Here I’m going to give you a stealth pricing strategy that you can use to immediately boost your sales.
It’s weird, and it’s illogical but it works.
You can file this one under either ‘pure customer persuasion’… or providing ‘pure customer clarity’, depending on your point of view.
Either way, it’s a powerful way to dramatically boost your profits.
There’s a very famous pricing strategy from The Economist, look at this:
The pricing options
As you can see there are three pricing options.
The first one is for a web-only subscription, and that is priced at $59.
The second one is a print-only subscription and that is for $125.
And then the third option is is both print and web subscription for $125 – which is the same price as the print option.
So what happened?
The most profitable pricing option
Well, an MIT study found some really interesting results when they ran their own experiment.
Using this formula they found that:
- 16% of people chose the online subscription
- 0% chose the print subscription
- 84% of people chose both online and print
This tells us that the most expensive option is obviously the better value for money and the most desirable option available.
Things get weird
But what happened when the second option was removed?
Because nobody opted for it, there was no point in offering it, right?
Well, something really interesting happened.
- 68% people took the first option, web-only subscription
- 32% took the most expensive one, print and web subscription
So what does this mean?
The ‘useless’ middle option that nobody wanted actually made the more expensive option look like a really good offer.
When we look at the bigger picture, it helped people to make up their mind more efficiently because they could seek they could clearly see which the which was the best deal on the table.
The next time you need to price a new product, if you throw this strategy into the mix you might find that it’s an easy way to boost your bottom line.