The bad news: most course creators are leaving thousands of dollars on the table per month by underpricing their course.
The good news: you can easily turn a price increase into your most profitable campaign ever.
For example, our client Will Gibbons recently implemented our simple Price Increase Campaign to announce his courses were going up by 20%.
The campaign alone brought in an extra $8,751 in sales, bringing his monthly total to about $21,000 — roughly twice what he would make in a typical month.
All from sending 5 simple emails.
Our Director of Marketing, Ben Dahl, hopped on a call with Will to break down his campaign so you can use it to increase your course or coaching prices as well — and pick up a flood of new customers in the process.
Check it out and get the full breakdown below!
Check out Will’s website and business here.
Breaking Down the Price Increase Campaign That Doubled Will’s Typical Monthly Sales
First, let’s get clear on Will’s business so we can understand how the price increase campaign factored in.
The Business: Will is a product visualization specialist who teaches people how to create 3D renderings using software called KeyShot.
What’s a 3D rendering? Think of it like a high-end mockup of a product, like this one of a Ducati engine:
Will teaches and attracts leads via his blog and YouTube channel:
The Product: Will sells a wide range of courses via his website. They’re designed to help customers master various aspects of KeyShot to create 3D renderings.
The Problem: Here’s the thing about KeyShot (the subject of Will’s courses) — it’s freaking expensive. Like, $1,188 per year expensive. And its customers are skilled professionals.
That means the people who use it:
- Have money, and
- Can further their career by leveling up their KeyShot skills
So why was Will only charging $399 for his incredibly comprehensive KeyShot Rendering Masterclass course?
He needed to raise his prices yesterday. In fact, he literally had customers telling him he needed to do it.
It’s a good problem to have.
But how do you actually go about doing it?
Do you just increase the price on your website and cross your fingers?
Only if you want to leave a bunch of sales on the table.
Instead, the smart move is to implement a Price Increase Campaign — one last chance for your audience to get your product at its current price before the increase hits.
It’s like offering a discount without offering a discount. And it works like a charm.
How to Announce Your Price Increase with 5 Simple Emails
A Price Increase Campaign has 3 jobs:
- Create urgency
- Explain why the price is increasing
- Prove the product is effective
Fulfilling the first job is easy. All you have to do is announce the price change and communicate that the current (much lower) price will only be available for a few more days.
That remaining number of days defines your campaign structure.
In Will’s case, he kicked off the campaign on a Monday and announced the price would be increasing on Friday at midnight. He sent 5 emails during that window:
Emails 1,4, and 5 are all primarily aimed at creating urgency.
Here’s how Will announces the increase in Email 1:
It doesn’t get much simpler than that. That’s the power of savings + urgency.
Pro Tip: In later emails, Will specifies how much money people can save by purchasing before the price increase. I’d recommend doing that in Email 1 as well. For example, he could have tweaked the last line above to read, “With that in mind, now’s your opportunity to save $100 by placing an order before the price goes up.”
Of course, people will naturally question why the price is going up. And “because I haven’t been charging enough for it” isn’t the best possible answer.
That’s why Email 2’s job is to communicate one (or both) of the following:
- You’ve made recent upgrades to the product
- You’re planning to upgrade the product
These upgrades don’t have to be major or even that specific. For example, check out how Will described them in his second email:
It’s clear in the first section that Will provides a lot of hands-on value to his customers — direct access via Discord, interaction in the comments of each lesson, etc.
The second section explains that the price increase will allow him to dedicate even more time to supporting customers and creating even better content going forward.
It might seem small, but showing people your price increase isn’t arbitrary goes a long way toward preserving their trust.
Important: Don’t promise a higher level of support/interaction if you don’t plan on delivering it.
As for the third ingredient (proving the product’s effectiveness), this can be accomplished with case studies, testimonials, and other forms of social proof.
For Will, it was as simple as building Email 3 around a handful of testimonials:
Notice how results-driven that final testimonial is. Remember when I said Will was undercharging? This is why.
Michael Z. landed a career-changing job because of Will’s course. You can’t even calculate the ROI of something like that.
If I were Will, I’d built an entire email around that story in future campaigns.
How Will Amped Up Urgency with a Creative Bonus
On top of the price increase deadline urgency, Will gave his audience even more of a reason to buy quickly by offering a bonus to the first 15 purchasers:
This isn’t a must-have for your Price Increase Campaign, but I thought it was a nice touch.
At only about 90 minutes of video instruction, this mini-course is pretty small relative to Will’s flagship courses. He was able to put it together in a couple of weeks.
And the best part is that it gives him an incentive he can continue to offer in future promos (instead of relying on discounts).
“It’s been a bit of a mental shift since joining Growth University,” he said. “My coach was like, ‘Yes, you can run sales, but how about you keep your prices where they’re at and add value as a limited bonus, and then that really is gonna help your bottom line.’ And that’s absolutely true.”
Want me to create a custom plan to get your offer in front of the right people? Let’s talk.
Book a Strategy Call with my team and we’ll walk you through the exact steps you can take to grow your course or coaching business’s revenue. Plus, if it’s a good fit, we’ll show you what it would look like for us to coach you like we’re coaching Will.
Grab a spot on our calendar here to get started.
On the call, we’ll show you:
- Growth opportunities you’re currently overlooking in your business.
- The step-by-step process you can use to take advantage of those opportunities.
- What it would look like to have my team individually coach you through the entire process.