As a professional photographer, you probably have different packages and pricing options you offer to clients. But if there’s a specifying pricing plan you’d like them to choose, how are you going to make people choose it? In this video, Nick Kolenda teaches you some psychological tricks that will help you guide your clients towards the pricing plan you want to sell the most.
Nick uses pricing plans on a website as an example. It’s just an illustration, but it will help you understand how the method works so you can apply it to your business.
1. Structure the perceived value across plans
It’s hard to evaluate the value of a product in absolute terms. Instead, you should allow your clients to evaluate it in relative terms. In other words, offer them a few options to choose from so they can make comparisons.
An intuitive way to create these pricing plans is to make their values proportional: the cheapest plan has the fewest benefits and the most expensive one has the most benefits. However, Nick points out that this is a wrong approach. You shouldn’t structure your plans with an equal level of appeal, and there are two reasons for that. First, it will make the customers’ decision a lot more difficult. And second, if someone chooses one plan, it means they’re losing the benefits of another, and this loss is in a way painful.
You can make people more likely to choose an option by deliberately lowering the perceived value in some options. When people compare the plans, the decision will be easier, they’ll have a clear winner to choose and they won’t be giving up as many benefits of other plans.
2. Choose the ideal position for your target plan
When you create the options, the question is: where should you position your target plan? The answer is usually in the center. According to a research Nick quotes in the video, when choosing among several options, people are more likely to choose a central one. The explanation is fairly simple: our eyes tend to be drawn to the center of the scene, so we’re likely to notice the central option first. As we scan other options, we constantly gaze the central ones, so the majority of our attention is right there.
3. Optimize the visual nature of your target plan
Finally, you should visually distinguish your target option among the peripheral options. So, to make your preferred option stand out more, use a different color, size, and/or shadow to emphasize it. It will attract the viewers’ attention more easily and quickly pop into their mind as the best option. Also, by emphasizing a certain option, you can make people perceive them as the default option, and people are more likely to choose default options.
I believe we’ve all seen these techniques applied to all kinds of online subscription plans. Some things that pop into my mind are subscription plans for 1x, Grammarly, antivirus software and of course, Adobe products. You can apply the same strategy to your pricing plans and guide your customers to choose the one you want to sell the most.
This is an interesting and useful topic for everyone running their photography business. And if you’d like to read more about pricing, you can download Nick’s free PDF via this link.
[How to Get People to Choose a Specific Pricing Plan via FStoppers]
