Messing With Consumer Psychology (How To Make Your Customers Buy More)

I’m fascinated by the simple (or, sometimes not so simple) art of pricing and the psychology behind it.

I was reading one of my favourite blogs on money by Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You To Be Rich) and he’s talking about raising your charge out rates.

Down near the bottom he makes a really valid point that I wanted to share here on shifting your customer’s mindset from deciding to buy to deciding what to buy.

“Do you know why it’s critical to offer more than one package? There are 2 reasons, actually:

1. He might actually pick a higher tier, which would be money in your pocket — and a new hourly rate
2. By offering 3 options, she’s shifted the prospect’s decision from “Should I buy her services or not?” to “Should I buy $50, $60, or $75/hour?””

Shifting The Way Your Customers Think

As you as you present multiple options this shift of thinking “whether I should buy your services or not” is changed to “which one of your services should I buy?”

Let me explain.

• I offer a programming service at $50 per hour.

Immediately the question becomes, “Should I purchase Josh’s service which he offers at $50 per hour?”.

The shift happens when I tell you I offer:

• Basic programming service at $50 per hour.
• Priority programming service at $150 per hour.

With a few optional extras such as after job support:

• Basic after job support at $35 per hour
• Priority after job support for $90 per hour.

What’s the question in your mind now? You’re working through deciding if you need priority or not, whether you will need after job support or not and a range of other questions that will need to be self-answered.

Now obviously this is an example I’m not quoting my exact rates (It’s pretty close to this though), but you can apply this to other pricing games as well.

How about products?

eBooks are popular among bloggers right? Most people throw out a price like $19.95. Buy the eBook, it gets delivered, transaction over.

But what about the upsell? Instead of giving away those bonuses, why not price them fairly? Give you customer options.

• eBook  – $19.95
• Upsell 1 – $9.95
• Upsell 2 – $9.95
• eBook + Upsell 1 + Upsell 2 – $29.95!

That sounds like a good deal right?

Now all of this so far is theory, but it’s something I’m dead keen to explore in the coming months.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness – NYTimes.com (nytimes.com)
• The Best Way to Use Your Applied Psychology Degree (brighthub.com)
• Money CAN Buy You Happiness! (getrichslowly.org)
• Ramit Sethi’s 3 Choices for Paying Off Student Debt | I Will Teach You To Be Rich (youshouldgotoschool.com)
• Ramit Sethi: How to Save More Money By Doing Less (mint.com)

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