake I see is people thinking that email marketing means emailing and it makes sense because that’s what’s in the name of the, of the type of marketing. 

But I would say that 60% or so of my automations in my active campaign account don’t even send emails. They track my subscribers in different ways. So things like that can mean you’re tracking a subscriber. If they read a certain percentage of your emails or if they visit one of your sales pages or if they click on a link but then they don’t take action, you have the chance then to tag them to send them an email to add them to a Facebook audience to send them ads. There’s so much more flexibility and automation you can do than just sending emails. So I really want you to take away from this, you know, where are you doing too much on the backend? Where are you trying to Mastercraft what people are or aren’t emailing what they are or aren’t clicking, what they are or aren’t reading. 

Because there can always be a million reasons for this. Yes, we can improve our subject lines. Yes, we can try to make our emails more interesting. Yes, we want people to click on them, but there could be 1500 reasons why someone doesn’t open an email. And it’s not really in your best interest to spend all that time stressing about what you can do instead is control their behavior once and if they have clicked. So that’s when you can get an email to yourself to follow up with them, about why they didn’t go forward. That’s when you can add them to a Facebook audience and make sure they see an ad that you want them to see. That’s when you can do, you know, anything that you want from the back end to make sure that you’re marketing to them in a really smart way. 

So, uh, think about how you can be managing your, um, your subscribers better with active campaign [unable to transcribe] and we’ll talk about how that obviously can then lead to, to raising your prices. But this doesn’t just mean to me that you’re emailing all the time or you’re emailing people if they don’t respond to something or whatever it is, you can really be tracking them in a much more strategic way no matter what. And so ideally what you want this to look like is your email marketing and your automations are kind of teasing out your own leads and qualifying them for you before you even try to sell to them. So if you’re not seeing the conversions that you want or the sales that you want, part of it might be because you are selling to people before they are ready or before they even really know the value of whatever it is that you have to offer. 

And that’s where these automations can come in. And you can imagine that once you have gotten people to a place where you know certain things about them, you’ve seen them express interest in certain things, you’ve reached out to them personally and built a relationship with them. You can raise your prices. That’s when you can charge more because you have done this tailored work to really know that you know what is going to benefit them and what they’re going to benefit from and how you can help them. You are not just shouting from the rooftops about things that you have to offer and hoping that people self-identified and claim on. You kind of need to identify for them and that’s what you can do if you have a strategic email marketing system in place. 

Now, if any of you have questions about this, please reach out to me. I love teaching this kind of stuff. I may have lots of programs and coaching that can help you do that and you can email us at leah@urban20something.com, super easy. 

Beyond that, I want to talk a little bit about finding your pricing. Even if you know you can be charging more, how do you actually know what to charge? So one of the biggest, biggest mistakes I see new entrepreneurs that are in a service based industry making is that they try to charge people based on their time. And how long they spend on them and like what their hourly rate may be, but in reality that is that [unable to transcribe] your own worth and you want to explain why. Here’s like the little example that might paint a picture for you better. So let’s say that you have a client and maybe you are doing branding and marketing for them on a freelance basis, so maybe you’re going through their website and you are maybe writing some new copy for them and you are helping them with their colors and their photography, et cetera. 

If you are going about this on an hourly basis and you are charging them per hour and then let’s say in one hour you re-do one of their sales pages and immediately their conversions go up and they immediately see a tick in their income, well they’re going to then assume that that is how much you can earn them every hour. They’re not really going to understand the time that you put in to get there. The time that you put in to understand their branding, the background you have done in order to get to that educational place. And they’re not going to understand that other parts of branding work that you need to do. Like let’s say doing an about page on their website or maybe redoing your Instagram aesthetic that’s not going to get them those kinds of same results, but they still need to be done. So you can’t devalue your own success are your own capabilities which will be done if you do an hourly rate. 

Another reason an hourly rate is a big mistake is because it never is just about the hour. It’s about all the correspondence in between. It’s about whatever you can do, you know, to make things go faster that they don’t really need to understand totally and would take longer to explain than for you to just do it. So you need to be charging people in a package, uh, and the way you can find that package pricing is based on the value you provide for them. Not their term. Ative campaign has an amazing tool where it can actually help you score the value you can give them. So you can find a number of hours. So I recommend going to find that if you need it. But the big takeaway here that I want to share with you is to not charge for the, not charge for the hour and not charge for the time charge for the value that you provide. 

And when you do this, you bring yourself into a higher caliber and you also bring yourself into a cocreation price with your client. You’re no longer than just being outsourced to, you’re not just sort of doing busy work. You are co-creating with them and you’re invested in it because you’re presenting them with a cohesive service or package or product. It is not just one off work. They’re not actually the director of your expertise. Tells me, going back to this example of branding and marketing, if you are working with an entrepreneur on their branding and marketing, you don’t want them telling you what needs to be done for their branding and their marketing. You need to be the one to tell them and you need to be the one that price it and you need to be the expert. So you need to come into this with this whole bigger picture and not think of this as you’re selling your one on one hours like you’re still in babysitting days or anything like that. 

So look at your pricing right now. Ask yourself, do I feel like I am getting paid for the value I’m providing and really dig deep here. You know, one of the things that I had to think about when I started raising my own prices was that what I do, I help people get out of their nine to five jobs. I help them build businesses. I can help them get to six figures, is life changing for a lot of people. You know, it’s not just like I’m helping them put up a website. It’s that I’m helping them completely change the trajectory of their lives. That has a hell of a lot of value. And more importantly, or not more importantly, but the other side of this equation also is to what your business needs in order to perform best. 

So if you’re not charging your clients enough and you’re not getting paid enough, then you’re not going to be able to perform best for them because you’re either going to be exhausted, you’re going to have to get other jobs, you’re going to have to take too much work. You’re going to have to do too much on your own, and you’re not going to be able to outsource. So you’re not really giving them the best quality either. So if there’s one thing you could take away from this episode, I would ask you to go look and look at your pricing and ask yourself two things. Does this match the value I’m providing in their life and does this match the potential of my business? And if you feel like the answer of either that is no, that I would ask you to go back to the drawing board. 

Look at the service and performance and analytics you’re doing of your clients on the backend and look at the value you can provide them and try to rewrite the script and try to work backwards from there and try to think about how you can raise your pricing in a justified  way from there. If this means that you need to have more sophisticated marketing because you need to have more hands out there or maybe you need to have more automations going or you need to have more personal touch or you need to have communications, [unable to transcribe] seems interested. Whatever it is, make it happen because we don’t want you charging yourself short. There is no time for that and these tips are here and these tools are in place to avoid that.

 Alright you guys, I hope that this was helpful. This was a little nugget of inspiration from an amazing conference I went to. I hope you have a great week and it’s a great way to re-evaluate your pricing before the end of the year and run some sales because I encourage you to raise the pricing next year anyway, so think about and strategize how you can use techniques to ramp up your sales for the end of the year and then raise them even higher in 2020. Have an awesome week. I’ll talk to you guys soon.

Your Biggest Vision’s Daily Checklist for Visionaries;

Free Download!

Click here to download the checklist