Should You Reveal Prices in Your Marketing Emails?

Friend and fellow Entreprogrammer Derick is in the middle of drastically revamping his membership site business.

Among other changes, he’s doubling his prices and switching from a monthly subscription to an annual one.

(Remind me to write more about this in a future email—the whole “monthly membership” approach can be a **huge** mistake if you’re mainly selling info products.)

As part of the change, Derick plans to experiment with his pricing. But he has found that changing prices is a huge pain:

“there’s too much text in my site and in my emails for me to make changes quickly, at this point :-/”

Well, there’s an easy fix for that.

The way I set up the sales funnels I build, I can change the prices in less than 3 minutes.

The trick is:

Don’t mention prices in your email copy.

A couple of months back, I did a test where I bumped the price of one of our products from $97 to $147.

All I had to do was edit 2 text boxes on the sales page and update the shopping cart software.

Boom, done.

No messing around with editing a dozen different emails or other random marketing pages.

But there’s an even better reason not to mention pricing in your emails—it can help your conversions.

How?

For most products, it’s tough to “close the sale” in 300-500 words.

That’s why long-form sales pages are so effective. They give you room to fully develop the sales argument for your product. (My sales pages often run 5,000 to 10,000 words long for more involved products.)

And a good sales page is carefully constructed to build up the value of the product before revealing the price.

My goal with emails is to pique the reader’s curiosity and put them in the right frame of mind to read the sales page.

By revealing the price right in the email, you’re short-circuiting the whole process—and cheating yourself of the chance to make your best case to the reader.

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