.jpg)
The Art of Selling Online Courses
The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses.
The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!
The Art of Selling Online Courses
How To Increase Your Course Price Without Upsetting Customers - With Monica Badiu
Welcome to "The Art of Selling Online Courses" podcast! Today we talk with our team over at Data Driven Marketing so meet Monica Badiu our Copywriting Chief & Copy Coach.
Monica's passions extend across the realms of paper art, psychology, and entrepreneurship. As our in-house copywriting chief and copy coach, she brings a unique blend of creativity and strategic insight to the table.
Monica has carved a niche for herself in the world of copywriting, specializing in crafting compelling sales copy for online course creators. With her expertise, she empowers entrepreneurs to create copy that not only resonates with their ideal customers but also drives conversions. Her journey is a testament to her commitment to mastering the art of persuasive communication and helping businesses thrive in the online landscape.
Today we'll be focusing specifically on how to increase your prices without alienating your audience.
If you're interested in growing your online course sales and funnel optimisation contact us at https://datadrivenmarketing.co/
Hello and welcome to the art of selling online courses. We're here to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Ainsworth and today's guest is Monica Baddou. Now Monica is our head copywriter. She writes the copy for loads of our clients and then manages the copy for the others. She gives feedback on copy to all our consultancy clients and last year she made our clients over three million dollars in additional revenue. And today we're going to be interviewing Monica about price increases how to communicate a price increase and still make bank.
Speaker 1:Now, before we start learning from Monica, do you own a course or an authority website? If you do, did you know there's a short list of techniques that can help you to double, to quadruple your revenue? It's true, there's eight techniques my team regularly uses and it's a lot of the stuff that we cover here on this podcast, but the average rate of return you might not remember this from these from these techniques, is 486 percent, and if you want to find out about the eight techniques, how they can help scale your income and which ones you should be using, and how much each one would help you to make in terms of additional revenue. Go to courseprofitreportcom. On that page you can access a short 10 question survey. Takes about three minutes to fill out.
Speaker 1:After you fill it out, my team is going to create a personalized profit increase report for you and we've just updated the process on this. So the the report that you get is going to be improved. So if you've done this before, feel free to do it again. You're going to get a better version of the report with links to useful resources about what to do to actually implement each of the techniques it recommends you do, and it's going to tell you how much more money you're going to be making. I'm going to tell you what to start with first. I'm going to share those links to the different trainings. So go to costprofitreportcom, fill in the short survey and get your free personalized report and make loads more money.
Speaker 1:Monika welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Great to be back.
Speaker 1:Nice. So we're going to talk today about how to communicate a price increase and still make bank. So what is the? What's the problem that we're trying to solve here for people?
Speaker 2:What's the problem that we're trying to solve here for people? So it's a reality. Prices have increased and it's getting harder and harder to just keep up with. You know marketing platforms with app hosting costs and still like be profitable or have enough money to invest back in your business. So a lot of course creators they're going to have to really consider increasing their prices and not like an option that sounds good but they're going to be forced by the market. Now, most people they're waiting until it hurts so bad that they have to do it. Other people they do it like once or twice a year, and this is the type of a promotion we do once or twice a year and it's not necessarily easy. It comes with a lot of anxiety. So I thought it would be great to talk about it today why do you think people feel anxious about it?
Speaker 2:well, obviously nobody likes to pay more for something that they've paid less until now. And we do have lots of course creators who are using the freemium kind of business model, where they're using very low prices as a way to compete in the market, to break into the market actually, and to get people to say yes to their courses instead of the competitors. So when you jump from 14 dollars per month or, I know, 100 per course to doubling that just because you need to, because you have costs to cover, your audience might be like, okay, but why? Why should I pay more if until now, I paid less? So you can get a lot of backlash from your audience what are the reasons for doing this?
Speaker 1:is it just because your costs are going up, or are there other reasons why someone should do this in the first place?
Speaker 2:well, like I just mentioned, like low prices are a way to break into the market, but you can't really be competitive and scale your business keeping up with the low pricing model, because for low prices you need to have a lot of volume of content.
Speaker 2:So you have to either have a large volume of new audience, new people, coming into your funnels to buy that low price thing, or you have to create multiple new products over time. Both of these models can be very time consuming and exhausting and you don't have any way to kind of predict the future and say, okay, I'm gonna do this this year, but as of next year I'm gonna be able to afford the time to create better courses, to bring new features, to explore my market in a way that I can find unique selling benefits or propositions that make me stand out from the crowd. So even if right now it doesn't hurt to the person who's watching or listening to this, eventually you're gonna have to consider the idea of increasing your prices, because is it realistic to scale your business and provide a better experience to your audience with what you have right now, with what you're making right now?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think I think a lot of course creators price their courses too cheaply, like I think it's really common, because the kind of people that we tend to work with and the kind of person who's listening to this show you probably have a background in teaching. You like teaching, maybe you used to teach this thing in person, or used to teach it like in a group coaching program, or you used to do it in a classroom whatever it was Right and then you got into creating content because you liked sharing this, that this kind of stuff, online for free. And then those people asked you to make courses. And then you started making courses and you felt very self-conscious about it and then you weren't quite sure oh, would people pay for this? I'm not quite sure, and your own discomfort got in the way of, like, what price it should be priced at. And the problem with that and some of some of this is what monica said, but just from my perspective is because you're not charging enough and then you make less money. You then have less money to reinvest, to grow the business, to spend on other people to help you with the marketing, maybe, or to spend on other people helping you to make more courses. What have you?
Speaker 1:So, overall, long term, you serve your audience worse by having your prices too low because you don't have enough money to actually build the business the way that it should be built. And you're not serving yourself well enough either. Like I've seen people really extreme at this where, like you know, they had courses for 27 bucks and they're like, oh, I'm going to put the prices up, maybe I'll put them to 37. And it's like, put them to 150. It's like, what are you doing? You know, like if you want to, fine, do it to 47 and then 67, then whatever. But it's like we've had a client before. I remember it was like he put his, we told him his prices were ridiculously low and he's like, oh, I've already put them up twice in the last year. I was like what were they before? You know this is insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I totally get that reluctance. I mean, we're talking about people who have this expertise in teaching, but most of them don't have any marketing background or, I know, business development background. Because the price you set for your products, first of all, it shouldn't be set in stone, it should fluctuate based on market conditions and it should also reflect the value that you offer. And now I know that's kind of complicated, like how do I actually put a number on that? But we're not inventing marketing here, right? I mean, pricing strategies exist for so long And'm sure there's like very, very clear economical pricing models. Looking at you, john, because you like numbers that can help you figure that out yeah, yeah, smartest, monica, and I like to think that we are.
Speaker 1:We did not come up with marketing in the from first principles. People have done the work, hard work, a lot of the hard work before we turned up.
Speaker 2:Yeah maybe one day we'll leave our legacy, but this is the thing. So I started, I went back to school. I'm now in advertising school, right. So I'm going back into the theory of marketing and it's like oh my god, we don't have to invent anything. This already exists and a lot of our clients are.
Speaker 2:Whenever they create a new offer, they're like I don't know how to price this and, at a minimum, what I tell them is like can you see what other classes cost? Can you see what are the other solutions they have at hand for achieving the same thing or for getting access to the same features you're giving them? Then try to think about your expertise in this. If you're someone who has like 20 years experience in the market, can you compare yourself with someone who just started teaching I don't know Spanish, like last year? There's like a big difference, and a lot of this has to do with personal mindset and the value you think you're giving clients. On the other hand, you have people who are like overestimating the quality of their courses and they go with a high price from the beginning, which tends to be marketers that's my experience.
Speaker 1:It's like people who've got a marketing background. They're like, oh, I could charge more for this, and people who've got a teaching background don't charge enough for it. So my guess is, dear listener, that you are probably not charging enough. But let's say, let's move on to that then, right? So what do you do when you raise the price? Like wouldn't it be good to just like raise the price without telling your audience? Just like put it up quietly in the background.
Speaker 2:So I think it's like multiple answers here. So, first of all, if we're talking about the front end offer, so I go to your website and I can buy your course from the website, then you can increase the price, whatever, I'm not gonna know but, if I'm already a customer or I'm a subscriber. Ideally you give me the chance to buy your course before you actually increase the price, because that kind of.
Speaker 1:It's only fair, isn't it? It's nice, it's actually very kind of you to email your audience and let them know the price is going to go up. Now's the last chance to get it at this lower price.
Speaker 2:And it's even more important if you have an existing base of users. Maybe you have a membership. So if you have a subscription and you're planning to increase the price of your monthly or annual subscription, you should inform your members and just give them a chance to decide for themselves Should I stay or should I go, Because that's where people get pissed, right? So if you're telling me I'm going to increase the prices as of like yesterday and didn't give me enough chance to decide for myself, of course I'm going to get pissed because you took away my freedom of choice. I'm going to get pissed because you took away my freedom of choice, right, it's something very elemental.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. So when you are sending out this email promotion, how do you justify the price increase?
Speaker 2:So this is actually part of what we do before we even send an email.
Speaker 2:This is something we do with the course creator and we go through a few like it's five things and it's sort of like a coaching call, because a lot of them they're very afraid of increasing the price and then by going through this process, they become a lot more comfortable with the idea that they're going to do this and they also understand what's the value they bring to the table. So I have five questions. I ask so have you increased the price in the last six months? It's usually no, because if they had, then we need to put a lot more accent on what has changed in the last six months that you're now increasing the price again. Which leads me to the price again.
Speaker 2:Which leads me to the second question what new features have you added? What are the new benefits you've added or you're planning to add for your users that can justify that price increase? And this is where a lot of people they're like well, I have added so much content or I have added so many new features, and I'm like have you communicated that to your clients? No, so how do you think they're going to find out about this and consider them valuable? So that gives me an idea of what we can focus on during the email promotion, just talking about the new features and the results that people who have used them have had.
Speaker 2:Lately about the new features and the results that people who have used them have had lately. Third one is having a lot of demand from new customers. So this is usually a result of either the prices are so low that when you get the bump in visibility and traffic you get an influx of people who just buy everything.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm an influx of people who just buy everything. If everything gets bought, then you could test higher prices just to see if people continue to buy. The other one is maybe you have such good features or benefits in your course that a lot of demand from new customers means you can't really provide the same quality, the same service. Maybe you're offering group coaching and you have four coaches a month who have to deal with a specific number of students, but when you get an influx they are kind of overwhelmed. So you're facing an option Put a limit on how many new people can come into your funnel, or increase the prices to make sure that when you do get the bump in new customers, you have what it takes to handle all this new demand.
Speaker 2:The fourth one is when you know that the value they get is higher than the price they pay. And for people who are just starting this is kind of difficult because they have to spend a lot of time talking to their customers, collecting testimonials, figuring out what's the before and after. But if you're in business for at least two years and you have, like, enough people buying, you should know exactly what's the kind of value they get. So if I buy a course who's going to prepare me to pass the YELTS speaking exam and that's going to help me get a new job. Then you kind of have an idea of what's the value I could get. And obviously, if I pay I don't know $47 for your course and I get the job because I passed the exam, then I could make that job I don't know $30,000 per year or more. So you can compare what you're investing with what you're getting and that can help you justify the price increase. Uh, and finally, you just uh like.
Speaker 2:The fifth one is very basic. It's you want to provide a better experience to your user. You want to add new features maybe coaching, live classes or whatever which means you need to scale your team, you need to hire out other people and you can actually justify the price increase by saying that. So over the next 12 months, we're going to be adding live classes for all our students. But to be able to do that, we have to hire three new coaches, which is why, as of, I know, january 1st, we're going to be increasing our prices for monthly or for whatever this course by this amount. But if you're getting before that, you can get all these new benefits for the old price.
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, cool. So these are all reasons why the course creator can feel good about increasing prices. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yes, and it also highlights what we're going to communicate during the email promotion, because we're going to need to figure out.
Speaker 1:What the angle is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. So the five reasons why you might be justified raising prices are more than six months have passed, because you do one or two price changes a year anyway. You've added new features and you haven't charged any more for it. You've got a lot of demand from new customers. The value that they're getting is higher than the price they're paying because you've just got such a great course, great program. Or you need extra income to develop better courses, hire a team, et cetera. That's going to improve the user experience down the line. So one of those five. So if any of those five are true for you, you can probably do a price increase. So this is good news. Monica's coaching over the podcast. Okay, so let's say you've decided yes, one of those is true. How do you then communicate the price increase?
Speaker 2:Well, we usually run an email promotion and this is probably the hardest part for many people, because they're just going to write like an email saying, hey, prices go up as of april 1st. Get in while you can, and that's kind of it, and it's. It's probably because of this fear that you know people are gonna fight back and they're gonna send you hate emails and they're gonna be. No, why are you doing this?
Speaker 2:But if you've gone through the other five steps and you know the answers to some of those questions and you know how your course is going to help. You can actually position the price increase as something that is beneficial, because essentially it is. Whether it's because you are forced by inflation or by, I don't know, marketing platform costs going up, you're still going to be able to provide an experience, a teaching experience, to your users. If you want to add new features, you need money to add those new features, even if it's just your time. If you're going to create a new course and it takes an extra 40 hours in the next month, where are you taking those extra 48 hours away from? That's still time that you need to monetize. Okay, so a few guidelines before I go into what kind of emails you can write. It's very important to be honest about why you're increasing prices, and honesty is like a superpower. Not many marketers and not many brands are using it, but it's honestly what helps.
Speaker 1:That's such a nice way of saying that people lie.
Speaker 2:It's not lying, it's kind of not telling the whole truth, right.
Speaker 2:Okay go on. I think there's so much power in telling the truth and explaining, even tackling the objection which is like, look, we're going to increase the price and I know it's not nice, it's not comfortable, and I know you're thinking, okay, so this guy is increasing prices as well. All prices are increasing, which means that at some point you're going to have to really sit down and do the math and figure out what are your priorities. And it's perfectly natural, because we as a team did the exact same thing and we realized that we can't keep up offering new features providing the same number of new students, like enrolling new students every month with the current prices we have. So we had to take to make a decision. It's probably not the best decision, or it's not the decision that makes us happy, but it's what we have to do to continue offering, providing the kind of quality teaching experience, whatever we've become some known for. So that's that's one approach, right?
Speaker 2:okay, so guideline number one be honest yes, be honest about why you're increasing prices now. The other one is reminding people that higher prices mean better quality and long-term benefits to the user experience, so you are forced to increase prices. Or you want to increase prices because you want to afford to develop new features. You need to explain that to them. So you're in. You're now having an opportunity to like be grandfathered in for this price as of april 1,. We're going to increase the price because for the next six to 12 months, we're adding a new feature into our system for all our students, because we realized you can't really make progress fast enough when preparing for your Yale speaking exam if you don't have one-on-one coaching or live feedback. But that costs money and we want to provide you with really good quality. We want to give you, like, the access to the best coaches in right cool.
Speaker 1:So what's next?
Speaker 2:oh, the next one is using the features, and I love this um. So one of the ways we did this for a former client is we asked them to create a calendar for rolling out new features, and that can be complicated because people think in like weeks and I was thinking in quarters. So you don't have to tell me what you're going to do next week, but I want you to know what's your promise to develop every quarter for the next 12 months. So even if you don't deliver all those new features at the same time, there's at least an expectation of what's going to come next.
Speaker 2:And that gives people something to look into for to be curious, expect it, and they do realize that if they want that new feature, they're going to have to pitch in now, because them pitching in and enrolling today actually supports the cash flow for the brand to deliver on that upcoming feature gotcha okay cool, so we've got so far.
Speaker 2:Be honest, remind people higher prices mean better quality and long-term benefits, and then tease the features, and it could be over a long period of time yeah, um, ideally at this point if you have at least like one new feature that you've been rolling out lately and a lot of people roll out features without announcing it, announcing them, which is a missed opportunity but if you have it, find out who's using it and talk to them to figure out what's their experience and then communicate the results your students have been able to already achieve thanks to that beta feature.
Speaker 1:Gotcha Okay cool, what's next?
Speaker 2:what's next? So the next one is showing people how you've been committed to deliver value, and this is basically on reminding them that you've been committed to improving the experience before. So the price increase is not the moment when you suddenly become an amazing teacher. You've already been doing that for a long time and you've tried to cover all the costs with what you already had. But you can't do that anymore and you don't necessarily have to talk that much about how things cost money, but you can talk about.
Speaker 2:Well, this is the first time we're increasing prices in the last two years and we're so grateful for everyone who's been helping us develop our course to this point, because we've been able to help 10,000 people all over the world pass their Yelp speaking exam. Not only that, but we changed the entire framework of how people learn or prepare for the Yelp speaking exam. You don't necessarily you no longer have to invest in working with a one-on-one tutor offline, because we've added that feature right now and 5,000 people have already benefited from that. And they're saying things like la la, la, la, la la, and our approach has been recognized by this institution or whatever you know.
Speaker 1:So you basically remind them that you've been delivering value before and, and that does a couple of things right, because, one, it shows them why it already deserves to have a higher price, and then, secondly, it shows them that you are trustworthy, because, even without charging any more over the last two years, you were busy working away trying to make it better, because you're the kind of person who cares and you want to make it better and you actually want your, your customers, to do well, and so you kind of hit both of those in one go.
Speaker 2:That's nice great yeah, and my final one would be just like drafting an email that answers all the potential questions or objections. We call that the faq faq email frequently asked questions, but you need to create an opportunity for your audience to reach out to you and position it like this is the safe thing to do for you. So if you have any concerns about our prices going up, if you want to know what you're going to get exactly as a student when these new features come up, please reply to this email or, I know, please sign up here. We're going to do a live call where we're gonna answer all of these questions next week yeah, got it okay cool.
Speaker 1:So be honest, remind people that higher prices means better quality. Tease the features, show people you've already been committed to delivering value and allow customers to reach out with further questions or concerns. Nice sounds great, okay and I. I think price increases are fantastic because it's like when you do that, it's one of the biggest uh amounts of sales you'll tend to get in. It's more than when you do a discount. It's saying the prices are going to go up. You get a really big increase in sales. So from the marketing point of view, from the sales point of view, it's brilliant.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely fantastic, even for the evolution of your business. I mean, at some point you're gonna have to like, grow up and consider okay, where do I want to take this business in 12 months from now, in five years from now, based on where I am right now and what I am offering right now? What's my place in the market? How do I compare myself with competitors? Can I offer what competitors are offering? With the current prices I have, and a lot of people they're going to realize that what got them here might not get them there. It sounds scarier than it has to be, but it's just like the way of running a business yeah, the market develops over time.
Speaker 1:There's competitors. You have to figure out what's needed. What does the audience want? Yeah absolutely all right. Is there anything else anybody needs to know about price increases today? No, just that's it, do it do it, yeah, all right cool.
Speaker 1:So to summarize overall, the problem is most people start with low prices because they're trying to break into the market, maybe, or they're a bit self-conscious about price and your prices are going, your costs are going up, but you're not put your own prices up. You've created more value, you're making your product better and you're not charging more for it, and that just doesn't make sense. It makes sense to tell people the price is going to go up because if you do that, it's going to allow you, it's going to allow your customers to buy something from you at the cheaper price. That's good service to them and it gets you more people signing up, which is fantastic. You can grandfather them in at the old price if they are, if they're in a membership, something like that.
Speaker 1:In terms of understanding for yourself, why should you be doing this? Maybe it's because six months have passed. You should do one or two price increases a year. Maybe it's because you've added lots of new features. You're not charging for them. Could because you've got a lot of demand from new customers and if you've got high conversion rates, it probably means your prices are too low. Could mean your value is higher than the price that the what they're paying, so you're just giving too much value at the moment. You could afford to increase the price, or it could be that you need extra income in order to develop better courses and how you communicate the prices through emails.
Speaker 1:Be honest about why you're doing it. Remind people the higher prices means better quality. Tease the features. Show people you've been committed to delivering value up till now and allow them to reach out with further questions or concerns, and if you do that, you're gonna have a great email promotion. You're gonna have a great price increase. You're gonna be delighted about it. Email me afterwards and tell me how fantastic it was. John at data driven marketingco. I'll share it with monica as well. Boom, monica. Thanks so much for coming on today. This was fantastic.
Speaker 1:Really appreciate your time it's great to be of help if you found the interview useful and you want to get future episodes, subscribe wherever you listened and thanks, as always, so much for your time for listening in. I hope this has been helpful. And don't forget if you want to get that profit increase report, you want to know how much more money you could be making with your course business and what things you need to change and how to do it. Then go to courseprofitreportcom and sign up. Thank you very much and we'll see you guys next time.