Picking A Course Or Membership Price Is Not A Pricing Strategy

Discover the new “Name Your Price” add-on. Let learners choose what they pay for your courses and memberships with pay-what-you-want pricing, donations, and sliding-scale access.

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How To Use Name Your Price To Sell More Courses And Memberships

In this free LifterLMS webinar, Chris Badgett demonstrates the Name Your Price add-on, which lets learners choose what they pay for a course or membership within guardrails you control. The training covers why a fixed price loses sales, three flexible pricing strategies (price discovery, global reach, and patron style support), and a live build of all three access plan types on a real LifterLMS site.

What You’ll Learn

• Why a single fixed price loses you both revenue and students at the same time
• The three guardrail settings inside a Name Your Price access plan (minimum, suggested, and maximum price)
• Three flexible pricing strategies most course creators never try
• How to build pay what you can, price discovery, and patron style access plans live
• How to read what buyer chosen prices tell you about your offer

Key Takeaways

• Set a minimum price to protect your floor and a suggested price to anchor buyers to your number
• Always set a maximum price on recurring plans to protect buyers from costly typos
• Use a zero dollar minimum for sliding scale, nonprofit, or volunteer training
• Pair a Name Your Price plan with a fixed price plan when you want to run coupon campaigns
• Watch where buyers land against your suggested price, then adjust the price or fix the offer

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Welcome And What This Training Covers

What’s going on? It’s Chris from LifterLMS, and I’d like to welcome you to another complimentary training. We’re going to be going into pricing and a new pricing add-on we just released at LifterLMS called Name Your Price.

The name of this presentation is Picking a Course or Membership Price is Not a Pricing Strategy. And I’m going to show you three ways to sell courses using the new Name Your Price add-on that a fixed price makes impossible. And by the way, this works for one-time payments and recurring payments.

So here’s the plan. Number one, I’m going to go over how having a fixed price can actually cause you to make less money. We’re going to look at three specific pricing strategies using Name Your Price that most course and membership creators don’t even know exist. And I’m going to show you how to do all that live using Name Your Price.

There Is No Perfect Price

So first, there is no perfect price. A lot of us actually don’t put a lot of thought into pricing, and pricing is one of the most important aspects of product. If you have figured out who your customer is, the result you deliver to them, and you’ve done that foundational offer work, the next step is setting the price based on the value you deliver and what’s included. A lot of people just guess, but there’s actually science and strategies on how to price more effectively.

Just using an example, if your course or membership is priced at $500, there are going to be people who would only pay less than that, like $490 or $450, and people that would gladly pay more, like $525 or $1,000. So for some people, your course is going to be overpriced, and for others, it could even be underpriced.

The Sale You Never Knew You Lost

So I’m going to talk about the sale that you never knew you lost. Somebody found your course or membership site. They wanted access. They looked at the number, they closed the tab, and you never heard from them again. That’s actually the majority of many website visitors.

There’s no email, there’s no objection, there’s no conversation, there’s no chance to answer or have a dialogue with your prospect. So that loss is basically invisible, which is why almost nobody fixes it. Until LifterLMS Name Your Price.

Three Problems With Every Fixed Price

So there are three more problems when you have a fixed price. Number one is you likely never tested it. You just guessed. Maybe you looked at a competitor website, maybe you just followed your intuition, maybe you asked a friend.

Another big mistake is you priced a market completely out of being able to afford your course or membership. So for example, a $499 course may be approachable to somebody living in Boston in the United States, but that price point doesn’t work in Manila in the Philippines. And if your course or membership is a good fit for people all over the world, it’s important to recognize the currency and purchasing power in different parts of the world. In Boston, people can typically pay more for online education than they can in Manila.

The other thing that people do is they cap their upside. I’ve learned this lesson at LifterLMS over a long period, across tens of thousands of customers. There’s always some people who are fans of your work. Maybe they’re just financially set, and they’re happy to support creators that they know, like, and trust and get value from. And they would pay over your purchase price, or even way over it, just to support you on your journey.

What Ten Years Of Scholarship Requests Taught Us

And here’s a little pricing experimentation we’ve done on our own. For about ten years, we ran a scholarship program. These are folks who reached out to us with various financial issues. They really wanted to get into LifterLMS, but the price couldn’t work for them, and we worked on those on a case by case basis.

But those are only the 605 people over ten years that even raised their hand and asked. So there’s often a lot of demand for your courses and memberships where people simply can’t afford it. And it’s better to get a customer than no customer at all.

So the reason why we built Name Your Price for LifterLMS comes from our scholarship experience. Opening up access to your products gives you a much more global reach, and it’s more inclusive to allow people all over the world with different purchasing power or currency abilities to be able to buy. That’s just something we’ve learned. Giving some flexibility on pricing can really unlock significant revenue, but more importantly, more impact with your course or membership in the world.

The Three Guardrail Settings On A Name Your Price Plan

So the basic idea of Name Your Price is that instead of just having a fixed price, somebody can type in a price of what they want to pay, what they’re willing to pay. But you can also add guardrails to that.

The guardrails are three fields or settings when you’re working on a Name Your Price access plan. The first one is your floor, or the minimum price. This is the minimum you’re willing to accept. Then there’s the suggested price, which is also known as the anchor. This is where you suggest a price that the user could pay. And then the ceiling is the maximum price. So if you don’t want people paying over a certain amount of money, you can put a cap on that.

And I’ll explain why that’s important. At first you might think, why would I want a ceiling? I want somebody to pay me as much as they’re willing to pay. But we’ll get into that in a little bit.

Three Ways To Use Name Your Price

There are three different use cases, primarily, for Name Your Price. The first use case is to discover what your market will actually pay. In pricing, that is called willingness to pay, or price discovery.

The second one is more of the global reach option, which is to open your courses and memberships to people your price excludes. Again, using the Boston buyer versus the Manila buyer, you may be excluding people in other countries that have lower purchasing power that would be a great fit for your course or membership.

And number three is kind of like a patron style support that you can add to your courses and memberships, where you’re essentially asking people to donate or pay what they feel they would like to contribute to support you as a creator.

Ask The Wallet Instead Of Running A Survey

One of my favorite pricing experts in the world is Patrick Campbell. If you want to get really good at pricing and learn about pricing science and psychology, I would definitely encourage you to check out Patrick Campbell.

Campbell’s advice for finding the willingness to pay is to go ask your customers. But Name Your Price lets you ask their wallet directly, which is a more powerful, direct form of validation. So instead of doing a survey, like, hey, how much would you pay for my course, you can just set up Name Your Price and let the system do that homework for you, with real wallets and money moving through the system.

How Flexible Pricing Turns 200 Dollars Into 350 Dollars

I’m going to give you an example of how with a fixed price you might make $200, but if you had flexible pricing, you could make $350 from a course sale.

Let’s say we have a $100 course, and four people visit the page. Two people buy and two people leave. One person who did buy would have paid $130, but there was no way to do that.

If you use the Name Your Price add-on, you could set a floor of $40 with a $100 anchor or suggested price, and let’s say not do a maximum. In this case, with our four hypothetical buyers, instead of making two sales for $200, we get one sale at $100, one sale at $70, one sale at $50, and one supporter going over the top and paying $130. So when we add these up, the revenue is $350 from four learners instead of two. That’s how you turn $200 into $350.

Every Named Price Is A Data Point

So what do the numbers tell you? Every price is a data point.

If you get to a point where your suggested amount just seems to work and people pay it, you could potentially switch to a fixed price. If you’re seeing other people pay more than your suggested price, what that means is you’re probably underpricing, and you want to move the suggested price up and see if that actually helps you make more revenue.

And if most people are picking the minimum price that you’ll accept, it’s probably not a pricing problem. It probably has to do with the offer that your course or membership promises to deliver. Something in the offer itself is probably the problem.

Price Localization And The Spotify Example

This is a classic example of what’s known as price localization. If you’ve ever used Spotify, Spotify charges different amounts of money in different countries based on their purchasing power, for the exact same product, all over the world. So as an example, in Nigeria, a Spotify subscription is $1.04 a month. But in Liechtenstein, it’s $19.71 a month for the exact same product. This is price localization.

So it’s the same product, nineteen times the price. It’s not charity, it’s competence. One of the biggest subscription companies on Earth built a pricing organization to create fair pricing for the same product all over the world, based on purchasing power in different countries.

You don’t need a pricing department or fancy stuff to do this. You just need a pricing field that holds more than one number.

What Radiohead Proved About Pay What You Want Pricing

The next thing is strategy three, which is that some people will pay more. There’s a band called Radiohead, and they let their listeners and fans pay whatever they wanted for one of their albums, called In Rainbows. And the band made more money before the album was actually even released than they made in total on the entire previous album.

So that is an example of the power of patronage. It’s kind of like the software Patreon, where you support creators. You can do that with your LifterLMS system as well, and I’m going to show you exactly how to set up the patron style pricing plan.

And also keep in mind, this isn’t just for one-time payments. It can work for recurring payments as well for your courses and memberships. So your learners pick the amount, but you keep the billing system.

No New Checkout And No Redirect Required

This is not like a separate thing. It works with the existing LifterLMS access plans and checkout. There’s no redirect or complicated behavior on your website. It’s literally just a new field where people can enter their price before clicking buy now, instead of you having a fixed price.

Why You Should Set A Maximum Price

So the minimum price protects your floor. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about why you would use a maximum price, because at first you’re probably thinking, oh, well, I’ll just leave that empty, and if somebody wants to pay me $30,000, they can.

The first thing is it’s good to cap recurring payments, because people make mistakes when they check out on websites. So for example, if you have a low priced recurring plan and somebody accidentally types $150 instead of $15, now they have to ask for a refund. You can protect against extreme amounts that are likely caused by mistake. If you had a price cap of $1,000 and somebody put in $10,000 by mistake, like they typed in one extra zero, now you have to deal with a refund and Stripe fees and all that.

Also, an open field with no maximum can attract things you don’t want to have happen. Like you don’t want somebody to put in $100,000 on your checkout, as an example.

How A Price Ceiling Anchors The Buyer

And then the other cool thing about putting a cap in is it sets up a mental model in the mind of the buyer, where they see the range of what they’re supposed to do. So if you put a $99 suggested price and a $500 ceiling, you’re basically saying anything above $99 up to $500 is normal here. So it kind of normalizes where people will go.

If you have a suggested price of $99 and a $500 maximum, some of those clients with more financial resources might say, well, I’m doing pretty well, I love this creator and the courses and memberships, I’m going to do the $500 max and be a super fan. So it creates a scale in the buyer’s mind where they can see what’s appropriate.

It’s kind of like how when you leave a tip in the United States, the suggested tip amount is fifteen percent or whatever. If the service was okay but not great, maybe you would do ten percent. But you could do twenty percent or thirty percent if it was exceptional service.

Who Name Your Price Is For

So who is Name Your Price for? There are all kinds of different groups of people where having flexible pricing is a benefit.

Nonprofits and mission driven educators. Nonprofits can often benefit from sliding scale training, with even the floor being zero. By the way, you can do a zero dollar minimum. So let’s say there’s a nonprofit that has a certain mission, and there’s a bunch of volunteers that need to take this training, and they’re already volunteering their time. We want those people to select zero dollars. But maybe a supporter might want to essentially make a donation through Name Your Price and just pay a large amount of money.

Creators with a global audience. It’s important to think worldwide if your mission is to take your training all over the world, and just recognize that different countries have far different purchasing abilities. So for example, countries like Nigeria, the Philippines, other parts of Southeast Asia, and Argentina have a much lower purchasing power than places like the United States and the United Kingdom. And the countries with the highest purchasing power are Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

If you’re a coach, it’s good to test a new offer. So if you’re really not sure how much your coaching program is worth, this is a perfect way to use Name Your Price to discover what the market is actually willing to pay for your coaching.

Patron Models And The Discount Request Problem

Membership sites running patron style models. I know a lot of YouTubers, as an example, who have a Patreon, and what they’re doing is they’re basically getting monthly supporter payments, maybe a little bit of premium content. But a lot of times it’s just a support the creator, patron style situation, whether that’s through newsletters, premium content, courses, and so on.

And going back to my scholarship example before, if you’re running a for-profit course or membership site and you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve probably had people in your email inbox asking for a discount for various reasons. If you’ve ever been asked for a discount, you can actually proactively get in front of all that with your Name Your Price solution. And if you’ve ever just guessed at your pricing or copied a competitor, I would recommend you try this out as well.

Every Price Is A Door

One of our customers, Angela Brown, says, “Every day there is money in my bank account thanks to LifterLMS.” Angela helps house cleaners and maids create, launch, and scale cleaning companies. And I’ve put this in here just to mention that part of our mission is to help you become the most profitable, successful course creator you can be. This kind of flexible pricing strategy can play a big hand in that.

So every price is a door. Some people are standing on the wrong side of yours for reasons that have nothing to do with how badly they want to learn. And you don’t have to give your work away. You don’t have to have a minimum price of zero. You just have to stop making one number decide who gets in or not.

How To Build A Pay What You Can Plan For Global Reach

So I’m going to build three plans for you live here on my demo site. The first one is to maximize global reach. The second one is going to be for price discovery. And the third one is going to be for the patron style.

What I’m going to do is go to my courses and jump into this business budgeting course. You can see I’m already enrolled, so the pricing isn’t displaying. Let me go into the edit screen of this course, and I’m also going to unenroll my test student, just so I can easily show you the pricing tables that I’m developing.

There are no access plans on this course yet, so I’m going to click Add New Access Plan. And you’ll see, if you have the Name Your Price add-on installed, there’s a new shortcut to go ahead and start setting up one of those.

For this one, we’re going to start with the global reach strategy, where we’re trying to make our course accessible to people all over the world and more inclusive. So I’m going to name this plan Pay What You Can. Then we’ll do a monthly payment in this case, so every month until they cancel, basically. Name Your Price is on. Let’s do a minimum price of $2. I’m doing sort of like the Spotify example. We’re going to do a suggested price of $10 a month and a maximum of $20. That’s good to go, so let me save that.

What Learners See On The Pricing Table And Checkout

Then we’ll look at the course on the front end of the website. So we’ve set up our access plan, and you can see here, Pay What You Can. We have this adjustable price, and you can see down here the minimum of $2.

In this case, I’m going to pay $12 and enroll now. And you can see here I am on the checkout. I’ve got my $12 here. I’m not going to complete this checkout yet, because I want to show you the other models, but that’s basically how it works. And the user, at the last minute, could change this. They’d be like, you know what, I really like this creator, I’m going to pay $20. So they can adjust it on the checkout screen as well.

How To Set Up A Price Discovery Access Plan

Going back to our course, that is the pay what you can model. Next, what I’m going to do is a price discovery model, where I don’t really know what my course is worth. So I’m going to add another Name Your Price plan, and in this case, I’m going to call it Pay What It Is Worth To You. This is price discovery, where we’re experimenting and trying to figure out what the market thinks.

So let me make sure Name Your Price is on. There we go. For the minimum price, I would not accept less than $100 for my course. I personally think it’s worth $200, so that’s the suggested price. And I’m going to put a maximum of $500. If somebody were to pay this amount, I would be very happy with it, and I don’t really want to take more than that. You know, I don’t want somebody to pay me $5,000 and then expect private coaching and things I’m not necessarily offering with this offer. So we’ll save our plan there.

How The Maximum Price Catches Typos And Caps Payments

Let me see what that looks like. So this is Pay What It Is Worth To You, and the suggested amount is $200. I, as a buyer, actually think this course is worth $300. So I’m going to click enroll now, and you can see it’s $300.

And you know what? I really love this creator. I’m going to put $600 on there. And you can see here it hit the maximum cap, so it’s adjusted. It says I can only pay $500, so I could do $500, and now we’re ready to go and check out.

And you can also see here, if somebody does a typo and they accidentally put an extra zero on there and type in $5,000, it will error out. That’s part of the protection we’re putting in there, so that we can check expectations. So that is the price discovery way to use Name Your Price.

How To Build A Patron Style Support The Creator Plan

So I’m going to go back and delete these out, just to keep it clean, and we’ll do one more. We’re going to do the patron style.

In this case, we’re going to add another Name Your Price plan. I’m just going to make sure that’s on. And for this plan title, I’m going to call it Support the Creator.

Here I’m actually going to have a zero dollar minimum. Let’s pretend we’re doing that nonprofit training. So we’re doing a zero dollar minimum, and in this case, we’re going to do every month. Our suggested price is $50 every month, and then we’re actually not going to put a maximum in here. So we’re saying we hope you can pay $50, we’ll actually do it for free, and if you really want to support us, you can put in a huge number if you want to. So we’ve got our access plan here. Zero minimum, no maximum, $50 suggested.

Free Enrollments, Big Donations, And Order Reporting

Then we’ll go look at it. So in this case, it’s a Support the Creator, patron style access plan. The suggested amount is $50. Let’s say I’m a volunteer and I don’t want to pay for this training. I’m just going to make it zero and click enroll now. And you can see I’m ready for a free enrollment. Good to go.

If we go back, let’s say we want to pay the $50. Now we have the checkout with the credit card and everything like that. And if we go back and say we are a patron and we actually want to donate $5,000 per month, we could enroll now, since we didn’t set a maximum. So we’re going big here with the $5,000 per month, and we’ll go ahead and complete this checkout. You can see we just enrolled in this course for $5,000.

If I go to the dashboard and the orders, you’ll see right here the access plan, the Support the Creator plan, and that the buyer chose $5,000. And it’s $5,000 every month. We also have, with LifterLMS PDFs, if you ever need all that order information for your accounting, that’s there, and you’ve got all the pricing information that the buyer chose. So that’s just a detail in the reporting there. And that’s how you do Name Your Price.

Which LifterLMS Bundles Include Name Your Price

It’s very cool. I definitely recommend you try it. What we just did is three strategies. We did global reach, we did price discovery, and we did support the creator, or patron style, name your pricing. And those are just a few examples of the flexible ways you can do Name Your Price.

We also wanted to make Name Your Price accessible to everyone. So this add-on is included in the Earth bundle, the Universe bundle, and the Infinity bundle. All of our bundle plans include the Name Your Price add-on. The Earth bundle, by the way, also includes Cart Abandonment Recovery, which is another way to help you make more money from your LifterLMS powered website.

So if you’re already on a bundle, you can start using Name Your Price today. If you’re using the free plan, you can always upgrade to the Earth bundle and get started with Name Your Price. And if you’re brand new to LifterLMS and you’re excited about this kind of pricing flexibility, I would encourage you to just start with the LifterLMS Earth bundle. Head on over to lifterlms.com/pricing if you don’t have LifterLMS yet. And if you do, just start using the Name Your Price add-on.

How To Mix Name Your Price Plans With Fixed Price Plans

A question came in asking, can I use coupons on the Name Your Price add-on? So the answer with that is no, you cannot use coupons on Name Your Price, because you’re already delivering flexible discounts through Name Your Price. It doesn’t make sense for somebody to say, I’ll pay $2, but then I also have a fifty percent off coupon code. So if somebody comes through an access plan that has Name Your Price, they can’t use a coupon code.

But what you can also do is, you don’t just have to do Name Your Price. In this example, we have our Support the Creator plan, which is monthly, with a zero dollar minimum, a $50 suggested price, and no maximum. So I could add a new plan here, and we’ll just call this Gold Support the Creator. And this one is, let’s just say, $100 every month until they cancel. And I’ll save that.

So what we did is, you can have a support the creator plan and then a regular plan. And on this one that’s not Name Your Price, I could use a coupon on that access plan if I wanted to. So just putting that out there.

How To Offer Country Specific Discounts With Advanced Coupons

The next question we got is, does it detect the buyer’s country and set a regional price? So we were talking about price localization, in terms of somebody in Nigeria having less purchasing power than somebody in Norway. It can’t detect the location of where they’re at and automatically change the price. What it’s doing is just allowing the person to set their own. So they could always say, I’m going to do $1 a month.

And if you do want to get into location specific targeting, I would encourage you to check out our Advanced Coupons add-on. So if you go to orders, then coupons, then add new coupon, Advanced Coupons is installed here. If I was going to do a Nigeria discount as a coupon code, let’s say we’re doing a percentage discount on any access plan, ninety percent off. Then I go to the restrictions, and you can see there’s a toggle down here to enable geographic restrictions. So I could put Nigeria in here, and potentially multiple other countries, and then do a marketing campaign or run ads in Nigeria as an example.

So that’s using another one of our advanced add-ons, which is included in the Infinity bundle, called Advanced Coupons.

The Fastest Way To Try Name Your Price Today

Another question was, what is the fastest way to try this today? The fastest way to try this today would be to go to the LifterLMS website. If you head over there and go to the LMS demo, you can do a sandbox demo. This is where you get the exact same website that I was just working on right here for my demo. I was using the expert template.

That’s the one dollar demo site. Basically, that’s your version of one of these sites for thirty days. It has all our add-ons installed, as well as demo content and everything that you see here. So you could test it out for a dollar.

What I’d also just recommend is to go ahead and choose a plan. We do have a thirty day, one hundred percent money back guarantee, so you could always just try it out. And again, Name Your Price is included in all of these bundles.

Why Most Creators Just Guess Their Price

I asked which strategy people watching were most likely to try, and price discovery came up first. That’s awesome. I think that’s honestly one of the most important ones.

Patrick Campbell, he’s my favorite guy on pricing, ran a company called ProfitWell for a while. He was mostly focused on software, or the SaaS industry, pricing. But he has this funny thing at the beginning of most of his talks where he asks the audience how they chose their price. And he says, let me guess, you just held your finger up and guessed. Which is exactly what most people do.

How To Choose A Strategy As A Teacher Or Coach

Another attendee asked what’s best for a teacher or coach. It depends on where you’re at in your journey as a teacher or a coach. It also depends on who you’re serving. For example, if you’re serving people that have resources, that are used to donating and supporting, they can all work, really.

But as an example, I might use global reach to make sure I’m helping people all over the world and not being overpriced for people in countries that have less of an ability to pay. I might do price discovery in the beginning, to figure out what the market thinks my training is worth. And if I’m already established and doing well financially, I might add a support the creator option, even as a separate membership, where people could just donate to the platform and give back. You might even do something where you promote to your successful students the opportunity to donate, but not just to you. So you can do scholarships for others. There are all kinds of different ways to think about it.

This attendee happens to teach beekeeping, and I’m actually a beekeeper. I have bees. I’ve had many hives of bees, and I know beekeepers in general. They are very fanatical. They’re really into the topic. But for beekeepers, it’s the same thing. You could use any of the strategies. You may be excluding beekeepers in other parts of the world that would love to join, but your stuff is too expensive in American or European pricing. Or you could do the patron style thing, where beekeepers supporting other beekeepers is kind of cool. If you sell honey or whatever, you could ask your customers to donate to the cause and support the beekeeper. And if you are not sure what your beekeeper training is worth, then I would do the price discovery strategy. So all could work.

Start Experimenting With Your Pricing

So that’s it for this complimentary training. I hope you enjoyed it. I want to encourage you to use Name Your Price and do some real pricing experimentation, because pricing is one of those levers that you can pull. You may just be operating under an assumption, where you kind of guessed on a price or followed competitors. But do some experimentation with Name Your Price.

I want to thank you for coming today. Thank you for spending time with me. And thank you for letting me do my best work, which is to lift up others through education. That’s my life mission, my personal mission, and my company mission. So thank you. I love helping creators and education entrepreneurs like you be more successful. I hope you enjoy the Name Your Price add-on, and have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for coming. Take care.