Sean Mccabe

Sean McCabe writes over a million words a year.

He is the author of Overlap: The ultimate guide to turning your side passion into a successful business. He’s helped tens of thousands of students with his courses on copywriting, client work, pricing, and marketing. On a daily basis, he runs Seanwes: a learning community for entrepreneurs looking to do fulfilling work.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Sean’s success

Increasing the price and grandfathering existing members on the current rate—if they switch to an annual plan

Result if you follow the steps in Sean’s session

Increase your member retention and spike your sales

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

You could just increase your price, right? You could just do that and that might work. But I think it will help justify the price increase if you’re adding value, if there’s something new.

In our case, we went from a forum plugin to this immersive experience with the community system we built. And then later on, we added a bunch of training and resources.

And so each of those justified increase in price but whenever we increase the price, we do so permanently. We don’t want to bring it back down. You don’t want to increase and decrease because that’s going to punish your loyal buyers. Your loyal buyers, they’re the best customers, they always deserve the best price.

So whenever you’re discounting or decreasing the price, you’re communicating something to your loyal buyers. You want to think about that. This person is buying early from you. They’re first in line like people stood in line for the iPhone, you know, they’re ready to buy as soon as it’s available. Who is that person for you?

They are your loyal buyer, your ideal, you want to treat them special like royalty, they’re going to buy from you again and again. They’re going to tell other people about you.

When you decrease your prices later on. You’re telling this loyal buyer, hey, you were stupid to buy from me early. You should have known eventually. I do run a sale and bring down the price. You should have waited.

And that’s the opposite of how you want to treat your very best people. This is somewhat controversial, believe it or not, I think it kind of makes sense. It kind of makes sense to me that you want to treat your best people really well.

But some people like to run discounts. And you know, I understand that. There’s basically two kinds of brands, there’s discount brands, and there’s premium brands. And you’re only hitting in one of two directions. It’s discount brands or increasing the value.

And don’t get me wrong. We all buy from both kinds. We buy from discount brands, we buy from premium brands, we buy from everyone, but what’s the difference? We know premium brands will never discount.

And so we’re like okay, I guess I gotta save up the money. You know, we know that the discount brands always will discount, so we wait for the sale. Now here here’s the kicker. We buy from discount brands to save money to give to premium brands. It’s amazing.

You know, Apple is never going to run a fourth of July sale get 20% off all our iPhones. So you have to save up your money if you want what they have to offer. So price increases. This is important to note price increases are not discounts, they’re not discounts, but they can be just as effective if not more effective in terms of driving sales, you can get a huge spike in revenue. I’ve had $25,000 in a weekend, $50,000 in a weekend just from increasing the price $50.

The important thing is that this is a permanent price increase whenever you go up, you don’t want to come back down because you’re going to punish your loyal buyers. So when you do this, you want to give people a chance to buy before the price increases.

So you’re designing a campaign around this price increase and you’ve got a set deadline. You’re telling people when it’s going to happen when you increase it. This is the day it happens. We’re not coming back down.

And this works with digital products, physical products, you know, one off purchases. But in our case, we’re talking about memberships today. So obviously the payments going to recur, they have a subscription.

And when you’re increasing the price of a membership, you want to increase it permanently, but give your current members the ability to lock in the rate they have indefinitely. So they’re going to get to keep this rate for as long as they maintain their membership.

So you may have some loyal members right now. But they’re going to stick around even longer, because they know, hey, if I leave and come back, I’m going to lose my grandfather rate. I get to keep this as long as I maintain my membership, so they’re going to be loyal. They’re going to stick around for a long time.

And this is a retention tip for you, just if anyone does cancel, have a script written up that’s reminding them of what they’re going to lose.