Episode 219: How To Run A Price Increase Promotion For Your Wedding Business

When you raise your prices, do you do it quietly? Maybe you just quickly update the page on your website or the pricing guide you send to potential clients and then of course proceed to worry whether anyone will notice and be willing to pay the new price. If so, you’re not alone!

In the wedding industry, most people raise their prices quietly because they don’t want anyone to know but that misses a huge opportunity for you to get people off the fence. Running a price increase promotion is a great way to get potential clients to book and incentivize them to book by a certain date.

Running a price increase promotion is simple but don’t let that trick you into thinking it’s not powerful. Running a price increase promotion is a great way to give your business a cash injection and raise your prices so you can make more money after the promotion. In this episode of the podcast, I’ll walk you through how to create your own profitable price increase promotion!

In this episode we’ll cover:

• What a promotion is
• Why promotions are so insanely powerful
• Why you shouldn’t raise your prices quietly
• How a price increase promotion works
• The key components of a profitable promotion
• How to use a reverse discount to book more weddings
• The importance of using a deadline in your promotion
• Why a pre-launch period will make your price increase promotion more successful and profitable
• How to market your price increase promotion
• How to use the post-launch period to make your marketing easier

How To Run A Price Increase Promotion For Your Wedding Business

What is a promotion exactly?

Inside The Wedding Business Collective, we have a course called Running Successful Promotions that covers how to create and run successful promotions that go beyond offering a discount and this is a price increase promotion is just one example of a promotion you can run. Not all promotions need to involve a discount!

Promotions are a great way to provide cash injections to your business and call attention to whatever you’re promoting. A promotion is simply a special focus for a set amount of time on a specific product, service, activity, or piece of content. One key component of a promotion is that it’s time-bound. It is either limited by the time it’s available to purchase or it’s limited in availability. A promotion is something that is different or noteworthy that stands out from your day-to-day marketing.

If you’ve never run a promotion before, you’re probably not aware of just how powerful promotions really are. They have scarcity and urgency which are powerful psychological tools. Scarcity means there is only a limited amount of something whereas urgency means something is only available for a limited time.

When you run a promotion you can create an event around it to create buzz and excitement to shine a light on a specific offer. In our Running Successful Promotions course inside The Wedding Business Collective, we cover many different types of promotions that you can run and the price increase promotion is one of my favorites.

What You Need To Run A Promotion

1. The Focus

In order to put a promotion together, you need to identify what you’re going to promote. Are you raising the price of one package or all of your packages? It’s important to get specific about what you’re promoting so that you can focus on it in your marketing.

2. The Incentive

There are a lot of different things you can use to incentivize your potential customers to buy but in a price increase promotion, you’ll use a reverse discount. If you’ve raised your prices in the dark without telling anyone, I want you to commit to not doing that. Making a big deal about it allows you to offer something really special to your potential customers: a reverse discount.

Instead of offering money off (a discount), a reverse discount offers an opportunity to purchase by a certain date to get the current price or the price will go up. It feels like a discount but you’re not actually giving people a discount. It makes your customers feel like they’re getting a deal and saving money, because they are, and you still get to increase your prices.

A reverse discount works well because people don’t want to miss out on a lower price and have to pay more later. It’s a great way to get people off the fence who have been thinking about contacting you but just haven’t taken action to do so.

3. The Deadline

Deadlines get people to act and that’s why they’re such an important piece of creating a successful promotion. Look at how effective Black Friday promotions are. They wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective if they were available all the time. Instead, you know you can only get them on Black Friday or over that weekend so you get off your butt and take action.

A reverse discount deadline gets people to take action because they have something to lose. They know that if they don’t book you by a certain date, they’re going to have to pay more later and people hate that feeling.

4. The Audience

Who will receive your promotion? Are you going to target this to just your email list or will you promote it to everybody across all of your marketing? Are you only going to offer this to people who previously inquired but didn’t book?

Personally, I’d advise you to target all of these people for a price increase promotion but you can change how you interact with each segment. For instance, for those who inquired but didn’t follow through and book, you may want to send them more personal communication about the promotion.

5. The Timeline

What is the date and time of your price increase? What are the dates of your pre-launch period? When is the promotion live? What do you need to do post-deadline to make the most of this?

The Pre-Launch (2-3 weeks)

During the few weeks, before you announce the promotion, you want to think about how you can gain more attention for your promotion. Maybe you find that Instagram Reels is great for you so you would want to make that part of your pre-launch plan so you can get more eyeballs on your promotion.

Will you host any sort of event? I’m sure you’ve seen online challenges and those are usually an event to bring attention to a promotion that follows. You don’t have to do this but it may be a good fit for you.

Will you run any sort of paid ads? You don’t have to do this but you want to make these decisions upfront while you’re planning your promotion so you can just execute your plan.

Where will you promote this promotion? Think about the marketing channels that you currently use and think about what you’ll do on each of them to promote your price increase promotion.

How can you start now to get better results during your promotion? Maybe you haven’t been great about interacting on Instagram and that’s going to be an important channel for your promotion.

Doing something as simple as spending 15 minutes per day in the weeks running up to your promotion actually engaging with people can really help you be seen by more people. We have a Quick Win Training in The Wedding Business Collective to help you with this called 3 Simple Social Media Engagement Strategies. Use those strategies to kickstart your engagement and visibility in the pre-launch period.

You’ll also want to consider what you’ll do in the pre-launch period to hint at what’s coming. How can you tease this a bit?

All of the marketing during your pre-launch period should focus on the problems your ideal client is facing in terms of what your product or service solves. If you’re raising the price on a full planning package, all of your marketing should focus on debunking myths about full planning, answering frequently asked questions about full planning, the benefits of full planning, sharing testimonials, and showing them how this is a solution to their problem.

That way when you announce that you’re increasing the price of your full planning package, your potential clients already understand why it’s important and if it’s a good fit for them. Don’t market the product/service, focus your marketing on the problem your ideal client has and how you solve it.

The Launch

The launch period is when you officially announce the offer and start the countdown to the deadline. I’d suggest either a week or 2 weeks at most.

During this period, emails & other communication during this period should be focused on what the offer will do for them. My main channel of communication to my potential clients is email marketing and I HIGHLY recommend email marketing to all wedding pros. We have a course on this inside The Wedding Business Collective called Selling With Email Marketing and it even comes with a done-for-you 7 email sequence you can take, tweak, and use in your business.

Each email or piece of communication needs a reason to exist. The first one will most likely be about the offer & what it’ll do for you. You might decide to tell a client story or share a testimonial. Maybe you share what happens if you don’t decide to get this product or service. What is the worst-case scenario?

Another email or post could sweeten the deal with a bonus while another could answer FAQs about the offer and the benefits. Your final piece of communication is giving people the last call to get in on this promotion or miss it for good. It’s important to stick to the deadline you give because people will tell you they missed and ask to get in. If you don’t stick to your word, they will assume you don’t mean what you say. Trust is incredibly important.

Post-Launch

A lot of people skip the post-launch part of a promotion but this is a critical step that makes your marketing so much easier. In this phase, you’ll assess your results. What worked and what didn’t work? Maybe you find that most of the people who bought came from a particular platform. That tells you that maybe you need to pay more attention to that platform.

You also want to ask yourself what you’ll change next time and what you’ll reuse. You can reuse the content you used during this promotion the next time you raise your price as well as in your regular marketing.

Every time I host either Book More Weddings Summit or Wedding Business CEO Summit I reuse the emails from the previous summit. I change about 10% of the content but the rest stays the same and it saves so much time.

You can also ask people why they didn’t buy from you via email or survey. This can be really helpful feedback. For instance, you may learn that people didn’t buy because they didn’t really understand what the package included. This tells you what you need to change to make sure it’s easy to understand.

If you’d like help creating your price increase promotion, come join us inside The Wedding Business Collective. You’ll have access to all of the courses mentioned (and a whole lot more) here as well as wedding pros who have run their own successful price increase promotions!

Will you create your own price increase promotion? Let me know! Shoot me a DM on Instagram @evolveyourweddingbusiness 

Links & Resources:

Join us inside The Wedding Business Collective!
Episode 152: Pricing For Profit In Your Wedding Business with Fiorella Neira

Want more? To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below and be sure to leave a review:

Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes (You’ll just need to click the blue “View In iTunes” button and then click the Subscribe button when your iTunes opens.)

Click Here to Subscribe via Stitcher

And please take 2 minutes to leave me an honest rating and review on iTunes by clicking here. It will help the show and its ranking in iTunes immensely! Thank you – I appreciate it!