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In today’s episode you’ll learn:

  • Pricing your product based on value
  • How to reply when customers complain about pricing
  • Some psychological tricks for pricing your products
  • The importance of market research and how that will help you know what your customers are willing to pay
  • How to change your mindset and realise that being profitable isn’t being greedy

Where to find Courtney, and the books and podcasts she talks about on the show:

Podcasts

‘The Soul of Enterprise by Ron Baker and Ed Class

The Pricing on The Cake – Courtney’s own podcast!

Books

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely – https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248  

Where to find her

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/courtnco/ 

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/court.and.co/ 

Website – https://www.courtneydeagon.com/

Transcript:

Dahna:

Hi, and welcome to the Bright Minds of eCommerce Podcast. I’m Dahna founder of Bright Red Marketing, your eCommerce advertising specialists. Today. We’re here with Courtney, from Court & Co. 

Courtney Rogers is an award-winning pricing and sales coach based in Brisbane, Australia. Her business, Court & Co is founded on her background in sales and marketing and her prior studies in psychology and accounting. Courtney is passionate about helping women become confident leaders in their business with a particular focus on profitability, growth and achieving the business of their dreams. In today’s episode, she says how to price your product based on value. Her thoughts on discounting, how to reply when customers complain about pricing and some of her favourite psychological tricks for pricing your products and so much more. So, let’s get into it. Welcome to Episode 22.

Dahna:

Hi, and welcome to the bright minds of eCommerce podcast. Today. We are here with Courtney Rogers from Courtney & Co. Welcome Courtney. 

Courtney

Thank you so much for having me here today. 

Dahna

It is so good to have you on, so can you tell us a little bit more about your business and how you and co came to be? 

Courtney

Sure. Thanks. So, my business came to be back in late 2018 when I was studying accounting at the time, and I knew that I really wanted to start my own business. I really wanted to help women become capable and confident business owners. So, I started in bookkeeping actually because I was studying accounting and bookkeeping made a lot of sense. It was something I was really good at. And while I was deciding on a niche to choose, because as a lot of us know nicheing is a very good thing and bookkeepers, traditionally choose an industry.

I didn’t really wanna choose an industry from my niche. And so, what I decided to do instead was to pick a business problem. So, I spent many months being one of those really creepy lurkers in business groups and that, having a look at the types of problems and the types of questions that people were talking about. What I came to notice was that a lot of people were asking questions around pricing and how to set their prices, how to be profitable, how to work out, what prices to set for which products and so forth.  And I decided that I wanted to focus on pricing. What I didn’t know at the time was that pricing is its own field in its own right. And so, I spent many, many months studying pricing, studying, press pricing, psychology, pricing, strategy, product portfolio, and differentiation, all these wonderful things.

And I eventually became known as the pricing lady because I was talking about it all the time and slowly, I phased out the bookkeeping side of my business and specifically focused on pricing.  What I focused on in the beginning is a little bit different to what I focus on now. At the very start, it was just pricing. Now, as I’ve gone on, I now take hold of my background in sales and marketing, and I implement those into my coaching and my services as well as, so … my goal and my mission is to take a woman who has a business, help her become really confident in herself, really confident in her product, give her the skills and equip her with the tools that she needs to be able to market and sell herself well. And to be able to charge prices that give her profit for her business to grow and for her to live her life on her terms.

Dahna

Absolutely fantastic. Like I know that pricing is obviously something that a lot of businesses struggle with, but I like that you have not just taken that, but you’re taking all of the elements that surround that to really give them that success. 

Courtney

Yeah, absolutely. 

Dahna

So obviously I know pricing is one thing that a lot of businesses struggle with. Have you got some like general best practices on pricing like this? This is a million-dollar question, I suppose. 

Courtney

Yeah. It is a million-dollar question. There are certainly some answers to that that would be business specific, right? Like one business is not going to be the same as another, right? So, there are certainly some pieces of advice that would only apply to one business and not another. In terms of general principles. Absolutely. My number one thing is market research. If you’re an eCommerce business, you absolutely absolutely have to be doing market research.

If you don’t know what your customers value and what their willingness to pay is, you could very much be leaving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on the table. The best example I have of this is one of my e-commerce clients in particular comes to mind. We found out that through the market research that I conducted for her, her customer’s willingness to pay was around 20 to 40% higher than what she expected. So, I have a tradition that I do with all of my clients. I ask them, what do you think your client’s willingness to pay is, right? What do you think your customers are willing to pay for this product? And every single time I go out and do market research for them, their customer’s willingness to pay is actually higher. That means every time you sell a product; you are leaving money on the table that your customer would’ve happily paid.

The other really cool thing about that research too, Dahna, is that when a customer says, this is my willingness to pay, they’re giving a modest response. They’re being conservative because humans are risk averse and we’re loss averse, which is told to us by prospect theory in behavioural economics, you know, we don’t like to lose things. And money is one of the things that we hate losing. Most of all, obviously… I’m sure a lot of people can relate to that. So, market is absolutely essential. 

The other thing with market research is you wanna know what your customers value drivers are, right? If there is a certain feature in your product that your customers value above all else. If you know that, then you can price a bit higher and still have your customers really happy to pay that price for that product. Right? And in doing so you get more profit.

And now I do wanna address as well. You know, another tip here is that profit is not a dirty word. Wanting to be profitable, wanting your business to be profitable is not a bad thing. It doesn’t make you greedy. It doesn’t make you evil or anything like that. This is a really big problem that we have sort of imposed on us by society thinking that, you know, our profit is greed and money is greed and all of that nonsense. And I see it a lot, especially for women. Women feel really bad about asking for more money. And the truth is if that if those women get more money, they are far more likely to make a really positive difference in the world. Like the women that I work with when they become profitable, they end up being more generous with it. They can create better products that make a difference in people’s lives.

They take their kids on holidays, or they pay off debt, or, you know, they do really, really amazing, good things when they are more profitable. And so of course, that’s, you know, something I try to help women achieve. 

Dahna

That’s such a fantastic way of looking at it. Cause I know a lot of business owners do struggle with, oh, but I don’t wanna be greedy. And that’s such a good way of looking at it, but it’s not greed. It’s just, you can do so much more when you’re not making you absolutely nothing on the products that you’re selling and the hard work that you’re putting in. 

Courtney

Exactly. And that’s the thing, like you said, it right there, when you work hard and most of the time, you know, women, when they start a business, they’re working more hours for less pay than they were at the job that they left, right. To go and start their business. And they end up burning out. 

And this is why the mortality rate of new businesses is so high. Right? We don’t get enough money. We don’t get enough earnings in from the products that we’re selling. We end up working more, we end up burning out. Cause we’re not making a profit … you end up resenting the business, the self-doubt creeps in and it becomes a vicious cycle. Right? And this is why pricing is so important. 

Dahna

I know a lot of small businesses when they start, because they come to me and they they’re looking for assistance with their marketing. They aren’t even paying themselves a wage at that point. So, the money that they’re making doesn’t even cover the cost of their time. So, I suppose for those that are listening, that haven’t started yet or in the very, very early days.  I know there’s no magic formula. Um, haven’t started a business. You don’t kind of have that market research yet, but is there some sort of process that’s a business can work through to work out what that sort of pricing structure should be? 

Courtney

Yeah, definitely. So, before you start a business, it’s the perfect time to be thinking about your pricing, right? Because it’s not just a, how much money can I make from this product question. It’s a viability question. Is this business that you’re thinking of making, is it actually viable, right? You don’t wanna start a business if you know, it’s not gonna be viable, it’s not gonna make you enough money. Right? So, the first thing that I get people to do, if they come to me and they’re like, look, I’m brand new. I haven’t even started yet. I say, okay, go and do some market research.

It doesn’t have to be expensive. You know, you don’t have to be a million-dollar company to get good market research, go into groups on Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever where your target market is. Ask questions and say, Hey, I’ve got an idea for this thing. It solves this problem. Is this something that you think people would be interested in …. and get people’s feedback? 

Because at the end of the day, if that need doesn’t exist in the market, or you think there’s a problem that your market doesn’t think is a problem, your business won’t be viable, right? That’s the first thing …you need to check if your is viable to start. And the way you do that is by going to where your ideal target market is and asking them and saying, “Hey, I see this as a problem. Do you see this as a problem?”

“Is this a problem that you feel a big need to fix or a big need to solve? How important is it to you? “

And if you find out that, cuz a lot of the time I see a lot of women, they get an idea for a service because of a personal experience they had. And they think it’s a really great, great idea because they were really impacted by it. But maybe it’s not necessarily something that is a strong market need and they go into the market and they try to sell something that they think everyone should think is important or that some people should think is important, but no one does, and they can’t figure out why they can’t sell it. But the issue there is that they had the idea, they confirmed it with them, that they thought it was important, but they didn’t actually verify it with the market first.

And that’s the thing. The market will always decide if your business is viable or not, that’s not something we can decide. We need to go out and discover it first. So that would be the first thing that I would do. Go out to the market, find out what the problem is that your ideal target market needs solving, and focus on that. Focus on making a solution that you know is gonna be needed and wanted in the market. 

Dahna

Yeah, fantastic. So obviously in the eCommerce space, there’s kind of different kinds of eCommerce stores and some of them sell a small number of products and others sell, you know, hundreds of, if not thousands of products. Do you find that the pricing strategy changes between the different number of products or is it just a different strategy depending on the different business?

Courtney

 I wouldn’t say that the strategy changes on the number of products. I would say it changes based on your market segment. Let’s say you have two companies, and one sells like five products and the other sells a thousand. If they have a similar market segment with a similar price sensitivity, for example, then you might give them a similar strategy, right? Because it’s about the perception of your branding and your prices in terms of when you are setting the actual price levels, that’s gonna come down to the individual business and what they can handle. So, you can do a lot more when you’ve got more products. If you’ve got more products, like let’s say that you have 20 to 30 products. What I would like to implement is some, a little bit of anchor in there do a little bit of decoy effects and things like that. A little bit of psychology. Tricks and tips that I like to do with the prices in there.

You can have, you can play with it a little bit more. 

If you only have a few, you need to be a little bit more careful because you’ve only got a bit more room, but at the end of the day, the actual strategy for your pricing itself is gonna be based on what you want your pricing to do for you.  Do you want to enter into a new market? Do you want to penetrate a certain market segment? Do you want to gain market share? So, depending on what your pricing strategy is, is gonna determine how you approach the pricing for your entire product range. The number of products just gives you a lot more room to do a lot more with the price levels, the actual amounts that you set. 

Dahna

Yeah. Fantastic. Uh, you briefly mentioned some psychological, I’m gonna call them tricks and hacks, but they’re more than that.

Yeah. <laugh> 

Courtney

oh, they are. 

Dahna

Um, yeah. I mean, that’s the, they’re kind of hacking the brain really. Can you tell us some of your kind of favourites that you’d like to, to implement and what they are for those who don’t know what they are? 

Courtney

Yeah, absolutely. So, one of my favourites, which is used quite a lot in very luxury, high-end spaces, and it’s one that I encourage my luxury and high-end econ, best clients to use is a really, really hot, significant anchoring effect. So anchoring is basically where you show someone a number and you wanna anchor them at that number because you wanna set a certain perceived value. If you go to not all, but a lot of luxury eCommerce sites. What you’ll see is, you know, let’s say you’ve got a shoe store for example, and they’ve got a couple of dozen shoes on the page and all the shoes cost around $800, right?

Except this one pair of shoes that you see, which is so stunning. And it’s probably the most beautiful pair of shoes on the page. And they’re priced at $3,000. That’s your anchor … because when the brain is in a buying scenario, okay. So, you’ve gotta think of the brain as it’s always on the lookout for threats, it’s always on the lookout for anything that might harm our chances of survival, right? I’m going, I’m going backwards and steps here because it’ll make more sense if I do. So, you’ve got the brain, you’re looking at a store. Anytime the brain goes into a buying scenario, it’s on the lookout. It’s on red alert. There’s sirens going off. Okay. We’re potentially going to lose some money. Like I said before, humans are loss averse. We feel the pain of a loss twice, as much as the pleasure of a gain.

Okay? So, loss really hurts us a lot. So, when you are going through and you’re looking at the store … because we don’t inherently in our brains have anything that tells us what something should be worth. The brain looks for symbols and signals to tell us the value of something, right? Prices are one of those symbols. So, we go through looking at all of these pairs of shoes, they’re all about $800. And then we see this pair of shoes. That’s $3,000 … alarm bells start to go off. All of a sudden, we feel like we’ve already lost that $3,000. The other thing that’s happening at the same time is our brain is trying to find a solution to this problem. Why is there a pair of shoes here? That’s $3000 when all the other pairs are 800, because our brains are notorious automatic problem solvers. We like to be able to come up with reasons for why things are. We like to understand our environment so that we can keep ourselves safe.

So, we go, okay, why is this $3,000? Well, there must be a reason for that. Maybe it’s better quality. Maybe everyone else wants it. It’s just better. All of a sudden, as soon as you see that $3,000, your brain goes that pair of shoes is worth $3,000. You could have never seen this pair of shoes before. You don’t even have them in front of you. You can’t touch them. You can’t feel them. You can’t smell them, but your brain decides based on that $3,000, that it’s worth that at the same time, your perceived value of all the other pairs of shoes goes up because there’s a pair of shoes there that is so exorbitantly priced, and your brain has to come up with a reason for why that is. And so, it says, well, other people must have paid that $3,000. They must be worth $3,000.

They must be really, really excellent. Therefore, all the other products here, I want them even more now. 

You find a really similar effect. When if you look at something like to your company, like to your, and they have really of handbag and dresses and things like that, and then you go and buy their makeup, right? It feels really good to have a Dior lipstick, although only cost you $50. Right. But it feels really good because the brand is so valuable. You know, you’ve seen that the bags are $20,000, the dresses are a hundred thousand dollars or however much they are. I haven’t actually looked at Dior prices myself, but it feels really good to have that Dior lipstick because you know, that that brand is also selling, you know, a hundred thousand dollars products. Does that make sense? 

Dahna

Totally makes sense. How would that apply to a brand that is not a luxury brand that’s, you know, not selling $3,000 pair of shoes, but maybe selling $100 or $200 pairs of shoes.

Courtney

Yeah. So, you can do the exact same thing just in a smaller dose, right. So, if you let’s say that most of your shoes are a hundred dollars, then I would say something like, you know, have one or two pairs of shoes a year that you release. And, and again, you know, I’m gonna preface this by saying, you need to have a customer base that has a high perception of value, right? Like if your customers are price sensitive, this will not work. This will backfire big time. If your customers are the kinds of customers who like paying more for luxury or really nice things, then this should work for you. But if you, most of your pair’s shoes are a hundred dollars then once or twice a year, you know, you could have like maybe an anniversary pair or a Christmas pair or something really, really special and price it at a thousand if you wanted to, or, you know, even like 500.

The amount is really up to you and what you’re comfortable with. But also, what you’re trying to do, you might also say that it’s invite only, right. You might release a pair of shoes and it’s like $900 and say, look, this is by invite. Only if you are interested, then, you know, please click here or whatever, cuz exclusivity makes things more valuable for us. You know, we’ve heard about the scarcity effect and things like that. And that’s something that brands use all the time and that’s, you know, scarcity is something that any brand can use anytime when it tends to work very, very well because we don’t like missing out on things. 

Dahna

So that’s anchoring. Are there any others that you would suggest? 

Courtney

Yeah, absolutely. So, you can also use something called D decoy effect.

The example of the decoy effect that I really like is by Wendy’s, uh, over in the US. So, Wendy’s used to have just a single cheeseburger and a double cheeseburger, and they would find that what would happen is customers would come in and they would go, well, I don’t wanna be a pig and get the double, I’ll just get the single right. 

And so, they were trying to think of ways to increase prices of the double and instead of, you know, changing the price or anything like that, they brought in a new product. They brought in the triple cheeseburger. The point of this triple cheeseburger was not to sell the triple cheeseburger. It was to sell more of something else.   It was to act as a decoy because what happened then was customers would come into the store. They would say, I don’t wanna be a pig and get the triple I’ll just get the double sales of the double skyrocketed.

And so that’s a really good example of, yeah, absolutely. That’s a really good example of the decoy effect. 

Another really good example that really shows the irrationality of the human brain that I really love is another example that was presented by Dan Arielli. Who’s a behavioural economist. It’s a, it’s a little bit of a story. So, if you don’t want me to tell it that’s okay. Um, but it is a really good example just so that 

Dahna

Maybe just the short story we don’t go too far over time. 

Courtney

Oh <laugh> yeah, no that, yeah, no, no. That’s okay. That’s totally fine. So, what happened was this magazine released some subscription options. They had a print only option that was say $50 a web option. That was a hundred dollars and a print and web option. That was a hundred dollars. I’ve heard this now you might think that. Yeah. Yeah. So, and you might think, well, they’re both the same and why wouldn’t I just get both of them then?

Right. Because I’m getting more value. And Dan thought this was really interesting. So, he conducted an experiment to see how many people would choose what, and of course, most people went with both right? The print and web option because it was the same price as just the print option. And no one chose the just print only option. And so, he thought, well, why do we, we even need the print option if no one is choosing it. So, we ran the experiment again, taking out that middle option. And what happened was, you know, you had the web option, which was $50 or the web and print option. That was a hundred dollars. All of a sudden, the percentages switched. Most people chose the cheaper option rather than, than the print and web. So that middle option in the first instance was only there as a decoy.

And so even though logically, you might think, well, no, one’s choosing it. We should just take it out. Humans aren’t actually that logical, we’re very irrational. We’re predictably irrational as Dan Elli says. And when you bring in different options, you change people’s perception, right? And you can kind of influence and help their decision. Now there’s a bit of an ethics thing here where you don’t wanna ever coerce customers into something, cuz that’s not okay. That’s a really crappy thing to do. We wanna be able to help customers make the best decision in their best interest because if they get better value, then that is a win for us. They don’t get better value if we’re just exploiting them, then what’s the whole point of our business. 

Dahna

Yeah, exactly. So next question. If someone is listening to this episode and going, okay, I probably need to put my prices up.

Courtney

Mm-hmm <affirmative> 

Dahna

what is the best sort of strategy around that? When you’ve got an existing customer base? 

Courtney

Oh gosh, you’re gonna hang me through this answer. It’s a very typical consultant answer, but it depends. There’s not really a general rule when it comes to increasing prices because it depends on a, when you last increase your prices, B how much you increased it by, C whether your customers currently value your product, D their price sensitivity. So, there’s, there’s too many variables for me to say, do X, Y, Z, right? Because that would kind of be negligent and lazy of me. But I guess the biggest thing is to be wary of things like … you should be increasing your prices at least once about once a year, no more than once a year. You need to make sure that you have earned that price increase through the year, right through testimonials, good reviews. Are you increasing the quality of your products? Are you trying to send the products to more places? Are you improving your packaging and branding and increasing your perceived value? 

You know, you’ve gotta make sure that you’ve been earning that price increase. So those would be the things that I would say to check before you think about increasing your price is yeah. 

Dahna

That’s good advice and probably safe and legal advice as well. 

Courtney

Yes. See, <laugh> absolutely, I totally understand where you came from. 

Dahna

You don’t want someone listening to this episode, listening to what you say, and then coming back and being like, I lost my business because I did your things and point. 

Courtney

Yeah. No. Oh exactly. You know exactly. Right. Like I don’t, I don’t want that for anyone. Like, not even just from a legal perspective, but also just from a, a good. Totally, exactly.

Dahna

<laugh> so we have a lot of customers that do like with my own business personally, that do sell quite high-end goods. Um, we’ve had some guests on the show that sell high end goods. And occasionally you get not gonna say customers because they’re not customers, but people see ads or posts and things that are complaining about the pricing being too high. Now, obviously these are not your ideal customers, but what’s kind of the best way to reply to that from a marketing perspective?

Courtney

I would say it depends on your size. Your size will really determine what you can get away with. Like, you know, let’s take a really extreme example. Look, if you look at like, Mercedes-Benz, if you source on commenting on there, you would not expect Mercedes-Benz to reply, right. Because of their size. So, if you are, if you’re a really big, massive company, you can probably get away with not responding.

Right. And in a sense that really, yes, yeah. Most people would laugh. Most people would ignore it, but if you are smaller and I’m, I’m going to assume that most of the listeners for this podcast are small to medium size businesses. It also depends if this is a customer that’s gotten in touch with you before. But the way that I tend to coach my clients to respond is by, you know, saying, Hey, thank you for your feedback. Here is how great our products are. I would talk about the fact that, so I’ll use an example because that’ll be the best way to answer this question. I’ve got one e-commerce customer who hand makes women’s accessories. And when she gets like a negative comment or something like that, I say, look, be thankful, be positive, right? Don’t come in, be defensive and angry and things like that.

You know? So, like thank you for your comment, right? You want to, you know, show gratitude for them, voicing their concern and say, look, our products are really proudly hand made. We pride ourselves on the fact that we are a very sustainable and eco-friendly brand. The way that we produce and manufacture our products also goes to support women in poorer areas and in low socioeconomic situations in overseas countries.  Here’s where you can go and find out more about how our products are made and our values as a company. I hope you have a wonderful day. 

So, you’re not even saying, oh, well, it’s just out of your budget or, well, you’re not my ideal customer. So, go do something else. You know, you’re coming in and, and it’s not even having a, a tone of justification. It’s a tone of pride and saying here’s the facts.

Yes, our products are, and you don’t say this in words, but you say it through implication of what you’re saying. Yes, our products are expensive and we’re proud of that because they’re such high quality. They are in high demand. We contribute to sustainability and diversity. We contribute to wage growth in poor countries. 

If you talk about those things, then you can be proud of the fact that your products cost a lot. Does that make sense? 

Dahna

A hundred percent. I think that’s brilliant. And I think that will help a lot of listeners as well. Cause I know it’s something that a lot of businesses struggle with. 

Courtney

Mm-hmm, <affirmative> awesome. 

Dahna

On that note, sort of in the eCommerce space, especially discounting is a big thing like black Friday’s coming up Christmas and boxing day. Like what are your thoughts on discounting? Especially in that eCommerce space. 

Courtney

I loathe discounts.

Anytime I get a new client, I eliminate it from the vocabulary because discounts, research has shown can have a negative impact on purchase intention. What that means is when a customer comes to your website and they see, and obviously not every single customer, but for most customers, most humans… when a customer comes to your website, if they see something has been discounted, it makes them want it less. Because if the price is less, then the value must be less. That’s what the brain decides that that really quick automatic problem solving in the brain. It can have a negative impact on our purchase. Intention also has a negative impact on the rest of your products. The moment you put a discount on one product, you reduce the perceived value of the rest of your product range. You then bring down the perceived value of your branding and the, of your, of your business in general.

So, it has a negative impact. The only time this is not true is if your customers are price sensitive, even if you looked at something like Ali Express, for example, I don’t shop on all express. That’s why I was struggling to come up with one <laugh>. If you look at ally express, right? People who are very price sensitive, Ali express, like they, right. They love the discounts or Shein – there’s another one I just thought of they go there because they are price sensitive that their value driver is a low price, right? So, the opposite happens in their brain for them, they see a discount, they want it more. So, if you are an e-commerce or if you know that you are, and I’m like cringing while I say this, but you’re competing or, you know, have a similar market based to Shein or Ali Express, all that discounts may work for you.

I’m gonna say may …. cuz I don’t know your business and I don’t know your customers, but it may work for you. But in general, if you are someone who makes products that are of high quality, even if you’re not luxury range, even if you are mid-range or high range, I would strongly, strongly, strongly urge you not to discount because of the detrimental effect it has on your customer’s way of thinking about you, but also on your, a bottom line. 

When you discount, you are just scraping profit out of your profit P & L . You  are pushing money out of your business. And I hate seeing women do that. I wanna see every woman become like a millionaire. Like I know it’s a crazy mission I have, but honestly, I just, I want that. And discounting is not going to get you there. It’s not going to get you … probably won’t get you more customers. But like, again, it just depends on your market segment and how they respond. Um, but in general I strongly encourage people not to discount and to add value instead. 

Dahna

Yeah. I think that’s a, a good way of looking at it and definitely something worth considering for a lot of businesses.  How would a business know if they need to increase their prices?

Courtney

If you start getting reviews, like I love how much you get for the price. That’s a very good sign. Yeah. Fair. Yes. Yeah. I started so I, I, 

I got a, um, I got a new client a couple of months ago and I was looking at some of her reviews and you know, they were all like such great value. What are bargain? Get so much for the price. And I said to her, I was like, do you, I want you to give me a list of words that you want customers to use to describe you.

Dahna

Bargain

Courtney

That wasn’t one she gave me. 

And it was like, no. And it was things like, you know, luxury and divine and elegant and whatever. And I was like, do you want your customers to think of you as like a bargain shop? And she’s like, no. And I was like, yeah, I didn’t think so. Here’s what all of your customers are saying though. They say you’re a bargain. They say that they get so much for the price. Let’s change that right now. Okay. So that was the next thing that we did. We went and increased our prices. So that is a really good sign. Also, if you haven’t raised your prices in more than a year, absolutely think about it. Start thinking about it. 

Go through your reviews and testimonials, go through, you know, the things that you’ve done in your business over the last year or so to increase the value that you’ve given to customers. If you haven’t – get on that right now

You know, if you are not every day, thinking about how you can give more value to your customers, you’re not gonna be able to increase your prices cuz you can’t just increase your prices just because you want to, you need to earn it because if you don’t earn it and you go and increase your prices, your customers won’t buy. They won’t be happy. You want it to be win-win. You want them to be happy that you’ve increased the prices because they know that you are worth that. Right? Like I wanna help my clients get to a point where their customers want to pay them more money. Cuz that’s a nice feeling too. It’s nice. When you receive money from a customer, they were happy to pay for you. That’s an awesome feeling. So that’s what eCommerce owners should be aiming for.

Dahna

Fantastic. Is there anything else you think we’ve missed that you can share with us before we wrap up? 

Courtney

No, nothing that we’ve missed, but you know, I, I can’t stress enough how important that market research is in terms of finding out what your customers are willing to pay. So, with one of my clients, we did her market research, and we did a projection on how much money she would lose over a certain amount of time. And over 11 years it showed that, you know, the difference between what she thought her customers were willing to pay and what her customers were actually willing to pay. It was something like 1.6 million that she was gonna leave on the table. 

Dahna

That’s insane. 

Courtney

Over, over 10 years. Yeah. 

Dahna

On that note quickly. Yeah. What is your kind of strategy around doing that market research? Are you sending out a survey to customers? Are you doing it in Facebook groups? Like what’s the, 

Courtney

yeah, so it’s twofold. So yeah, so it’s twofold for the, the way that I do it with my clients is I do a mix of survey and face to face interview. So, I actually have a, like a survey template that I use and customise for all my clients. And it also has the NPS promoter score diagnostic on there. And then I also conduct some face-to-face interviews with customers. 

So, I actually go and talk to my clients, customers face to face. Cuz I find that often customers will be more open if it’s not the owner. Like if they know the owner or they, you know, they’re familiar with them, they’re more likely to be open and honest with someone like me. Who’s just someone they don’t know. 

Dahna

Yeah. No that’s fantastic. Alrighty. So, we’re just getting to the last few questions we ask everyone.

Do you have any strategies or habits that you follow each day to help you on track? 

Courtney

Ooh strategies I follow each day.  Oh gosh. I would say other than my morning coffee, I keep a checklist handy and I break things up into very, very, very small bite size pieces because you know, studies have shown us that motivation is … it’s a very hard to drum up motivation on its own.  But we know that action begets action. So even if you do one small thing, even if it’s just writing a comment, reply on a post or replying to an email or something really small, right. If you do that, you’re far more likely to do the next thing and then to do the next thing and the more small tasks you complete … that likelihood of you completing more goes up and up and up. So, I know that if I can just do a few tiny things in the morning that will get me on a really good role for the rest of the day.

Dahna

So that’s, there’s, there’s actual science behind, write To do list on your to-do list. <laugh> yes, absolutely absolutely right. 

Courtney

And you know, the other thing I do as well is I don’t those done items until the end of the day, right? Because at then at the end of the day I can go through. Cause what I used to do is I would delete it once it was done. But at the end of the day, I don’t get to see everything I’ve done, and I’ve forgotten everything because it’s, you know, nine o’clock and I’m tired and I need a glass of wine. Yeah. So, what I do now is I leave it there. And at the end of the day I can go, I did this, this, this, this, this, and if there think extra small that I did in the day, I’ll write it on my list and tick it just so it’s there at the end of the day.

Dahna

I love that. That’s fantastic. Do you have a favourite business book? 

Courtney

Yes. Predictably Irrational by Dan Elli. I have a bit of a business crush on him. He’s fantastic. He’s a behavioural economist. Very, very smart. And his book, predictably irrational basically goes through and talks about how traditional economics has always seen humans as rational beings. And he kind of really like turns out on its head and shows through a lot of research, how humans are very irrational in even predictably. So, and how there are just certain things that when you know them makes so much sense and you go, oh, that’s why I do that. 

So, if you are a business owner and you sell to humans, you absolutely, absolutely should read this book. 

Dahna

I’m gonna add it to my list. Favourite podcast, other than your own, which you’re allowed to, um, here, if you feel like it <laugh> 

oh, I, um, so I’ll just mention it.

My, my podcast is The Pricing on The Cake. I’m very proud of coming up with that name. I thought it was really funny at the time love. Um, but my favourite pod <laugh>

My favourite podcast is ‘The Solar Enterprise by Ron baker and Ed Class’. It’s an American podcast. 

They talk about business and economics and pricing, finance and psychology and subscriptions and just lots of different topics. I have lots of really smart people on there and I really enjoy the, the depth that they go to. And I I’ve, I’ve learned a lot from them for sure. 

Dahna

Fantastic. And if people wanna get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that. 

Courtney

So my email is Courtney@Courtneydeagon.com or you can look me up a, on Facebook. Just add me, tell me that you heard me on the podcast. I’d love to have a chat I’m extroverted. So, I love talking as you can probably tell. And I also have a free Facebook group, The Pricing on The Cake where I share lots of tips and also lots of memes as well. 

Dahna

<laugh> fantastic. And I do believe you have a special offer running at the moment. 

Courtney

Yes, that’s right. So, at moment I have my new programme at the moment and it’s a six-week programme. I only take in a few people at a time for it. It’s normally $1,000 for the six weeks it’s called ‘Perfect Pricing and Sales. We do the market research like what I talked about before. So, I help you do your market research. We do a marketing audit; we do sales coaching. So, I coach you and help you overcome any mindset blocks and also help you set your pricing based on that market research.

So, it’s basically six months of working with me condensing to six weeks. If you are an action taker and someone who’s really willing to do the work and really willing to, you know, get that confidence and get that profitable pricing, then it’s absolutely the programme for you. It is normally a thousand dollars, but for anyone listening to this podcast, I’m offering a promotion to do it for $890. 

Fantastic. Thank you so much for that. And again, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been very, very enlightening and I’m sure our listeners are gonna absolutely love the information you’ve shared. So, thank you. 

Courtney

It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Dahna, 

Thank you for listening to the 22nd episode of the Bright Minds of E-Commerce Podcast. Don’t forget we load all of the links and show notes onto our website. 

You can find everything at brightredmarketing.com.au/episode 22. The link will also be in the episode description. 

Thanks so much for listening.

Dahna Borg

Author Dahna Borg

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