Episode #259: The Biggest Mistakes Wedding Professionals Make When Raising Their Prices
Planning on raising the prices in your wedding business? There are 7 very common mistakes wedding pros make when raising their prices that cost them sales.
When was the last time you increased your rates? I’m not here to simply tell you to raise your prices right away.
Instead, I’m going to unveil the biggest mistakes wedding professionals make when increasing their rates. Because, trust me, if you make these mistakes, you’ll pay for it.
Raising your prices can result in more bookings and more revenue or it can result in fewer bookings and feeling completely defeated. It all depends on how you do it.
What are the 7 big mistakes wedding pros make when raising their prices? Listen to this episode to find out!
In this episode we’ll cover:
- Why you shouldn’t raise your prices by a huge amount overnight
- Aligning your pricing with your ideal clients
- How often to evaluate your prices
- The numbers that will tell you how much to raise your price by
- What causes price increases to flop
- How your marketing and messaging is like Elle Woods in court making her case
- Why hearing “no” is actually a good sign
- The 3 things that need to align to book more weddings at a higher price
- Why you shouldn’t hide your price increase
- How to make your price increase an opportunity for your ideal clients
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The Biggest Mistakes Wedding Professionals Make When Raising Their Prices
Hello there, my friend. I am your host as always, Heidi Thompson, here helping wedding professionals of all different kinds book more of the clients they really want to be working with following a simple roadmap and building businesses that give you the freedom and flexibility that you’re after.
Now, a part of both of those that comes up sometimes multiple times a year for people is raising your prices.
And I want you to think about when was the last time you raised your price. Now, I’m not just going to tell you to raise your price right now, but I want to go over some of the biggest mistakes that I see wedding professionals make when they raise their prices, because if you make any of these mistakes, you are going to pay for it.
You’ll be shooting yourself in the foot and costing yourself a lot of money. But we can fix that in this episode.
1. Raising Prices Too Much Too Fast
So the first mistake I see wedding pros make is raising it by too much too fast. And what I mean by that is, you don’t want to do something like double your prices overnight. And there are multiple reasons why you don’t want to do this.
One is, that when you raise your prices gradually, it allows you to build confidence, it allows you to prove that what you’re doing is worth the price, and it allows you to kind of step up. Step up with the market as opposed to, you know, shooting up overnight.
Another thing that it does is it robs you of the ability to use your price increases as a marketing and sales tool.
And I’m going to be talking a lot more about that in this episode. I’m a big fan of running price increase promotions, where your marketing is centered around if you book by this date, you get the current pricing. If you wait, you’re going to pay more.
When you do something like double your prices overnight, if you were to run a promotion around that, It probably wouldn’t work because you may be pricing yourself out of your ideal client, to begin with, and it’s too much of a shock and your marketing isn’t in line.
But, all that aside, it also robs you of the ability to run multiple promotions. So, instead of doubling your prices overnight, if you increase your price by 20 percent and then in 6 or 12 months, you increase your price by 20 percent or you know, whatever percent you want to do.
I’m not saying that’s exactly what you should do but that allows you to have multiple opportunities to use this as a way to get people off the fence those people who are like, yeah, I might book you I might not book you. Or Yeah, I’ll eventually set up a consultation with that person.
You can get them off the fence by running a price increase promotion because there’s actual urgency associated with it. And if you’re raising your prices too much too fast, you get one shot at that. And it’s probably not going to work super well because you’re making the second mistake here, which is pricing out your ideal clients.
2. Pricing Out Your Ideal Clients
So we have to keep in mind who it is that you actually want to be working with and the pricing in your business has to align with that ideal client. It has to, you know, make sense to them. It has to be possible for them.
If you are a photographer who’s charging 20,000 for photography and you love working with couples that say have a 40,000 budget. That’s 50 percent of their budget. That probably doesn’t make a ton of sense to have your prices at that level.
That doesn’t mean you need to keep your prices low. We can do things like up-leveling your marketing and your messaging. We can do things like shifting the ideal client in your business, but those things have to be done strategically and they don’t happen overnight.
So if you do something overnight, like double your prices. Now, all of a sudden, you are priced out from the market you were in. Those ideal clients are no longer going to book you, and you probably don’t have the marketing and the messaging in place to sell at that higher price.
So, you’ve prevented yourself from booking the current types of clients, the people that, you know, you say you like working with, and you’ve also made it impossible to book the higher price clients because there’s more to booking higher price clients than just having a higher price.
Your marketing and your messaging have to be that much better, that much more specific in order to make that happen. So you really want to make sure you’re not pricing out your people.
Now, does that mean that, you know, you can only ever charge a certain amount? No, not necessarily. You could create different tiers and maybe some are super luxe and you’re charging a lot more for that, or maybe you want to shift your ideal client slightly so that the pricing that you want to have, you know, maybe a few years from now is in line with the ideal client that you want to be working with a few years from now.
These things have to be in line: Your ideal client, your pricing, and your marketing and messaging. All of those things have to be on point, in line, just perfectly gelling together, for you to be able to make sales at any price point. It doesn’t matter if it’s super low or super high.
So when you raise your prices too fast, you can find yourself in a position where you now have no one to work with because you can’t work with the people you were previously working with. You’re too expensive for them. And you can’t work with the people who would buy it at the price point because, as I said, the marketing and the messaging aren’t there. Those things have to up-level together. So I want you to keep your ideal clients in mind.
I also don’t want you to use this as an excuse, which some people do. Some people will be like, oh, my ideal client will never pay that. Okay, I’m going to need to see some proof of that, because that sounds like self-sabotage, and that sounds like something you’re just making up because you don’t feel super confident about raising your prices if we’re being honest here.
And we don’t know what people will buy. It’s down to their values. It’s down to the marketing and messaging and the alignment with that, your ideal client, and your pricing. You may be able to sell to the same ideal client for significantly more. If you improve your marketing, that’s very possible and I see it happen all the time.
What I want you to know though is this isn’t something you just like to do on a whim and do overnight or else you wind up pricing out the people that you actually want to work with.
If you have people you want to work with and I’ve had clients like this, I’ve had members in the Wedding Business Collective who are like, You know, I could be charging a lot more if I worked with this group of people, but I hate those people.
I don’t want to work with them. I want to work with this other group of people, and that probably is going to require me to charge a little bit less.
Okay, there are other things we can do in your business to make sure that this business model supports you, the life that you want to live, and the money that you want to make.
We can add in different revenue streams. We can add in different tiers. You can bring on associates. There are a million different things you can do. I just don’t want you to see the price of what you are currently selling as your only opportunity to make more money because it is definitely not.
3. Not going off of actual numbers
Alright, the third biggest mistake that wedding pros make when it comes to raising their prices is not going off Actual numbers of what you need to make. We are all guilty of this. I have done this. I’m sure you have done this. I think everybody has done this. Like, I feel like I could raise it by this much. Or I feel like I should.
If you’re using words like feel and should, it means you’re not looking at actual numbers. What I want you to do is actually figure out, and this is something we do in The Wedding Business Collective, by the way, in our 90-day planning sessions. We look at, okay, what does my life cost?
What does my day-to-day lifestyle cost me? How much do I need to be bringing home in a year in order to support the life that I want to live? And if you don’t know how much that costs. I would recommend starting to use a tracking and budgeting tool like Mint.
Mint is a free one and I’ll have a link to that in the show notes. That way you can start to get a feel for, okay, this is how much I actually have to take home in order to just, you know, pay for my life, pay for how I live on a regular basis? Then we can back that up to say, okay, when we add in things like taxes and, you know, business expenses, how much revenue does the business?
Quick and dirty, if you don’t have that information is, you know, about 50 percent you want to add on. So if you need to make a hundred thousand, and you’re trying to figure out how much your business needs to make to pay you that, calling it about two hundred thousand, is fair.
Although, I would encourage you to actually go look at the numbers, because again, we’re trying to get away from like, vague feelings and shoulds in order to get you to where you want to be, because you don’t just like, wish yourself to these places. You set the goals and you work toward them, following very specific steps in order to get there.
So once you know that, once you know, okay, this is how much my business needs to make, then you can look at Okay, what’s my capacity? How many clients can I work with in a year? How many clients do I want to work with in a year? How does that break down across the different services, across the different products that I have?
And all of that is going to be, you know, a bit of an estimation of, okay, I want to book 10 for this type of package. I want to do five of this type of service. But doing this helps you figure out what your prices have to be. Because what we’re doing at this point is getting into like actual real math of looking at, okay, I need to make this much.
I can work with this many people. Here are the ways I have of working with people. This is what I need to charge in each of these areas. That can inform how much you need to raise your price by.
If it’s a big jump you may need to schedule two price increases that are separated by a period of time to give you some time to build up and level up.
But not going off of those actual numbers and just like, uh, I don’t know. I guess we’ll just, um, raise it by a hundred dollars. That doesn’t actually help you get to where you want to be. Now, I’m not saying that, you know, you look at those numbers and you realize you need to be charging 100 percent more than you’re charging. So you go ahead and do that.
No, we want to make sure we’re not raising things too fast and we’re not pricing people out but it’s really hard to know how much you should be raising your prices by if you don’t have any actual numbers to support that if it’s just feeling. If it’s just looking at other people if it’s just you know Insecurity, guilt, all these things that come up when we talk about money and we talk about pricing.
So I highly encourage you to start to get familiar with those actual numbers of what you need to make and what that means for you. the business. How much does the business need to make?
4. Not evaluating your prices annually
The next big mistake is not evaluating prices each year. So sometimes I see people, they raise their price and then they like don’t touch it for two or three years, which is okay if you’re doing that intentionally.
Notice I didn’t say not raising your prices each year, I said not evaluating your prices each year.
So at least once a year you need to look at where you’re at in terms of how much money you’re bringing in, how much money you need to be bringing in, how does that align with your goals, what do you need to be changing, you know, do you need to stay exactly where you are, is this a good spot for you.
Do you need to increase your prices? And then making a decision based on that. But I would highly, highly recommend doing this.
Now is a great time to do this as we are gearing up for engagement season. So I want you to really look at those real numbers. I want you to evaluate your prices and where you are right now.
If you were to book at capacity, would you hit the numbers that you need to make? When we’re looking at those actual numbers of what you need to make in order to live the life that you want to live.
And so much can happen when we don’t evaluate these prices. It’s really easy to put it on the back burner and not think about it. And then what happens is the market raises, like everyone around you, all your competitors, raise their prices and now you’re the cheap alternative which definitely sends a different message in your marketing.
So you have to make sure you’re basically staying in the spot within your market that you want to be in for your ideal clients and that you’re not slipping because other people are raising their prices and you are not. Now, I’m not going to tell you that because other people are raising their prices means you should.
We’re making those decisions based on actual numbers. But, if you are kind of mid-priced in your market and you don’t raise your prices for two years, you’re probably quite low-priced compared to your competitors.
And that can lead to ideal clients deciding not to work with you because they’re a little suspicious of your pricing. Why is it so much lower than everybody else’s? Are they not going to get something that they’re going to get from someone else?
So it’s really key just to check the pulse, see where you’re at, and have an open mind of, “okay, do I need to make a change to my prices?” and do that at least once a year.
5. Not improving your marketing and messaging
The next mistake is not improving your marketing and messaging to sell the value. So this is a really big mistake I see a lot of people make and they raise their prices and they expect to get those prices because they’ve just raised them and people will just pay that amount of money.
I want you to think about your marketing, your messaging, and the copy on your website, all these things that I love to nerd out about, as the case that you are making as a lawyer to the judge and the judge is going to be your customer and they have to decide whether they think based on your arguments based on the things that you’re saying based on the value that you are presenting in that copy, is it worth the price?
And the weird thing about that, the very weird thing about pricing is that that is incredibly subjective, which is both good and bad, depending on how you want to look at it. It’s bad in that it can be kind of frustrating because there’s no like set rules. But it’s good in that if you improve your marketing, if you work on this, and we do this in The Wedding Business Collective, we do this in a lot of different ways.
We have members create their marketing plan and that’s a really big piece of this. And then we have website reviews called Member Makeovers once a month where I review one member’s website. And what I’m looking at is this disconnect between their pricing, their ideal client, and their marketing, the messaging on the website. Are they selling the value?
Am I feeling like, oh yeah, I would spend 10,000 on that? That sounds like a great deal. Or am I feeling like that is way too much? All of that can be changed. And what I mean by that is you can adjust another human being’s perception based on your marketing, based on your messaging. This is a really key piece.
Every time you raise your price, every time you move up in the market, every time you’re up-leveling your business in general, your marketing needs to up level. Because you are going before the court of public opinion and you are making your case for why this is worth the price that you say it is.
And if people believe you, they’ll buy from you. If they don’t believe you, they’re not going to buy from you.
So, improving your marketing and the copy on your website is key. I feel like we talk about this constantly in The Wedding Business Collective. We have a training about creating a service page that really sells and it really leans into this of selling the value of what you’re providing so that by the time they get to the price, it feels like they’re getting so much more than they’re paying for you’re not giving them more.
You are just using your words You’re using your marketing to make them feel like they are getting a deal and we all love that feeling.
6. Not being okay with hearing no
The next one is not being okay with hearing no and I get nobody likes rejection, nobody likes to be told, “Oh, I can’t afford you.”
Nobody likes to hear crickets from someone that was interested in working with you. And then it turns out it was about price, which by the way, it’s almost never about price. It’s about them not believing you in the value in your lawyer positioning, but you have to be okay with hearing no. And you actually shouldn’t be booking 100 percent of the leads that come through.
Now if you have a super specific, well-tuned machine of a lead qualifying system that you’ve put together and you’re booking 100 percent of them, that’s fine. I’m just talking any random person that inquires. If you are booking 100 percent of them, that is a really good sign that your prices are too low and that you do need to raise them.
Because, yes, we want people to feel like they’re getting value from what we have to offer, but if every single person that talks to you feels like they’re getting so much out of it that they don’t even bother thinking about the price, it probably means the price isn’t high enough. It probably means that you are, you know, giving yourself the short end of the stick.
So I don’t want you to be in that position where because you want to hear yes all the time, you’re not raising your prices and you’re not making enough money. When really, you know, if you are, let’s just say, and I just told you not to double your prices, but I’m going to do this for the sake of easy math.
Let’s say you double your prices. If you book 50 percent of the leads that came in and you were booking 100 perfect, you’re making the same amount of money with half the work. That is the math that we don’t think about when we look at it, we see it’s okay for people to say no. It’s okay for people to not want this or not feel like they’re a good fit and that’s totally fine.
But if you are booking 100 percent and you don’t have like exceptionally well-tuned lead qualifying mechanisms in place, that means that you need to be raising your prices.
7. Raising your prices quietly
The last problem, the last mistake here that I see pretty much everybody do is they decide they’re going to raise their prices.
They quietly go over to their website and they change the price and they quietly go over to their CRM or whatever tool they use to send out proposals and they change the price and then they like go run away. They hide and they raise their prices quietly.
And I get why people do this.
Most wedding professionals are afraid that raising their prices is going to cost them bookings, but if you do it right, it can actually result in more bookings, and that is the alternative here. You can make raising your prices feel like Amazon Prime Day for your potential clients.
Why do we see so much hype around promotions like Amazon Prime Day?
Well, because they allow their customers to get things they want. But that only works because there’s urgency to motivate people. There’s a specific day, there’s a specific time, there is a deadline. And the power of a promotion like that is really rooted in the deadline.
We’re all familiar with these. We all buy things because of these.
And they get us to buy because urgency motivates people to take action. You can tap into that same principle when you raise your prices because if you think about what you’re doing when you raise your prices, it’s kind of like a sale without you lowering your prices to begin with. And when you tell someone that they can save money when they book by a certain date, it motivates them.
No one wants to miss out on that. No one wants to buy later and know that they could have gotten a better price. And weirdly, because we are bizarre psychological creatures, humans are significantly more motivated by potential loss than by potential gain. That’s why FOMO is a thing and why it’s so powerful.
And when you raise your prices quietly, you actually give up that entire opportunity to tap into urgency and loss aversion and all these things that psychologically make us wanna buy things. And that is a huge sales opportunity, completely squandered, which is a huge bummer.
But when you run a price increase promotion and you tap into urgency, you can book more weddings from multiple different places. From those leads that haven’t gotten back to you yet. The people who follow you who are getting married and just haven’t inquired yet. Your referral partners who wanna save their clients some money.
And the cool thing about this is that they will be pumped, that they’re able to book you at your current prices.
The amazing thing about this, it’s such a feel-good sort of thing. It comes across. as you doing them a huge favor by raising your prices because you are giving them a heads up and you are giving them a way to get in at the current price. And of course, then afterward, as a result of increasing your prices publicly, you’re seen as more in demand, which draws more of your potential clients to you and helps you stand out.
So do you see why I hate this shameful secret approach to raising your prices?
And do you see how powerful running a price increase promotion can be?
The great thing about this is that it really doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated, and I know you’re busy, believe me.
You can run a price increase promotion with just a few hours of work. A few hours of work for an increase in bookings sounds like it’s worth it to me.
Plus, I’ve got something for you where I’ve done a lot of the work. So it’s going to be as easy as filling in Mad Libs in my new course, Run a Price Increase Promotion.
Now this course takes you step-by-step through running a profitable price increase promotion and it gives you the templates that you need to put this into action right now. Normally, this is only available inside my membership, The Wedding Business Collective.
It’s available for members, but if you’re not a member, you can get it now, and it’s only available until October 29th at 9pm Pacific Time. At that point, it will only be available inside The Wedding Business Collective.
So you can click here to grab this. It is available right now!
I’ll take you through what is inside. So we have three phases that you run through to put your price increase promotion together.
And in phase one, you get the full rundown on exactly what to do to prepare. I show you exactly what to say, I give you the templates, so people know this is coming. And this makes the whole thing feel like you’re hooking them up and that you’re not, you know, just trying to get more money from them.
Phase two is the promote phase. So once you’ve prepped your promotion which takes almost no time at all. You need to promote it to five key groups of people and with all the templates I’ve included for you, you will not be just randomly posting about this on social media “Hey, we’re raising our prices” and hoping for the best.
You will be strategically communicating with all five of these key groups that can send you bookings. You don’t have to think about what to say. I’ve included fill-in-the-blank emails, social media posts, and graphic templates for you.
Then in phase three, congratulations, you have raised your prices and booked some weddings in the process. Now what? Well, this phase gives you exactly what to do to update your prices now that they’ve increased and some key things to consider once you’ve updated your prices.
So the bonuses that come with this are pretty incredible.
The first is the killer promotion planner that I’ve created for you. It gives you everything at a glance and a checklist of everything you need to complete so you don’t miss a thing.
You get the fill-in-the-blank email templates so you don’t have to worry about what to say. This is like Mad Libs style. Fill them in. And you’re good to go.
Same with our fill-in-the-blank social media templates. I get that it can feel weird to tell your social media followers. How do you do that while making it feel like a win? These templates give you the exact words to say and they’re ready for you to fill in and use.
I’ve also created social media graphic templates for you in Canva. So if you’re going to post about your price increase promotion on social media, you obviously need graphics to go with it.
I’ve created some graphic templates for you to take and use. You can just swap out photos, swap out your brand colors, and you are good to go.
This has absolutely everything you need to run a price increase promotion now, later, you can use this every single time you decide to raise your prices. Which hopefully will be many, many times over the life of your business.
But the really cool thing about this is you get to raise your price and you get people to be excited about it. You get people to feel good about it. Because you’re giving them an opportunity to not have to pay that price and that is a huge hookup that people can get excited about that. They can feel good about it.
This is one of those rare promotions that just creates so much goodwill and can make raising your prices feel like such a positive thing not just for you, but for you know people who are interested in working with you and don’t want to find out you know, months from now that they missed out on an opportunity. Nobody likes that.
This is only available for people who are not members of The Wedding Business Collective until October 29th at 9pm Pacific Time. You get lifetime access to everything.
And if you are a member of The Wedding Business Collective, this is built into your membership!
You already have access to everything, so go ahead, dig in, and I can’t wait to see what you do with this, and what kind of a surge of bookings you get. How you can make people feel good because you’re letting them in the back door. That’s a great feeling to be able to give people, especially if you’re feeling a little bit uncomfortable about raising your prices.
So again, you can grab that until October 29th on its own right here. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today.
If you are raising your price, send me a DM. I’m @evolveyourweddingbusiness on Instagram. I want to hear from you. I want to hear all about it and I will speak to you again very soon.
Links & Resources:
Run A Price Increase Promotion Course & Templates
The Wedding Business Collective
Episode #257: How To Know When It’s Time To Raise The Prices In Your Wedding Business
Mint budgeting app
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