DON'T get ghosted after a price increase as a bridal hair stylist

All over Instagram, I constantly hear people preaching about raising your rates. Charge what you're worth. However, what happens when you do this only to hear crickets inside your inbox? Personally, I've raised my rates multiple times and I typically raise my rates at least two to three times every single year. So after doing this multiple times, year after year, here's four things I've learned how to keep the demand after you increase your prices, update your packages, update your PDF pricing guide. Those four things are you need an excess of inquiries before you raise your rates. There needs to be added value in your bride's eyes. Your offer needs to be extremely clear and actually build urgency within your bride and you'll need a consistent marketing plan in order to get new brides to constantly be seeing your offer. So before you wind up doing a price increase, ask yourself these things. Why do you want to do a price increase? How much demand do you currently have? So how many inquiries are you getting on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? And what will you be changing or adding to your client's experience to make it even more valuable? If I'm being totally honest with you, which we're going to be really honest honest here on this channel, without having those things solid af, it's going to be really hard to sustain keeping demand not hearing those crickets in your inbox, even if you're giving yourself that well deserved raise. So bottom line, you need to have demand before you actually go ahead and increase your rates. So what does demand look like? So how many brides are you turning away for a specific date? How many inquiries are you getting daily, monthly, weekly? And again, how many of those are you actually available for? This is going to let you know what your demand is currently like right now. If you don't know these, you're likely going to be basing your pricing increase off of emotion instead of off of actual factual data. One of the very first price increases I did was back in January of 2019. So I was about six months into doing my wedding business full time and I thought, oh my God, I need to bring income in. I need to increase my rates. This is going to increase my income. I need to do this like now. So what I did was based off of that emotion, I increased my rates. So what I did was I didn't change anything about my services, I didn't change anything about my website, anything about my perceived value. The only things I changed were my deposit rate. So I went from a flat rate to a percentage. So instead of taking say $100 as a deposit. I was now taking 25% of their total services. And what I did was I included all of these extra freebies so that they would feel like they were getting a deal. So I would include things like second hairstylist. I would include things like your travel fee is included, your hair trials, include it. Which is so weird because I was trying to increase my rates and give myself a raise, yet I was including all these other services. Like, what was I thinking? Here's the things I didn't do. I didn't change my client experience. My skill set was the exact same. The value I was offering to my brides was the exact same. My pricing was not on my website, I didn't change my website. And the inquiries that I was getting up until that point were pretty much non existent. And what I didn't realize, what I didn't actually sit down and think through, is if my inquiries were non existent prior to me increasing my rates, why would I think that I would get more demand after increasing my rates? Now you might be saying, oh, I heard that if you put your price point at a higher rate, people are going to see more value in that. However, you need to have the perceived value there. And I did not, because again, my skill set didn't change. My client experience didn't change. Nothing else changed other than me going from $150 for a bride to now 225 for a bride. So now let's break down those four things you need in place to keep the demand after you increase your rates. Okay? So first things first, you need an excess of inquiries before you decide to increase your rates. If you're only seeing an average of, let's say, five new inquiries a month, you don't have the excess demand in place. And that's totally okay, my friend. Let's chat supply and demand. So what I want you to think about is the housing market right now. So if you are currently somebody who is looking at homes or if you have heard about what is going on with the housing market in the United States, there is currently no homes, there is no supply because so many people during COVID who lived in the cities moved from the cities into these suburbs. So what ended up happening was all the supply that was there of homes for people to buy is now gone on. So what this did was it created more demand, more people wanted to buy houses, and there was less supply, there was less homes available. So what this did was it raised the housing rate. So normal houses that were selling for, let's say $250,000, there's more demand there. So that same house can now sell for $500,000 because there's no supply. And this is why you always want to have the supply and demand curve in your favor. So something that's worked for me as I gauge my amount of demand before I decide to do a price, something that I personally do is there's an average of 4 Saturdays every single month. So what you want to do to gauge the amount of demand that you have for your services, your inquiries should be double or triple that number in order for you to actually see demand. So if on average you're seeing four to five new inquiries every single month, there's no demand there. However, if you're seeing an average of 20 inquiries per month, you actually have demand there because you can only supply services for four to eight weddings per month. So if you're seeing 20 new inquiries, there's more demand then there is supply. That's really good. And the other indicator is if you are already turning away brides for dates that you are booked for multiple, multiple times, demand is present. So in summary, what you want to do is assess your current demand. If your current demand isn't there, what you want to do before you increase your rates is use the tactics below that I'm about to cover. Otherwise you're going to be left with less demand than before. And when you increase your rates, you'll hear crickets. The second way that you can keep demand after you do a price increase is there needs to be that value added in your bride's eyes if you're experienced or your perceived value in your client's eyes like your skill set didn't change at all. It's really going to make it not make sense. And the math won't math to your client when she's looking at those different competitors who are maybe lower priced. And if she's seeing the same skill set, the same value, and nothing is really different than somebody who is lower priced, it's not going to make sense to her. Now imagine you walk into an Apple store and you feel like you're walking into 2007. You go to check out the newest iPhone and it still has a button on it and there's only one lens on the back for the camera. There is no Siri, there's no upgrade updates. It is just all the same. And yet they're selling it for eleven hundred dollars. You look at the phone and you walk out. Because you can't justify spending an entire week's paycheck on a phone that looks the same as everyone else's. Why is this one priced so high? I don't understand. So ask yourself, what can I do to enhance my clients experience right now? So in summary, people pay for the transformation, not just the hair or the makeup. They're paying for the experience. When you're increasing your rates, add more to their experience with you and this is going to add more perceived value in their eyes. The third way is your offer needs to actually build urgency and it needs to be crystal clear. I recently did a Q and A on my stories over on Instagram and I got a question from somebody who was asking, how do we get more demand for our services? So what I did in response was I listed out five bullet points on ways you can increase your urgency, such as showcasing how many brides you have booked for the upcoming year. And her response was in the DMs. What if we don't actually have any brides book? So what I told her is you want to fake it until you actually have it. And this is where I actually started out my content days. And I would do content days. I would bring in models into the studio or the salon space that I was working at the time and I would make it look like I had brides in for hair trials. I would add these on my Instagram stories, I would add these as content to my feed, I would add them as highlights. And what this made it look like was like I was booked and busy. And this tactic alone brought me in so many more inquiries than if I wasn't posting at all. Just because I didn't have actual weddings with brides, people were seeing that I was working, people were seeing that I was taking clients. Even if it was a model, it was still practice for me and it was leveling up my skill set. And what this did was when I started posting this content, it built the urgency because people thought that I was working. So if you ever notice how there's always a line at Starbucks, did you actually know that this is a tactic that they use to build urgency. They intentionally create a line so that people see that they are busy and makes them want to stop there. Because if you're driving by and you see that there's so many people at Starbucks, you're like, oh, maybe their new Christmas drinks came out. They did. What this does is it creates urgency because you can visually see how many people are in the Starbucks line. So in summary, if you're planning to do a price increase, plan to Also build the urgency for your services to bring up the demand. Lastly, you're going to need a consistent marketing plan for people to actually see your offer. Flashback to 2019. The only marketing plan that I had in place, if you could even call it that, was me signing up for Wedding Wire and hoping and praying that people would see my page and then send me an inquiry. I was paying over $300 a month just to be featured on their third page. I have an entire YouTube video about if Wedding Wire and the Knot are actually worth it. I'll leave it linked up here and down below for you to check it out. When I was using something like Wedding Wire as my only marketing strategy, what this is was leaving it in their hands in order for me to get inquiries. So if you are on a website like the Knot or Wedding Wire, you are paying for vis. So if I was paying more per month, I would be able to get on one of the more visible pages. So what ended up happening was this led to inconsistent inquiries. I would see maybe five a month and most of them felt really spammy and I didn't even think they were from actual people. Which side note, a whistleblower did come out back in July of 2023 stating that wedding Wire and the Knot actually do this and they inflate new vendors with fake inquiries. So if you've ever felt like you're getting fake inquiries from those websites, it is true. And when I was utilizing Wedding Wire as my only marketing strategy and not focusing on anything else like Instagram, I was dealing with the Karen brides, the brides who are not a good fit for my services. This was not a consistent or good marketing strategy to get me in front of my ideal bride on a consistent basis. If I'm only getting five inquiries a month and I have to pay more to get more visible, that's not a great marketing strategy versus if you're using something that's free like Instagram where you have thousands of brides and you can get impressions that are triple what you see on Wedding Wire. And did I mention that it's free? So in summary, marketing equals eyeballs on your services and you need a lot of eyeballs in order to get brides to fill out your inquiry form and to actually book services with you. So if you are planning to do a price increase, you want to ramp up your marketing efforts to get more eyeballs on your services. So for example, if you're posting three times a week, ramp it up to seven times a week. Only posting once a week. On your stories. Make sure you're posting five times a week, weekly on your stories. This is going to be more exposure and more eyeballs on your services. Be safe out there, my friend. And I hope you don't get ghosted, because it's a scary place. So make sure you use these tactics so that way you can make sure your demand is in place when you increase your rates. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.