What have you seen work best for how to create messaging behind the reason for price increase? Is it features? Is it the underlying value? Other?

Question

Christy Roach · Accepted Answer

1. The best advice I have for messaging around a price increase is to clear, concise, and customer focused. No matter why you’re changing your prices or how justifiable the price change is, a customer is not going to be excited about having to pay more. The biggest mistakes I see in pricing are when companies are too self-congratulatory in how great their product is and why it’s a no brainer to pay more and, on the flip side, companies that are too apologetic or clearly worried about customers being upset in their communication.
 2. In terms of the way to create messaging, it starts with getting really clear on the “why” behind the price change internally. Once you have a really clear POV on why you’re changing yoru prices, you can figure out how to message it to customers. Of course, you’re never going to put “we’re underpriced in comparison to our competitors” in an email to customers but knowing that will let you know that you don’t need to be too apologetic in your tone because the price change you’re implementing won’t seem extreme in comparison to other options on the market.
 3. From there, I recommend a few tactical things:
     1. Tie your pricing to a product launch and new offernigs. That way, when you create messaging you can point to improvements that the team is making to justify why there would be a premium
     2. Be extremely clear internally about the way you’ll handle complaints. If you all agree to be very lenient and generous with current customers, your messaging can be very focused on getting folks to reach out to the team if they have complaints or frustrations since you know that they will get something to help ease the pain. If you decide internally you want to hold firm on the change, then you can make sure your messaging doesn’t lead folks to believe there’s some way to get a better price if they reach out since that will just furstrate the customer and your support/customer facing teams
     3. Test your messaging if you can. If you have a customer advisory board or very active community members, you can preview your price change and messaging to them. This is now standard practice for my team as a way to catch mistakes or oversights on pricing changes that we might not have noticed until we saw a customer’s reaction to the change.

What have you seen work best for how to create messaging behind the reason for price increase? Is it features? Is it the underlying value? Other?

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