Listing my prices on my website: Two months later
Good god, no.
No way.
What was I thinking?
It’s been exactly two months since I published a pricing guide on my website. For a TLDR version of my last article, I listed a ‘floor’ price for my logo design services on my portfolio. The aim was to weed out people either wanting a logo for free (exposure) or those whose budget unfortunately didn’t match someone with my experience.
I listed the price for my cheapest logo design package, with an enquiry button for the other two.
This was supposed to save time by creating a budget filter, and skipping a lot of back and forth with clients, before they finally discover my prices.
What were the results?
Before listing my prices, I would typically receive 5–6 leads a week. Either from my website or my Instagram page. Admittedly, not all of these were strong leads, but they were usually genuine enquiries from small businesses with a budget to spend.
After listing my prices I received one lead. In two months.
One.
And this lead, while starting strong, ultimately fell through due a delay in the project.
It was an unmitigated disaster.
After the first four weeks, as my cashflow dried up, I dropped my floor price. I did this by streamlining the number of deliverables in the entry package to a point where I could offer the bare bones of a brand; basically a logo file as a jpg, png and a high res format.
I then tried to stem the bleed-out by putting a small budget behind paid ads on Google and Facebook. But again, I was thwarted by failure.
So what happened?
Firstly, these results have nothing to do with traffic. I’ve worked hard on my search engine optimisation (Google the phrase ‘Logo Designer London’). Looking at the analytics over the last two months, traffic on my website actually went up more than 30%.
While I have no solid proof, I can only assume that my previous reservations about listing my prices came to fruition. Another designer, knowing my prices, could undercut me on a job. A client could also use my prices to try and negotiate another designer down. Or that I was missing out on small budget, yet high-exposure jobs that I might have taken on.
For example, after I posted a tutorial video to Reddit, one viewer reached out to me to design a badge for their Texas-based motorcycle club. He hadn’t visited my website, so he wasn’t aware of my prices. The budget was small, but I took the job on gladly because he had a pretty tight brief and the project was hugely fun!
One thing I am still sure of is that my price point is right. This might sound contradictory based on the above results, but here’s my thinking behind it.
People have paid my prices in the past. They are tried and tested. And feedback following a job has been glowing. But what’s missing now?
Objectively, a client might visit my website and click on the big PRICES link in the navigation. Ultimately that’s what they’re interested in, right?
Upon seeing a big number, which might immediately seem out of their budget, they would be very unlikely to continue on and research me any further. They’re seeing a price before I’ve had a chance to discuss their goals, what the value of those goals means to their business, how much experience I have in problem solving and any rationale I might have that would get them over the line.
Without an opportunity to justify my costs, all I got was a hard bounce. And off that customer went to one of my competitors.
Basically, my sales funnel was f*cked.
So this morning I made two small changes to my website. I changed the link in the nav from PRICES to PACKAGES, and replaced the floor price with an enquire now link (setting up a 301 redirect from the old page to the new).
Keep adjusting and be open to wiggle*
When I went freelance, one of the first pieces of advice I received was,
Always have at least two months of your living costs in savings.
Boy did I have to dip into those. There’s no accounting for problems and unforeseen expenditure, and having those savings has kept me afloat.
This was always an experiment, driven by the need to rid my life of incessant admin. But I guess that’s the nature of running a business. If it takes me an extra few minutes to copy and paste a pre-formatted response into an email, in order to win some bloody business, then so be it.
*A quote from the pricing guide by Made By James