The Unusual Business Decision That Made Us £540,000

I was terrified to raise our prices, but then we tried this and we made £540,000. We generated 45 brand new clients in 7 days, and this was all from a single email campaign. There were no ads involved, no cold calling, no social posting, literally just email. So How the hell did we manage to pull this off and how can you take advantage of it? But this email, of course, it was a price raise campaign. Let me tell you, this is one of the most potent, powerful things you can do in your business to drastically improve your number of new customers and also profitability. But the sad truth is most people get price raises terribly wrong. I mean, it's a crying shame. You see, a lot of people They just update the price on a website, okay, and then quietly hope that people will just acknowledge it. Worse, they send a simple, quiet little email. Even worse than that, they're just too scared and they never actually do it out of fear that they are going to cripple their business and not be able to get any new customers. Well, let me tell you, if you've fallen victim to any of these, this is a tremendous waste. A price rise is not a risk, in my opinion. No, if you do it properly, it is a campaign and it is a smart strategic decision that has profound impact on a business. You see, firstly, you've got to understand that actually increasing your pricing disproportionately increases your profits. Let's look at a simple example in a simple business. So pre-price raise, let's say I sell something for £100. Now, it cost me £60 to acquire the customer and to fulfill, so I'm left with £40 of profit. Then let's say I'm going to increase my price. I'm going to go from £100 to £120. So that is a, you guessed it, 20% increase in price. But because my cost of goods sold and marketing cost stays the same, I get all that £20, all the price increase actually goes straight to the profit. Or the bottom line, as we like to call it in business. So what that means is despite it being a 20% increase in price, the astute of you will notice our profits have gone from 40 to 60. That is a 50% increase. Price rises disproportionately increase your profits if your cost of goods roughly remains the same. So that's why we want to do it. Secondly, it also taps into one of the most powerful action drivers in humanity, which is loss aversion bias. This is where, as humans, our innate fear of loss is generally stronger than our desire to gain. We typically see in a lot of our marketing messages, if we are talking about the pain and the potential of losing something, that is stronger than the desire to gain it. And we can exploit this with a price increase campaign because we let people know, hey, in not very long, this price that you have right now is going to be gone forever. You're going to lose the opportunity to have that price, and therefore we can drive a lot of action and get a lot of people that are on the fence off the fence and paying us money. So that's all well and good. Price increases make perfect sense in almost every business. I've got countless stories, as I've shared on this channel before, of clients that increase their prices by, you know, double and then actually increase their conversion rate or close rate as well. Price increases the perceived value of your thing. And more often than not, if you're pricing yourself too low, you're actually deterring customers because they look at your thing and think, wow, there's no way that can even be any good for that particular price. So we're on the same page there, I hope. Now let's talk tactics, how to execute this, how we execute this repeatedly. So the first thing you need to do is decide when you're going to tactically increase the prices. And so over the course of a year, we will typically look to increase our prices on a couple of occasions. Now, we tend to always do it in December with a view that prices increase at the end of the year or on the 1st of January. And I really highly recommend this for most businesses because it makes perfect sense as a business to increase your prices a little bit every year. Because of inflation, the annoying force that drives costs of everything in our world up. And so if you're not increasing your price by, you know, 5 to 10% a year, then you're actually losing money because the value of what you're charging decreases over time naturally with inflation. So we need to keep up with that. So there is a natural rationale for at least a once a year price raise anyway. But then really choose your other opportunities. You know, we're actually doing one right now in April and May. And the reason is we actually just— it's time for us to increase our prices. We just want to do it right now. But if you're a seasonal business, then you want to pick the months where it is quieter because the price increase campaign will drive new customers to take action in times when they typically won't because of the hard deadline that has the financial you know, risk for the prospect. Now we do this 2 to 3 times per year. You can't just do this ad infinitum because eventually your prices are going to get too high, you're going to price out your consumers. But most of us have so much flex in our prices because we actually are underpriced to such an extent that doing it 2 to 3 times a year makes perfect sense. As you'll see when we do it, we don't increase our prices by that much, but it does make a material impact and it does do has the effect of driving all these new customers in. Now, controversially, we actually only increase our prices for new customers. While yes, that does limit the overall impact a price rise could have, we like that because A, we don't disrupt our beautiful long-term customers who we have fantastic relationships with, but B, enables us to actually increase our prices at multiple times throughout the year so we can benefit from the effects of this campaign without pissing off are again lovely customers. Now again, if seasonal, I recommend do this in your down periods because done properly, this will turn a quiet month into a great month. So we decided we're going to do it. Here's the actual timelines for executing the campaign. This runs on a 3-week cadence and there's a series of email communications that we're going to send out. 3 weeks out from the day when the price increases, we're going to send our announcement. This is the big announcement that lets everyone know what is happening and why. Then 7 days later, or 14 days out from the price rise, we send a follow-up. Just making sure you saw this big announcement and that you're aware in 2 weeks' time the price is going up. So you need to act now if you want to get in at the current price. 7 days later, we say, yeah, boom, this is the week. At the end of this week, in 7 days' time, the price is going up. So again, this is just your friendly heads up. And then 2 days out, we do a 48 hours to go reminder. One day, this is your last chance. We're not joking. The price is genuinely going up. This is not a marketing gimmick. We really are increasing our prices. We've done everything to let you know. Now it is your decision. And then of course, the day comes and the price has now increased. So this really is not that intense overall, and it all stems from a killer announcement email. And then our messaging is very much, hey, this is happening. We're giving you lots of notice. So you as the prospect are in control. You are able to make a decision and do what's right for you. I'm simply letting you know what's going on. Now, obviously, it should go without saying, but when the day comes, the price does increase and there are no exceptions. If you get someone calling you, emailing you the day after Well, I'm sorry, but no, the price has now gone up. We're not going to let you in because it is crucial that in a world of low trust and skepticism and bullshitters, we are honorable and we do the honorable thing. And that means if we say we're going to increase our prices on a particular date, we do it. And that's critical for your integrity and your overall brand and reputation as a business. So let's talk about the emails in particular. We are going to craft a killer announcement email that's going to follow the 4-part framework. All the other emails are basically just going to reference back to the original announcement email. And so this announcement email follows the 4-part framework, and this ensures you get the desired impact from your price rise. Because if you fuck this up, then it will not go down well. It could tarnish your brand, you could lose customers, you could piss off all of your prospects, and that's not good. So there is a right and wrong way to do it. As we say here at Entrepreneur Circle, Bananarama syndrome is key. Bananarama being this band that had a song, "It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it." That's what gets results. And that is so flippin' true. You want to do this right. So part one, we build the value. We clearly remind everybody of the value of our thing. And then part two, we make a crystal clear announcement. So we make it impossible for them to misconstrue or not understand what is going on. Number 3, we have a critical reason why. Because we're not just increasing the prices because we're greedy bastards. No, we're increasing the prices because we have good reason to. We're making investments into the development of our program, our product, our service, so we can get better results and have more impact for our customers. And then of course, number 4, Next steps with the deadline explicitly spelled out. So let me now take you through one of our price rise emails so you can actually see this all in action. So here we have it. This is a real one that we actually sent out literally a couple of weeks ago, and this is the one responsible for the results that I've been speaking about. So here's an example from our real price rise email that we sent out so you can copy it. But we start out, we say subject line: Important update for their name, about Masterplan, a.k.a. our product. So we say, hello, I have an important update. I wanted to make sure you heard the news directly from me. And we go straight into building the value and we say, look, we have been sold out for the last few months. The demand has been unprecedented and the results people are achieving are amazing. We've seen businesses completely transform their operations, shatter their revenue ceilings, and finally give the owners the freedom They actually started the business form. Then we actually get into the reason why we're doing this. To keep pushing the boundaries, we have been quietly expanding our world-class coaching team. We are already welcoming new coaches into our roster. We're talking former Olympians who understand high performance, battle-tested business owners with extremely impressive resumes who have actually built, scaled, and exited multi-million pound companies. As you can imagine, bringing in the caliber of this talent isn't cheap. They cost a lot and they inject a lot. So that's our reason why. And so I highly recommend having the announcement in all capitals and bolded, and we just say, because of these upgrades, we will be increasing the price of Masterplan on the 1st of May. And then we have the explicit details. It's currently this price, but it will be going up to this price for all new clients who sign up in 2026. And so this is us just giving you a friendly heads up. More importantly, here's the chance to lock it in. And so we then get into the clear next steps. If you book a call before the 1st of May, you'll be locked in at our current cheaper price. Important, this only affects new members. I know that considering a program is a big decision, so you have some questions. So our team has opened up their calendars And long story short, this is a unique opportunity to get clarity and save £1,200 a year if you decide to join. So big call to action, reiterating the fact that this is time to lock in and get access to the new lineup of coaches, the new stuff we're investing in. And so if you want to explore this, then please do click the button. So that is the price rise email in action. So what were the actual results from this? Well, I've teased them, but we went from £699 a month to £799 a month. And then right now we're just doing the same process from £799 to £899. So it is only a £100 increase, but our monthly target for Masterplan when we first did this was 40 new clients per month. Now, when we did this campaign, we signed 45 in 7 days. So the impact of this was extraordinary. Now, these clients commit for 12 months. Most of them stay for around 20 months. And so their lifetime value to us as a customer is around £12,000. So that means total revenue just from that 7-day period, 45 times the £12,000 is £540,000, which is pretty damn good week. We absolutely love that. But importantly, what it means is because we have now got that price rise in place, our profit per customer for all of our new customers that we bring in is also now going to be around £1,200 per year higher, which has great impact on our margins as a business. And again, we've not hit the ceiling with our pricing yet and we do keep investing. We're hiring the very best people in our programme. So this all is a genuine reason and rationale as to why we have to increase our prices, but it is increasing our margins as well at the same time. So the rules of executing a fantastic price rise campaign. Number 1, The deadline must be real. We are not in the realm of bullshitting here. We act with integrity and honor, and there must be a real deadline that exists. I highly recommend doing new customers only. This greatly de-risks the whole price rise campaign and means that you can do it multiple times throughout the year and get to your pricing sweet spot faster. You got to have a genuine reason. Again, you should always be investing in making your stuff better. and that becomes the core argument for increasing your prices. If you don't have a clear reason because it is just a money cash grab and you try bullshitting people, that's bad. We're not about that. Don't do that. Actually do invest in your thing and make it better so that you can then get even better results for people and then charge more. And it's a beautiful virtuous cycle. I always think of Disney. Disney are masters of charging you loads of money, but guess what? They use that money very well in their theme parks to create amazing experiences. You know, I compare and contrast that to some of the theme parks here in the UK, and it's a completely different story. But this is like 5 times more expensive, but people don't mind paying that and flying across the world to that because the level of experience is so supreme that they're very happy. So it's a virtuous cycle and you have a genuine reason. At least do a 10% price rise on the low end because that is just about keeping you in line with inflation. I would normally recommend a little bit higher than that, to be honest, but don't do any less than that. And then repeat this at least once a year. I recommend 2 to 3 times per year as tactical strategic campaigns impacting these new customers so that you can build a better thing, so that you can get people off the fence, and so that you can reach your pricing sweet spot so your business profitability can be as best as it possibly can be. So I hope you enjoyed the video. Don't forget to like and subscribe. I've been your host, Elliott Botterill, and thanks for tuning in. I really appreciate it.