← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
920: No-Brainer Pricing & Proving the Value of Your Intangible Digital Products to Potential Customers
00:51:12
I’m going to show you how to make offers so irresistible that customers won’t need convincing.
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Abigail Pumphrey
If you solve for the thing that's frustrating, but you're not giving them the thing that was stopping them. You're giving them something else that provides a similar result. They're less likely to recommend the product. Have you ever seen a product and thought, shut up and take my money? That's what we call no brainer pricing. And today I'm going to show you how to create offers so irresistible your customers won't need convincing. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host, Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as they turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Looking for a way to make a difference with your morning coffee? Grab a bag of talitha coffee@bossproject.com Coffee Every purchase helps support survivors of human trafficking. Make every cup count@bossproject.com Coffee when I launched my first digital product, I did not struggle to explain why it was worth the price. I thought it was the best deal on the Internet and I was constantly telling people that. I think it's really easy to get caught up in the fact that what we're putting out into the world is often intangible. You can't touch it, you can't feel it, you can't see it, you can't taste it. And because what we're creating is intangible, it can feel harder to conceptualize. It can feel harder to sell. And so everything that we're doing is about creating perception so that there's perceived value. You're providing the vision. Your potential customer is perceiving it. They are viewing it, they are absorbing it. And there has to be an exchange there. We want to address a specific and immediate pain point. But what really makes something a no brainer? It's really simple. When the value outweighs the price, customers don't hesitate. When the value outweighs the price, customers don't hesitate. So what creates value, I think is the real question you should be asking because you can Price something literally anything like think about it. There has been a lot of talk these days. Now this is a tangible product but still worth noting. There's been a lot of talk about Birkins online. So the average Birkin, I haven't looked it up, I don't actually know, I'm guessing $40,000. Okay, this a purse. Not that crazy but the thing that people were going crazy for is Walmart or rather Walmart.com and a third party seller who's using Walmart.com started selling a dupe of the Birkin. The dupe is like $110 ish. The perception is this looks like it's worth $40,000. The irony is that it devalues the higher priced item and makes the lower priced item feel like a steal. So you could theoretically have the same product, the same deliverables, the same everything, and two people could price it at completely different price points. But whoever does a better job of showcasing the value outweighing the price will sell more volume in terms of dollars. That's going to depend on a whole lot of factors. But if we're talking about who's going to get more number of sales, it's whoever does a better job of explaining the value over the price. Now I think sometimes it's hard to put a number on what the value really is for something, especially when it doesn't have a direct return. In the business world people are looking for money, they want to see more cash flow. And so when you're selling something, a lot of the time what you're ultimately selling is their ability to make more revenue. And if they can see themselves making a multiple on that, then they're way more likely to invest so much. So the stats say that consumers are 70% more likely to buy when the perceived value is 2 to 3x the price. Now in the world of intangibles, while I don't think this is 100% necessary, but if we're going for no brainer entry offers, my personal goal is 10x. I want the perceived value to be 10 times the price. So much so that they would feel dumb not making this investment. I cannot reiterate enough though the importance of simplicity. Like it's so easy when we're talking about increasing value that we like want to add more bells and whistles and make something fancier and list more things out on the sales page. But over complicated products confuse buyers and kill your sales. A no brainer offer solves one clear specific problem and does it well and might I add the kind that is going to give you the momentum in your business. A no brainer offer that's going to help you sell more future offers also is going to give someone a quick and almost immediate win. They're going to receive that value asap. It's going to be a quick return. And because it's a quick return, you're going to earn trust faster, which is going to lead to that person being far more likely to purchase from you again. Since the customer can't see or touch your product, the value has to be obvious in other ways. And I think one of the ways that comes up for me almost immediately is that your no brainer offer should ideally nearly do the work for them. So it's easy to confuse this with done for you services. That's not what we're doing here. We're not going to sell something at a dramatically lower price and then, then have all of this time we have to invest back in that person. That's not scalable, that's not doable long term. But you do want to either create a system or a process or a product or a template or an offer that makes it feel like you were there and you did it for them and you sped up the process so much so that they're seeing themselves in it. And what's going to devalue a product is if they see that they have to invest additional time beyond the dollars. So if they're paying less but spending more time, they're not always willing to spend more time even though it's cheap. So we have to like weigh that out. People make buying decisions emotionally, but they justify them logically. So we have to touch on both. When we're talking about sales, we have to make them feel a certain way when they're reading the text, but also give them information that just clicks logically and they're like, yup, you want them saying yes? You want them saying yes when they read your copy. I think a lot of people could argue about Apple. There's a lot of strong feelings one way or the other. Super pro Apple, super against Apple. Regardless, Apple products aren't cheap, but they have a very clear value proposition. So yes, they're going to work, but the design meets a certain expectation, it has a certain perception of prestige or functionality and it's going to look clean, it's going to look chic, it's going to look like the newest tech. Right now some people are going to say, well, that's not my style, okay? That's not my Point for Apple's ideal client. They are buying predictability. I don't have any other way to say that. They predictably know it's going to look good, it's going to work, it's not going to break, I'm not going to have to maintain it. They also might be a little bit frustrated, but already know up front if it does break, which doesn't happen very often unless you like smash it or overheats, you're just going to replace it like it's, it's just part of it. Like you know that going in. So they're buying predictability. Like there's just something about that. And so you as a small business owner do not typically have a large enough audience that you can rely on someone knowing that your shit's just good, that your shit just works. So you have to tell them. And it's not about proving yourself so much as giving someone clarity and providing tangible and real examples that are relevant to their life or business. Probably the one that is most overlooked, but the easiest thing to accomplish is if your product solves an urgent problem. You don't have to convince anybody, they're going to convince themselves. I'll give you an example of something that has been true for me and I have done on multiple occasions. So I love Instagram. I have for as long as I've been in business now I've had a love hate relationship with it at multiple times, namely when there was this huge shift to video and I loved me a good graphic and photos and I felt like I had to show up in this new way and it was exhausting to me and I wasn't unwilling, but I was definitely, definitely feeling a certain way about it. I just, I didn't want to do it. It felt like a big hurdle for me. And so when this concept of B roll content came out that I didn't have to be in, that someone else could produce and I could buy access to in the same way that stock photography showed up years ago when photos was the thing. It's, it is a little bit about timing. I was like, heck yes, it's 150 bucks I get access to this huge library. Honestly, if I make two sales of this entry offer, it pays for itself plus some. And so then I asked myself, can I make two sales using this product, I. E. The B roll to make my life easier on social media? Do you know how many times I said yes? Do you know how many stock libraries I got access to? Do I use all of them? Did I Download everything after the first day? No, most of those. I bought it. I immediately downloaded some stuff. I stuck it on my phone, and then I never opened it again. And I know you're sitting here like, well, then you didn't get the value out of it. No, I got exactly what I wanted. I wanted immediate satisfaction. I wanted to not do filming today. This wasn't about next week or next month or six months from now. I didn't want to do it today. So I bought today, solved my problem today, and made the sales the same day. So then I was like, okay, cool. Anything beyond that is just gravy. But that is like the perfect example of the perfect storm. And if you're not in the business space, which many of you are, but there is a lot of you that aren't, I think the question then becomes, well, what am I selling? If. If I can't provide an ROI, meaning someone invests just for the sake of math, $10 and they get back a hundred and I. E. They make 10x. If I can't do that, then what provides that perceived value? And more often than not, it is time savings. So what headaches are you preventing? Buying B roll is not necessarily gonna make me more money, but if it makes me do the thing I needed to do faster than I was gonna do it, then it was worth it. So if you need to solve an urgent problem, you need to know what those needs are. And so ultimately you have to talk to your audience. I think the people that find this to be the most natural for them is when they are their target audience or they are their target audience, but like they're five years previous themselves, if that makes sense. Like, they're a florist, They've been a florist for 15 years, and they're talking to the florist who just opened their business a couple of months ago and is their pricing is all over the place and they're selling things a la carte when they really should be booking full weddings and yada yada. The people who tend to get this concept the fastest are people who are selling to a previous version of themselves, regardless of how much time and space is between those. Honestly, it's actually easier to sell to a previous version of yourself that is more recent. Like, the more recent it is, usually the better you can solve the problem. But also you remember what it feels like in a much bigger way. So if that's not you, if you're like, my ideal client isn't me, that's fine. But you do need to talk to your audience because you need to know what's frustrating them right now. And you don't necessarily need to tell them what you're doing with this information. You just want to get in their head. What's frustrating? What's stopping them from reaching their goals? To me, recording video content when I just wanted to be in my sweatpants was frustrating. What I wanted to do was post on Social, but I felt like I had to do video so it was stopping me from doing the thing I wanted to do, which is why it was a no brainer for me. I want you to think about your audience. What's frustrating. But then what's frustrating them isn't necessarily the solution. You have to go one layer deeper than that. Okay, it's frustrating them, but what piece of it is stopping them from reaching their goals? Because it'd be really easy to say what's frustrating is I feel like I can't post on Social right now. And so someone will go and they'll start creating all of this content for someone and like all of these posts that are like prepackaged and ready to go and post the thing, but that's not what was stopping them. And so then someone might purchase, they might buy initially because it seemed like a good idea, but they're say this was in a membership format, they're going to get out quickly because that wasn't actually the thing stopping them. The same would be true for like testimonials and recommending the product. If you solve for the thing that's frustrating, but you're not giving them the thing that was stopping them, you're giving them something else that provides a similar result. They're less likely to recommend the product, which if you're a good marketer may not matter. But if you rely on other people to help hype you up, then that matters. But also you want people to use your product, right? You want people to get results. So look for the thing that's stopping them. Because ultimately people buy solutions, not products, solutions. Sometimes the solution may seem frivolous to someone else, but that doesn't matter to your ideal client. So here's a couple of my no brainers. Okay, so one of them is something I could absolutely charge for and I have actually decided to make this no brainer a lead magnet. But it is a very, very high converting lead magnet. What is it? So a lot of my audience wants to develop a digital product. They see the value in diversifying their income. They're interested in adding that type of product. To their sales lineup. Maybe they want to transition away from one on one services. They want to do the thing, but they keep saying they want to do it and they keep not doing it. So my one day challenge helps someone go from concept to launch in one day and it's incredibly effective. I've had over 7,000 people go through this. So many incredible digital products have been launched as a result. Like so many. So, so, so many. And across so many different topics, which has been so cool to witness. P.S. you can go through the challenge if you're like sitting here and like, I want to make a no brainer. Well, this challenge literally helps you make a no brainer. So get the challenge, go to bossproject.com launch okay, but let me talk about another one that is a paid product because I think it's important to illustrate that it absolutely can be paid and be well worth it. I have your digital va which is a chat GPT prompt vault. So what's the problem? The problem is so many people are intimidated by getting started with AI. Now there's a group of super consumers that are absolutely using it every single day. They can't shut up about it, yada yada yada. There is a group of people that are intimidated to start now. I hit the market early, so this was, gosh, I don't even know, a year and a half ago. Like a while ago, AI was still like new. ChatGPT had been out for the public like less than 6 months when I launched this. And ultimately the solution it provided was a jumping off point. I was doing prompt engineering. So people knew they wanted to use AI to improve their productivity across all sorts of things inside of their own businesses. But they didn't know how to get the AI to give them the result they wanted. And so what my product did, rather than teach them how to do prompt engineering, which I totally could have done, the reason it was a no brainer is I just gave them a bunch of prompts and they were clearly labeled and they were clearly in different categories and they were easy to find and someone could reference it again and again, they could bookmark the page and come back to it again and again and again and again and again. They got immediate value. Some people who bought the product undoubtedly were looking to do this in the moment and it solved the problem right then. And so they bought it right then and got the value right then. And maybe they never opened it again. But my hope is that it taught them a valuable lesson. What does the structure look like? What does the flow look like? How could they mimic the things I've done to get a similar result? For other types of things, that's still a win. Even if they only ever used one prompt, it's still a win. You can definitely see more about it. If you're curious what that looks like and how I've made that a no brainer. You can go to bossproject.com courses and you can see the lineup and check out your digital va. Have you been wanting to launch a digital product but you don't know where to start? Perhaps you're struggling to pick the right profitable idea. Is the idea there? But you just need to get the ball rolling again. I got you. I want to help you go from idea to launch in just one day. I partnered with Teachable to bring you the one day launch challenge. So far we've helped 6,786 people do just that. Inside this challenge. We're helping you pick the right idea, getting all the tech set up. Heck, you could even collect your very first payment the same day. It's all loaded up for you and ready to dive in@bossproject.com launch. Don't wait until you're ready to sign up. We got pre challenge goodies ready and waiting for you, including 100 profitable digital product ideas. Just head to bossproject.com launch and get started today. Hiring with Indeed. Your search is over. When it comes to hiring, don't go searching for the 1. Just meet your match with Indeed. Get unparalleled access to job seekers with over 350 million unique monthly visitors globally according to Indeed data and an extended reach through Glassdoor. I love that Indeed makes it easy to hire when we've hired. In the past, the process was full of unqualified applicants. With Indeed, we can target the right candidates for the right position, leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day. Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences, so the more you use Indeed, the better it gets and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com strategyour just go to indeed.com strategy hour right now and support our show by seeing you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com strategy hour terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you need Indeed. Now I think this is an under talked about topic because there's a little bit of irony about what I just shared when I shared your digital va, you didn't know what I was talking about when I shared Chatgpt Prompt Vault. You immediately knew what I was talking about and knew what potential types of problems that it could solve. I wish I had just called it ChatGPT Prompt Vault from the beginning, but I didn't. And it has the other name and it is whatever it is what it is. I have seen such a massive lift in sales from making my offers obvious. I don't know how else to explain this other than like what the product title is is what the product is. So when people look at the product name, they're like, oh, and if that's relevant to them, they'll click for more information. When my things have been more vague in the past. Like for instance, one of my signature programs for many years was called Strategy Academy. It sold hundreds of times and made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Incredible. Love that for me. But do you have any idea what it's about? No. Like, I mean, you might understand I'm going to learn something because of Academy and you might understand that it's going to give strategies for how to do the things. But what are you learning for what industry? For who? About what? Like, it's not telling you anything. So all of that to say if you want to make a product, no brainer, making it like, almost to the point where someone would be dumb to not like understand what it's about. And I'm not saying they're actually dumb, but it has to be extremely obvious to your ideal client what it is. Now that doesn't mean you couldn't name it something that someone outside of your niche wouldn't get it. That's okay. But your ideal client needs to immediately understand. And ideally these are even search terms like things that someone would be looking for. I'm literally googling this. I'm literally punching this into Instagram or TikTok or whatever platform because I want to learn more about this specific thing. Your product is more likely to come up when you integrate SEO friendly terms that are relevant and obvious. We've already talked about perceived value, but I think it's important to hit home again, the saving time piece of that. Because, for example, if someone purchased something that they know is going to save them 10 hours of work, then it's obviously worth more than $29 for them. Customers are willing to pay up to 13% more for products that save them time. I would venture to say that that's a much higher stat than that. But I'm not here to argue the stats. I'm here to tell you that there has to be clarity around that. So if your product saves them time, how much time? What kind of time? Where would they spend the time if they weren't spending it on this? Including that kind of wording on your actual sales page or in your social media or on a blog post that talks about your product is going to be helpful. If this saves them 10 hours of time, it should be so obvious that it saves them 10 hours of time. You need to make that clear. Now you do have some options for what I would call anchoring. And it's a pricing psychology tactic where higher priced options make your lower priced options seem like a steal. So if you have a multi thousand dollar group coaching program, all of a sudden your $97 course feels like a bargain and feels like a good way to test the waters with you, even if they were already interested in the higher price thing. So I think having pricing transparency around your high end offers only makes your low end offers easier to sell. I think some people are like, well, I want to put it behind like an application. Do you or do you just want people to apply that are ready to spend that kind of money? It's up to you. Because I think programs, regardless of price point, should sell themselves because the perceived value should always be higher than the price they're paying. I think it's a little bit ironic sometimes when people utilize this psychology aspect of sales to incentivize something that is potentially actually a deterrent. Like they'll take a deterrent and turn it on its head. I think Ikea is perhaps one of the best at doing this. They essentially invented the term flat pack furniture. That made it sound like it was easier to ship and move and like get it around when really they're just trying to make affordable feel like a win, even though you're doing all of the work. Now, I think the majority of people who've bought Ikea furniture know what they're getting into. But in the beginning this was a marketing strategy. They talked about Flatpak. So because Ikea became a destination, you would drive hours and potentially get a moving truck to go and get this stuff. And if you were going to get three bookcases, maybe that would have been all that would fit in your truck. But because it's flat pack, you could get a whole kitchen in a truck, which is crazy if you really think about it. And so they took a deterrent and flipped it on its head. Now, I'm not suggesting that you sit here and try to brainstorm what's wrong with your product and try to turn it around, but I just want you to be thinking about how they used perception. They changed the perception of something that was potentially a flaw. You have more influence over perception than you think when you use this low ticket pricing. This is an opportunity to get paid to build your audience. Now, it does require volume to make it happen. But low cost doesn't mean low value. It means low risk for your buyer. And you can emphasize that which is only going to make it easier to sell. Let's talk more about copy because I think it's really important when we're talking about no brainer offers. It's really easy to think all of these things, but how are you sharing them? How are you getting that information across so it's not just sitting in your head. The first one, perhaps the most obvious, is to show the roi, help customers understand what they're getting back from their purchase. Because here's the thing, Harvard Business Review did a study. Consumers make 95% of their buying decisions subconsciously. So even if they look at something like this course will save you 10 hours a week. And they glaze over it. And when you go to ask them why they buy, that's not what they said. You saying it saved them 10 hours a week got stuffed away subconsciously. And then they kept reading, they got further down the page and they hit yes. And that could have been the reason they said yes, because you clearly portrayed the roi. Now, if it's not time, it's money, almost always now, could you be selling something else? Maybe DM me? If you have something, you're like, I'm not selling time or money, let me know. I would actually be kind of surprised. Truly. Almost always it goes back to one of these two. But nonetheless, if you were saving someone money or making someone money, you could do both, by the way. And the same is true with time. You can save someone time or give them time, which I know sounds totally abstract, but I promise you it's a thing. Anyway, an example would be this template has helped x people land $5,000 clients. I don't care if that number is two. Okay, well now I've just stepped away subconsciously that I could spend $47 and those two people made five grand. I can't imagine those two people aren't like me. I bet I could do that too. That's what's going on in the back of their brain. So you need to, somewhere on your sales page have an example of return on investment. This is kind of like a step two, because I realize so many of you this may Be the very first time you're launching the thing and you're like, I can't do this right now, but there's kind of some things around this that I want to, like, demonstrate. Okay, so I'm talking about social proof. And I think we all understand the testimonials help sell products. And you can ultimately build trust in advance of a purchase by showcasing testimonials, case studies, results, because it demonstrates value. Because when customers share their wins, it does the selling for you. But if you're sitting here and you're like, I've never sold the thing, so I don't have social proof, you probably do, but it wasn't directly about the thing. So think about, is there a rave review you've gotten from a customer that talks about how you show up for them, or do you have a review that talks about your integrity? Or have you gotten incredible results for clients, but perhaps you did it on a one on one basis and now you're teaching the masses. You can still say that. You can say something to the effect of, I've spent the last decade working side by side with my clients to help them do XYZ. The last 10 clients all got X result. I'm tired of keeping this a secret. I want to share it with the world. All of a sudden they're like, well, dang, she used to charge this and got them this, and now she's sharing everything inside this thing. You can still demonstrate social proof by talking about your reputation and how other people feel about how you've showed up for them in the past. Obviously, try to keep this as relevant as possible to the topic, but don't ignore it. Don't forget it as an option, including using yourself as a case study. It's so easy to talk about, I can do this. I can help you with this. I'm so excited for this. You're going to learn how to do this and then forget to say, I'm teaching you what worked for me. And these are the kind of results I got, and I'm teaching you my process. I think another underutilized strategy, because it takes time to make, is giving someone a way to visualize intangible products. Now, there's some ways to do this with imagery. Like, you can use mockups to, like, make it look like they're getting access to a library or what's on this computer or whatever. I think those are great. I still absolutely recommend creating them. They take time. I think they're worth it. I think some of them can get really Hokey and some of them can get a little bit tacky. So you have to draw the line where it make sense for you. But nonetheless it does help someone psychologically view it as real. But there are other ways to do this. It doesn't just have to be a visual mock up. You could give someone a behind the scenes video. You could walk them through, here's the layout of this thing or here's how this thing's going to work, or here's how this client use this thing and how they transformed it to look like this. You can show them on an actual video. You can also demonstrate the thing if you have a template that you're giving them access to. You showing them how it works. I think a lot of people are like hesitant to do that because they're worried that well then someone could just go rip me off and yada yada maybe, but they're going to spend a ton of time doing that. Ultimately them seeing the thing is just going to prove to them that it is exactly what they need. And this is going to save them so much time. I think you also adding personal anecdotes is important. You can paraphrase and share stories from your perspective rather than always waiting for someone to turn around and tell you it worked for them. So what I mean by that, you could look at say someone wrote this obscure comment in a community that you run and it was obvious that they use this particular product and got XYZ result. But it wasn't something that you could like screenshot because it's got a bunch of other details that are a little bit too unrelated to make it work in the thing. Or there's too many other distracting details. You could say something like, just last week I saw a client who had implemented blah who got this result and it inspired me to like, you can share their story but then continue to tell your own. Anecdotally, I realize that's kind of obscure. That tends to work better in like a social format or email format. So like that the personal example anecdotal thing where you're just kind of interjecting it in the middle. Middle of a story doesn't work as well on a sales page unless you have a super story driven way of selling that's working for you. Generally speaking, it would add too much copy to the page. But I think this is a fantastic thing to include in something like a sales email. Now you'll notice I didn't spend a ton of time talking about the actual price. I just talked about the Price being less than the value, which really just means you can price it whatever you want, whatever feels good, as long as your perception of value is higher. That being said, I know some of you are like, but are you really want to talk about numbers? Like actual numbers? I get it. I hear you. I talk about that more inside of my one day launch challenge where I'm actually helping you go through this process. I'm helping you create the no brainer product. I'm helping you talk about it and create the copy for your sales page. I'm talking about price. I'm helping you get the thing launched and out there. So that's free. You can go get that to get more information@bossproject.com launch if you have an existing offer, use this as an opportunity to do a little bit of an audit. Are you solving a real urgent problem? Are you giving someone a quick win? Are you illustrating what it feels like to go through your product? Are you talking about the time savings or the return on investment in terms of dollars that someone might get? And if visualization is all about it, are you telling a story where you're actually having them visualize it? There's so many opportunities to tweak little things and make this so irresistible that people can't say no. Now if you want to learn more about how to price your digital products so they sell themselves, go get the challenge. Get yourself inside digital product. Fast track my one day launch challenge bossproject.com launch and then I want to hear your biggest takeaway from this whole episode. So send me a DM over on Instagram. You can find my profile by going to ossproject. Abigail says is linked in the bio. Let's chat. I would love to hear from you. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me at Abigail says and OSS Project so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project. I'd love if you join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.