Why Do People Market This Way?

Have you ever ask yourself why ebooks or stuff that are sold online are ALMOST ALWAYS ending in a 7? From big price items pushed by “gurus” of $1997, $997 to $97, $47, $17 and the popular $7 bucks deal. When I started marketing online, this baffled me. In fact, when I go to the supermarket or departmental stores, I don’t see this pricing tactic used that much for physical products. But, I do see prices of products ending in a 9 many times more often than ending in a 7.

Lowering your prices will not always increase sales, but in certain cases, ending the price in a 7 or a 9 will.

Finding the right combination of numbers can have a huge impact on our internet business.

Interestingly, a test was conducted some time ago by a very famous internet marketer, Mark Joyner. If you do not know Mark Joyner, he is widely recognized as one of the early pioneers of Internet Marketing, a marketing genius and is responsible for introducing many of the technologies and tactics you see used on the Internet today (most notably e-books, viral marketing). He once conducted a test where he compared the following prices for a downloadable software product:

$97

$99

$95

The $97 price outsold $99 by a factor of two. Yeah… you can say that it is no surprise since it is two dollars cheaper! But, get a load of this… the $97 also outsold $95 by a factor of five. Yes, a higher price was five times more popular than a lower price. Think about it, by increasing the price by two dollars from $95 to $97, we were able to multiply our sales by 5 times!!

Price Increase for Perceived Value

There is another story about a clerk who misunderstood the Boss’ instruction to , but instead he doubled all prices of jewelry that day in the jewelry store. Guess what… at the end of the day, the entire inventory was sold out! This phenomenon reflects the idea that a higher price created a higher perceived value that customers “just had to buy before the price goes even higher”.

These are some of the devices that are used time and again… and we as internet marketers should be aware of. If you had notice recently, in just a couple of weeks, there were several big priced items being offered by “guru”. Well, I almost bought into them myself… but I didn’t. Observe and learn from these marketing experts, who do not fail to take full advantage of the the psychology of marketing and their finesse in executing it through - well-written sales copies, videos and email marketing.

A well-written sales copy will walk you through the value of what you are about to purchase. It plays with your perceptions and gets you to expect that the price could very well end up in the thousands. After reading the sales copy, you see a $497 price tag for a box full of ebooks, videos, and audios and think you are getting a bargain. Try COMPARING and CONTRASTING with other similar products and their offerings. Most of the time, you will find the price would be perceived as much higher.

Recommendation

Recommendation in marketing is the most powerful of them all. If someone you know well and respect, recommends a product to you, you are much more likely to check it out than if you got that same recommendation from a stranger. This word-of-mouth marketing is so powerful that it cuts through almost any amount of bad advertising. Many a times, we purchase products that friends recommend, even though we had previously written the item off in our minds completely.

Well, these are some techniques that people use in marketing and I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I had written it.

Have a great week ahead!

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