This week I watched three really smart business owners try to fix the wrong thing in their business.
One was about to shut down a program she’s run for six years and actually loves. Another was tweaking webinar ads that were working just fine, and one was nervous to raise a price by about $10.
All three of them thought they had an ads problem, or maybe a page problem. When we ran the numbers, it was a price problem every single time, and usually the price was too low for the way they were selling that thing.
So let’s talk about why it’s just as hard to sell a $297 offer as it is to sell a $3,000 offer, and how to tell if your price is the thing that’s breaking your funnel.
She almost burned down a program that was working
I run a coaching program called the Scalable Offer Sprint, where I help people get their offer nailed, selling one-to-many, with their ads and offers working consistently. People bring all kinds of questions to those calls, and a lot of them sound like, “I’m missing clarity on this thing I’ve had for a while.”
One client had been running a coaching program for six years. Over a thousand people had gone through it. It’s a membership, and people who left would come back months later saying, “Oh my gosh, I miss this so much, I have to be here.”
For the first four calls of the Sprint, she kept saying she was going to kill that offer and go a different direction. Then on the very last call, it was her hot seat, and she asked, “Have you ever been at the point where you think you’re going right back to where you started, but in a good way?”
She’d realized the only thing she didn’t like about the program was that she wasn’t charging enough. She was charging a month-to-month rate that was just too low, and everything else about it she loved.
As her coach, I had to giggle a little, because I’m pretty sure I asked her around week two or three, “What if you just change the price? What if you sell it in a different way, or keep it running on the back burner while you explore the other program?” She dismissed it, and that’s okay. You always have to trust your own gut, whether you’re the coach or the client.
So instead of burning it down, she decided to package it as a three-month container at $797, maybe going up to $997, adding a $1,000 product inside as a bonus instead of discounting to get more people in, and putting a proven webinar in front of it.
Here’s what I see all the time. Something feels hard in your business and your first instinct is to scrap it and build something new: a new offer, a new funnel, a new audience, maybe a whole new business. Sometimes the thing you already have is good and it just needs the right price on it.
She also told us she found it harder to be profitable on a webinar selling anything under about $800, and I agree with her. That brings us to the math.
Webinar math: why a $297 offer can lose money on a live webinar
Another member on that same Sprint call was selling a $297 course from a live webinar. He’s an ads guy, so his ads were getting clicks and people were signing up. The webinar just wasn’t making him any money.
I told him something that surprises a lot of people. For the most part, any offer that’s sold well will sell to about 3% of the people who see the pitch. It doesn’t matter if it’s $297, $3,000 or even $30,000, because the work it takes to get someone to register, show up and stay until the pitch ends up being the same either way.
Here’s what that looks like with simple numbers:
- He pays about $10 per registration.
- 200 people sign up, so he’s spent about $2,000.
- Half of them show up, so there are 100 people live.
- 3% of them buy, which is 3 sales.
At $297, those 3 sales come to $891. You’re spending $2,000 on ads to make $891, and I would not want you to do that.
If the offer is $2,000, those same 3 sales become $6,000. Same ads, same webinar, same people, and now you’ve profited $4,000. The only thing that moved is the price and the way the offer is structured to reflect that price.
So $297 on a webinar is actually the harder one. You’re putting in all that energy to get people to show up and making less than half of what it cost you to get them there.
I’ve had the wrong offer on a live webinar too
Last winter into spring, I ran a weekly live webinar with a $3K offer and a fast action bonus: buy today and I’ll build your funnel for you. I was playing around with AI and getting used to what it could do, and technically that webinar was doing its job. It converted really, really well.
But I was only willing to spend about $100 a day on it, because I didn’t want to build too many funnels. I was stunting my own growth and living in scarcity. I’d get maybe 25 people live with me and most of them were quiet.
A quiet webinar can hurt your sales. You feed off the audience, and when there’s nothing to feed off, your energy drops and your pitch isn’t as good. People in the room are thinking, “Why is nobody talking? I don’t want to say anything in the chat if nobody else is.” There’s a tipping point where a live webinar has to be worth your while to show up, and I probably should have been spending closer to $1,000 a day to make that room feel alive.
I ended up killing that offer because I didn’t want to deliver done-for-you at that price point.
The Goldilocks offer match
You can get the price right and still need volume. You can also get the price wrong by doing too much for too low a price. I always think about it as a Goldilocks offer match: it can’t be too cold (too cheap) or too hot (too expensive). It has to be right in the middle for what you’re delivering, for the way you’re pitching it, and for what your audience can afford and sees the value in.
The price can be too low, and if you don’t have enough volume, that breaks things too. You need both.
Match your price to the way you sell it
This is the most important part. Every single way of selling has a price it’s best built for.
Low-ticket offers sell straight from an ad
I sell low-ticket offers all day and I freaking love a Tiny Offer®. You can sell them to strangers who have never heard of you and don’t know, like or trust you yet. They just want the result. You run ads to a cold audience, send them to a sales page and sell straight from the ad, because it’s an impulse buy. Nobody has to get on a call or sit through an hour-long webinar wondering what you’re going to sell them at the end, and that makes a big difference in the volume you can get.
One caveat: I’ve tested everything from $17 to $47. I’ve said on another episode that my Tiny Offers tripled in conversions when I went from $27 to $17, and that may have been true. After a little time, though, the data showed me those buyers didn’t ascend at the same level. The $17 buyer was much less likely to add an order bump or upsell, so my average cart value shrank and so did the lifetime value of those buyers. Getting more people in the front door doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting high-value buyers. $37 tends to be my sweet spot, and I like a $27 offer too (I was born on the 27th, so I guess it’s just a thing).
Live webinars are built for $1,000 to $2,000 and up
You’re asking people for an hour of attention, and every single person who signs up for a webinar now knows you’re going to sell them something at the end. They’re hoping there’s enough value before the pitch that it isn’t a waste of their time even if they don’t buy. This isn’t 2018 anymore. So you have to hit that middle zone where you teach them something without teaching too much, because different parts of your brain light up when you’re changing a belief versus learning something new.
The $97 to $497 middle belongs after checkout
If you’re trying to run a live webinar to something in that middle zone of around $97 to $497, you may as well put it on the back end of a low-ticket funnel instead.
A client sent me a screenshot this week of a $450 order. It started with her low-ticket offer, the buyer added her order bump, and then in that same transaction they bought her $350 course on the way through. She didn’t run a webinar or talk to them on the phone. It was just the next logical step after checkout.
Think about the first time you signed up for a gym membership. Something happens in your brain: “Yes, I’m getting in shape, I have a plan, it’s happening.” That’s what happens when someone buys your low-ticket offer. They already see themselves differently because they took action. And if the gym offers you personal training sessions, you’re ready to commit to accountability and spend more, because you’ve already made the decision. You don’t need to sit through an hour presentation like you’re buying a timeshare to sign up for a personal trainer. Your brain’s already there.
So what could you add after your low-ticket offer at $297 or $397? I’ve sold offers all the way up to $997 to about 1% of the people who bought my low-ticket offer. It could even be a recurring subscription, like a membership or a Skool group, added as an upsell. And if you love being live and want to sell something in the $1,000, $2,000 or $6,000 range, that’s when a live webinar makes sense.
How to raise your price without panicking
If you’re thinking, “Allie, I can’t just double my price,” you’re right, and that’s not exactly what I’m saying. When you move a price up, you give it a reason to be higher. That reason could be access to you, feedback, or something you do for them.
The ads guy from my Sprint is moving across continents soon and doesn’t want to be on Zoom all the time. So we talked about asynchronous coaching: his clients get a game plan from an audit of their ads, they go do the work, and he reviews it and signs off in Slack. No live calls and no delivery schedule he’s chained to, and suddenly he can charge $1,000 a month to the right person.
Price can also move more than you’d think without hurting conversions. I’ve run a $27 main offer with an order bump, the little checkbox on the checkout page that’s like the candy bars at the Target checkout, and whether that bump was $17, $27 or $37, the conversion rate really didn’t change much.
A lot of this is a mindset issue. “What if someone saw it at $17 and comes back and it’s $27?” Well, they missed out, and it’s okay. Stores run sales all the time. If I miss the coupon, I’m not mad at the store and I don’t swear off shopping there forever. Somehow when it’s our name and our face attached to what we’re selling, it feels sneaky.
I recently bought a skin cream from an ad. I saw the ads a few days in a row, it talked about melasma, and I thought, “If that can fix some of my discoloration, it’s worth it.” They didn’t give me 30 days of free value and I didn’t have to follow them or listen to their podcast. It was the right price for a problem I had, and I bought on the spot and I’m totally happy with it.
Personal brands tend to think we have to make friends with people before we ask them to be customers, and you can sell before people know, like and trust you. You still need the right messaging and something people actually want, so think about your info version of that skin cream: what problem does it solve, and how do you make sure the right people see it?
Put a one in front of it
A member in our Accelerator coaching program had a product sitting at $7. On our last call she told us she’d moved it to $17 and it was still selling. Her site tracking showed one person had looked at the page when it was $7, clicked around and left, and when they came back a couple of days later at $17, they bought. The same person said no at $7 and yes at $17. Nobody yelled at her and nobody left a mean comment on her ad.
I’m all about tiny baby steps. If a price change throws you into a full nervous system fit, don’t do it yet. A little stomach ache is fine, so take one little step higher. Put a one in front of it and test it: if it’s $7, sell it for $17, and if it’s $97, sell it for $197. You don’t have to keep it there forever, but you’ll probably knock your own socks off, and then that becomes your new floor.
Your homework this week
Look at the thing you sell the most and ask yourself two questions:
- Is the price right for how I’m selling it? A $27 offer sells from an ad, a $2,000 offer sells from a webinar, and the middle belongs after checkout.
- If it’s too low, what’s the one thing I could add that makes it worth more? It could be an audit, access to you, feedback, something done for them, or an AI tool you built that does the work for them.
If you want help running your own numbers and playing with these ideas, come hang out with me inside Tiny Offer® HQ, where I answer these exact questions every single week.
Listen to the full episode
I walk through all three stories and the full webinar math in this week’s episode of Start Tiny with Allie Bjerk. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or YouTube, or press play above.