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I Showed My Price And Killed My Sales

by Steve Peters Benn
10 replies
Hey Guys,

Some of you who remember WF v2 will remember I started a thread that became very very popular - called something like - show your price. Or something.

Anyway, my idea came from the Bang and Oulfsen, or was it Bose - who don't show prices on direct mail or in store. They told me (in store) that it was pushing sales through the roof.

We talked for a while about the pros and cons. So I decieded to test it out on a very popular product of mine. I'm not going to mention anything about it or details as that's not what this forum is for.

All I will say is that product was converting between 6%-7% before then and was doing great. Like any good marketer I like to test. So I altered the headline to include the price.

Sales fell to below 1% conversion rate. How bad is that????

I have plenty of other ways I have killed sales before, but I thought that I would let you know this one first.

Why did the headline kill my sales - well people just didn't progress past the headline. The cost was low, so I though that advertising it was a virtue. How wrong could I have been.

Now please - I don't want people destroying their sales by doing a KernCloneDrone (named for the less "creative" members of Kerns list). In some circumstances showing your price can be good.

So, in terms of testing, I think that this is one extreme example...
#failure #show price #split testing
  • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
    That's interesting. A while back, when I was running ads on Google, I started listing the price on the ads, thinking that would steer away people that weren't willing to pay that price. Lowered the CTR, but didn't raise the percentage of conversions at all.

    I never thought of doing a comparison, running an ad with the price and one with out and tracking those conversions...
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  • Profile picture of the author AlexR
    Steve, the success or falure of any copy depends on it's strength. Changing your headline without giving it the strength to be able to carry the price is probably what cost you the extra sales.

    By showing a price in the headline, you are effectively asking the reader to open their wallet/purse before they really see what you are offering. This gives you very few words to play with to win the sale.

    Companies like Bang and Olufsen and Bose can make sales on their name alone as they are known for quality and generally, more expensive products. Taking Tiffany's (the jewellers) as an example, here's a market that already knows..."If you have to ask the price, then you probably can't afford it".

    A few well known marketers make money on their name alone and probably wouldn't suffer any great loss whether they showed a price in the headline or not.

    For most people, it could have similar results to those that you found.

    Alex
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