Why Do Most Offers End in the Number 7?

Once upon a time at the dawn of internet marketing testing was done.

What they found is $7 outperformed 9 endings.

Alas the $7 ending was born & continued to be used by all moving forward

I'm being serious, i looked into this probably 6 years ago, and its just continued ever since.

Some products however perform better with $9 ending. Brunson tested it. It depends on the product, market, niche, and audience

I'm a simple man. I see the number 7 I purchase.

Way back before the internet a major direct mail marketer (I think it was Ted Nicholas) claimed that prices ending in 7 got a higher response rate than other prices.

In our testing we discovered this simply isn't true.

Having a price that's below the next decimail $9 or $9.99 instead of $10 or $99 instead of $100 may modestly increase response.

The 7 dollar pricing is just costing people who do it $2 a sale.

There have been loads of studies that show a price point ending in 9 outsells other price points even when that price is lower.

Forget 'IM' and 'MMO' and look to what real companies do.

Companies like Amazon spend millions testing.

Lucky number 7, I guess

Well i dont observe this thing but maybe its a coincidence or maybe its just about lucky number

I don't know if anyone knows exactly why ending a price in 7 will outperform ending the price in another number. For some reason it triggers something in our subconscious that makes the product seem less expensive or more desirable than if the price ended in 4 or 9.

I frequently saw the same thing when I was test Adwords ads. Just a very small change in the ad copy could significantly increase the CTR on an ad. It's really hard to understand why this happens, it just does.

I think humans just have a lot of subconscious triggers

Ted Nicholas is indeed the one who cited a test where the 7 price out pulled the 9 price, but even Ted never said this was Universal Truth. It was just the result of a single test to a single group for a single product.

Aside from that, I read an interesting article the other day where the writer made a case for numbers having gender. Odd. sharp numbers like 7 were considered male, while soft or even numbers like 9 or 6 were considered female. Also said that people responded better to numbers of their own gender.

Given that IM/MMO tends to be mostly male, the '7' price may be better in IM/MMO, all else being equal. Given that most purchases in many markets are made by the female of the house, a soft number like nine might be better, again with all else equal.

Whether it's true or not, the whole 'price ending in 7' thing should be tested with your products and your customers. There are things in this world to take on faith, but this isn't one of them.