Tech for Limited-Time Offers and Price Increases for Your Virtual Summit
One of my favorite virtual summit monetization strategies is to use limited-time offers and price increases for the all-access pass.
While I know some people are opposed to “fast-action” style offers, if someone is willing to make a purchase of something before they’ve had a chance to experience the summit, I’m happy to give them a discount because of it.
So today, let’s dive into:
- A quick overview of the price increases and limited-time offers we’ll talk about
- My favorite tool for handling it
- How to make all the magic happen.
Some links used in this post are affiliate links.
Overview of Limited-Time Offers
Let's start with an overview of limited-time offers and price increases. Limited-time offers and price increases for your all-access pass are a great way to increase conversion rates.
I recommend 4 different limited-time offers.
- For 15-20 minutes after an attendee registers for your free summit, they get a great offer for your all-access pass. I usually do 50% off. (I am considering increasing this time limit in future summits to account for people who are in a tough spot financially.)
- Then, before the summit starts, there’s a reduced early-bird price. I usually do 25% off.
- Next, once the summit begins, the all-access pass sells at its regular price.
- Finally, 1-5 days after your summit is over, the cart will close.
As you can imagine, doing this requires getting some tech pieces in order.
My Favorite Tool
My favorite tool for this is Deadline Funnel. It’s affordable, reliable, and easy to use once you get over the initial learning curve – especially based on the increased results that it can get you.
There are other tools you can use, but for the sake of keeping things simple, I’ll just use Deadline Funnel as my example. Research what it looks like with your specific platform of choice for more information.
Price Increases
Something that trips people up with the price increase portion of this, is how to make the price change on a page after a specific amount of time.
Make the tech setup easy with multiple pages
The easiest option is to have multiple sales pages and multiple offers/products – one for each price point.
First, you’ll have 3 versions of your all-access pass sales page - on for each price point:
- Fast action
- Early bird
- Full price
Everything on these pages is the exact same except for the pricing, special bonuses, and any countdown timers on the page.
You’ll also have 3 versions of your offer or product:
- Fast action product with fast action pricing
- Early bird product with early bird pricing
- Regular product with regular pricing
That way, when someone clicks the buy button on the fast action version of the sales page, they go to the checkout page with the fast action version of the product.
While duplicating things isn't always the route we want to take, for this specific purpose it’s the best option. Technically you could manually update the pricing from the early bird to the full price, but personally, I don't want to sit on my computer at a certain time to manually make those changes when I can automate it in advance.
Let's break down what this will look like for the different price changes.
Price Increase #1: Fast-Action to Early Bird
The first price increase we see is when that 15-minute fast-action offer expires and goes up to either the early-bird price or the regular price, depending on where you are in the summit timeline.
All you do to make the price increase after 15 minutes is use Deadline Funnel to redirect someone from the fast-action version of the page to the other page.
- Before the summit starts, redirect to the early-bird sales page.
- After the summit starts, redirect to the regular sales page.
Right now Deadline Funnel calls this the “15-minute opt-in upsell”, but you can change the 15-minutes to another length of time.
Price Increase #2: Early Bird to Full Price
The second price increase is when the early bird offer expires and your attendees are redirected to the regular price sales page. This usually happens on a fixed date and time.
For example, I tend to have my early bird pricing expire at midnight the morning the summit begins. I've seen others have the price increase happen right when the first presentation is released. You can do whatever you want.
You have two options here on how to make this price increase happen:
- Option 1: Have two sales pages and use Deadline Funnel. My recommendation is to have two sales pages and use Deadline Funnel to automatically redirect the early bird sales page to the full-price sales page. That’s called “fixed date promotion”.
- Option 2: Manually update the pricing. If you don’t want to use Deadline Funnel, you can manually go in and update the pricing on the sales page and in the offer that gets added to their cart.
One thing I do manually with Deadline Funnel: I go into my setting for the fast action timer and change it to redirect straight to the full-price version of the page. That prevents people from being redirected to the early bird sales page and then automatically redirected over to the full price sales page.
Price Increase #3: Limited-Time Offer to Cart Close
The last price increase we have is when the all-access pass offer goes away and you close the cart to your all-access pass.
This works the exact same way as the early bird price expiring. Use Deadline Funnel and a “fixed date promotion” to choose when people should no longer be able to access the sales page to your all-access pass and redirect them to another page.
To take things further, check out what to do with your summit website after the summit is over and how to boost all-access pass sales after the live event.
Make Price Increases Easy
Duplicating your pages for each of the different price points makes it all much easier. No magic or manual changes at a specific time necessary!
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