Pricing is a dark art. Even after five years of being a freelancer I am constantly refining, revising and researching the best ways to approach pricing my different services in a way that hits the sweet-spot, balancing value for money for the spender and viable levels of revenue for my business.
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about my training workshop prices for delegate registrations, which have remained relatively unchanged for the past few years. I’ve been wanting for find ways of offering different levels and incentives and just wanted to share an overview of what I’ve arrived at:
Different event formats
Having supplemented my one-day training workshops with a longer-form two-day events. The two-day workshops are not about offering more advanced teaching content, they simply offer a longer duration that allows more time for me to cover the subject in depth and offer more exercises. Creating this pair of workshops formats immediately creates a second price point for people to have a direct choice about what’s the right value for them, not just in terms of expenditure but opportunity costs too.
Previous attendee discounts
As time moves on, as I grow as a visualisation specialist and as a trainer, the content of my teaching too evolves. Those who attended a one-day workshop event in the past may seek to top-up their knowledge by attending the two-day workshop but they can’t justify the outlay of a full two-day registration fee. I have therefore created a 50% discount for previous attendees with five available in each event. These promotional codes required to apply the discount are available if people get in touch with me to indicate which previous event they attended.
Early-bird discounts
Typically, I try to schedule public workshops at least three months ahead of event date to ensure as many potentially interested people have the opportunity to discover the event and therefore to register in good time and plan their own schedule. I have decided to create an incentive for delegates to book their places early by offering a discount equivalent to 16.6% if they register earlier than up to two months before the event date.
Book owner discounts
Having just published my new book, one of the temptations is to find away to issue copies of the book to all attendees, especially given the book content and training content is complementary. However, it is a little hard to arrange logistically trying to order the exact number of books required to be delivered in time to a training venue and to avoid me having to carry copies around with me on my travels. Additionally, in time, I would like to think that an increasing number of people attending the workshops might already have a copy! So, what I have decided to do is to offer people who have already bought my book a £30 discount, equivalent (give or take a few pence) to the purchase price. To qualify for a discount, each workshop has a promotional code set up based on a specific word, in a specific position on a specific page. If you own it, this code will be easily retrieved, if you don’t, you’d have to be fairly desperate/resourceful to find it and cheat the system.
Hopefully these different formats and discounts ensure that my training workshop registration fees continue to be competitive, continue to be value for money but also create a range of different price-points to match the budgets of interested visualisers out there.
(For non-UK attendees, with the diminished level of the GBP, soon-to-be-scheduled events in the USA and Europe will additionally benefit from a ~10% currency exchange discount. The one, minor benefit of the repercussions from the EU Referendum.)