An example of justifying a price increase

During the course of your career, you will have to raise your rates several times. This is never an easy thing to do, especially if you have a steady stream of customers at your current price tier. If you want to maximize your revenue, however, you will need to make your prices higher eventually.

When looking at raising your prices, the first thing you should do is make a list to justify all your accomplishments since the last time you raised your prices. When you look at all your accomplishments, it should make raising your prices much easier. Usually, we downplay our accomplishments in our own brains, but seeing them written out on paper brings our growth into stark focus.

Here is an example from my own career. When I launched my first big course, Build a Rabid Fanbase, I had no experience launching large courses.

For that reason, I set the price $200 below my final price, at $297, when I launched it in January of 2018. I was massively undervaluing the course, but I had my reasons.

I did this partially because I wanted to give people a compelling reason to buy (the course would only be that cheap for a limited time), partially to convince people to take a chance on me, and, most importantly, to give myself confidence.

See, even though I was giving people a blueprint based on my own success, I wasn’t sure the course was worth the price. After all, $297 was the most expensive product I had ever launched by about $250.

Additionally, I wanted to work out all the bugs and make sure people were satisfied before I raised the price. For all those reasons and more, the $297 price point made sense to me.

In the ensuing six months, dozens of people took my course and enjoyed it. Many said it was the best course they had ever taken. Some said it revolutionized their career. My confidence grew as I heard stories of other people’s success.

By June of 2018, I had built up enough confidence to raise the price to $397, still $100 shy of my final target price. It would still be at a discount, but significantly less of a discount than before.

I wasn’t sure people would buy the course when I raised the price, but I had some compelling reasons to do so.

1. People had gone through the course and loved it.
2. I had witnessed massive transformations in people’s lives after taking the course.

Before I raised the price, I contacted people on my list and told them what I was doing, gave them my reasons, and offered one last opportunity to get in on the lower price.

Then, I raised my price and hoped that people would still buy the course at $397. They did.

Luckily, I saw no ill effects of raising my price. People still bought the course at the same frequency as they did before I raised the price.

Woohoo! I had justified my price increase and it worked. However, I still wanted to raise the price by $100 more dollars. In order to do that, I needed even more compelling reasons.

The biggest compelling reason to increase the price of the course came in November of 2018, when I became a USA Today bestselling author.

Being able to put that on the front of my name was a huge boost in confidence for myself and my customers. That alone was enough of a reason to justify a price increase.

On top of that, I had been doing book marketing for almost a year at that point, and during that time I watched my own audience, and the audience of my clients, grow by tens of thousands using the principles I taught in the course.

I had proved out my methods throughout the year using myself as a guinea pig and my customers as social proof, Those two compelling reasons gave me everything I needed to justify a second price increase.

In January of 2019, I once again told my audience that I was raising my price and gave them one last opportunity to buy the course for $397.

Before I raised my price, I made sure to add the new justifications on my sales page, including my USA Today bestseller title and a lot of testimonials, but then I raised the price without hesitation. I didn’t second guess myself because I knew the course was worth it.

I could raise my price so easily because I justified the price increase to myself first, and then others. The course itself was mostly the same, but I was a different human, and my methods had proven themselves. The power of the course was exponentially higher than it was at launch, even though the content was the same.

This is what I mean by justifying your price increase. When going to increase your own services, the question you should be asking is “What justified this price increase?”

If you can justify it to yourself, you can justify it to your customers as well.

Will all of them buy? No. Some will complain, but if you can justify yourself, then you will also be able to discuss your qualifications with new customers as well.