Price is a funny thing. Charge a client too much and they think you are ripping them off; charge them too little and they think you are not providing the value they deserve. I have discovered that it is much easier to give clients an overall price per project as opposed to trying to break some of the fees down. But clients always want to understand how we come up with our pricing. Of course pricing depends on how much we pay our team members. So every few months, I have to evaluate our pay structure to make sure that we remain competitive within the market place. Trying to gather information about appropriate rates normally involves visiting several industry web sites, looking at trade magazines and evaluating our current project load. Since I am an advocate of publishing prices for B2B companies, I wanted to answer the question of how much should you expect to pay for a web copy project?

I did a little search and discovered that some of my friends at webmaster world don’t mind paying $5 per hour for a copy writer. As a matter of fact, there is an Indian company that is relentless in sending emails about the quality of their writers and how fast they can turn the material in. I do not know about you, but to write for an American audience, I am a firm believer that the writer must be a native speaker and lives in North America. No matter how much an Indian writer may think he/she understands the culture, watching American movies is not the same as living in this country. I wonder if that Indian company would actually quit emailing me if they read this blog.

Some of the big names in the field of copy writing charge close to $15,000 for creating a sales letter. The logic they follow is simple. A well written sales letter can generate hundreds of thousands in sales. Of course the idea of copy writers getting paid on performance, while popular amongst writers, is not very popular with their clients.

Math is the secret behind paying a copywriter

Before you determine a “correct” rate for web copy services, you need to determine the revenue generated as result of the project. If all you expect from a landing page to generate 10k, I would not think you want to pay more than $500 for it. On the other hand, some of our ecommerce clients can generate tens of thousands of dollars from a well optimized landing page. A well designed and written landing page can easily double if not triple the conversion rate for the client. The moral of the story is “do the math.”

What is involved in creating successful web copy project?

Keep in mind, completing a meaningful web copy project involves a lot more than hiring a copywriter and telling them to write. Completing the copy is normally one of the last steps in creating a website that will actually generate revenue. We usually ask our clients to provide us with a marketing assessment, online visitor persona development, site story boarding, and general wire-framing before we start doing any copy work. Only when all of these elements are provided, is it meaningful to discuss the rates per project.

Rates vary based on the type of the project and the experience the company brings to the table. Here is a quick survey of the on going rates for two large categories of copywriting  projects we have been involved with.

Rates for web copy for a single page (landing page):

Assuming the client developed all the elements required to create a successful a single landing page, these project are small in nature. Rates for a single landing page project can vary from $350 on the low end to $5,000 on the high end. Sean Carton gave a nice break down of the fees associated with creating a single landing page. Although Sean’s breakdown contains cost for other team members besides copy writers, I think it gives a good idea of what is involved in full landing page implementation. With our own projects, the client is responsible for supplying us with site personas, information architecture design and page layout. These projects involve usually a single copy writer who will work for about 2 to three days on completing the copy for that one particular page. At a rate of $125 per hour, the total cost for these projects starts at around $2,000.

Rates for web copy projects for a whole site:

True web copy projects normally involve staffing between 2 to 3 copy writers on the project. Similar to single page project, I am assuming that the client will do most of the marketing analysis required prior to creating the copy. Rates for a full site web copy creation range from around $1,200 on the low end to upwards of tens of thousands of dollars. For our own projects, we assume the client will be provide us with marketing assessment, persona development and information architecture elements.  These projects do not involve developing story boarding or any wire-framing for the site. Projects as such start at around $10,000. 

To recap, the following are the factors that impact the price you might pay for web copy project:

• Size & Complexity of project/Website
• Size of Organization
• Reputation & Demand for the copy Firm
• Amount of work supplied by client

Tell me what do you think?

Tags: B2B-fees, Copy Writing, online-marketing
Posted in Business, Copy Writing

Moving beyond the duscission whether B2B companies should publish their fees and prices on their site, I can always see the puzzled look on client's face when I tell them that we publish fees on our site to help us increase our conversion rates. Many complain that publishing rates on the site cuts down their conversion rate. That is not true. We first need to ask how you define a conversion on your website.

Online conversion goal vs. offline goals

If you are a B2B service oriented site, most likely conversion does not take place when a client fills out an online form. Okay, maybe online conversion happens when the client fills the contact form but the final conversion goal takes place offline. So the final sale happens after you talk to the client and he decides to sign up for your service. So, while your site conversion rate might be 10%, your real conversion is the actual percentage of these contacts that end up singing up for your service. So, if you have 2,000 visitors to your site in a month and only 100 of these visitors contact you, your online conversion rate is 5%. The real questions is how many of these 100 contacts are you able to actually close on.

Assume that you are only able to get 10 out of these 100 prospects to sign up for your service, then you real conversion rate is 10/2000= %0.5. Yep, it is that low. But that is not the topic of this blog.

If you publish your rates, you will notice that prospects who can not afford your services will not fill the contact form. So, that does translate to lowering site conversion rates. However, the prospects who are interested in your services and are comfortable with your pricing structure would actually fill that contact form. As a result, your close rate for these clients will be higher. So, in our example above, we start with 2,000 visitors to the site per month. As a result of publishing the prices, you only get 50 online contacts per month. So, your online conversion rate is at 50/2000= 2.5%. But these 50 contacts are already aware of your pricing structure, so one of the major hurdles in closing them is already taking care of. As a result, you will be able to close on 15 of them. So you are actual conversion rate is 15/2000= 0.75%. That is over 50% improvement in conversion.

These numbers are actually based on a client’s experience, so I hope you get my point. Like it or not, pricing is one of the main reasons sales are not closed. By publishing your fees online, you are eliminating that sector of prospects who can not afford your rates.

What do you think?

Tags: B2B-fees, increase-online-sales, increase-site-conversion-rate, online-marketing, site-conversion-rate
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Should you do it or shouldn’t you? Are you going to lose possible customers if you include your fees on your site? Is it really that important? Jakob Nielsen lists not publishing prices as one of the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design for 2007.

The argument for not publishing the rate is rather simple. Andy Beal argued against publishing rates on a website because:

Visitors WILL shop on price and not value

Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world where budget is not an issue, where everyone has unlimited supply of cash, and customers choose to shop for value and ignore price. It is a fact of life that some customers simply will not afford to pay for a certain level of services. But let me rewind a little here. In my opinion any discussion about value should not exclude price. Why? Because price can have a great impact on the value perceived from a product or a service. It is not the only element that impacts value but it is definitely one of the major elements. For example, I would love to hire Andy Hagans for linkbaiting services, http://www.andyhagans.com/link-baiting.php I believe that his services are valuable and can help us a lot. But the reality is he is too expensive for us at this point. It is not that Andy’s service are not valuable, it is just that given his rates, we choose to go with someone else. Price matters to clients in two different ways:

• When evaluating different services, price compared to ROI will play a major role in selecting one service versus another
• When perceived value from different services or companies appears the same, then price matters.

Customers will see value in your propositions if you provide them with one regardless to whether you mention your price or not.

You’ll miss out on small clients and large clients.

In Andy’s opinion small clients will be turned away from high rates, and large clients will laugh at small rates. But my question is what about your marketing vision and goals? Should a business be targeting both small and large firms? One of the first things you do when creating a marketing plan is to assess the segment of market you are going to target. What revenue do they make, how much do they budget for your service and how large they are. Of course if you are a big company such as Microsoft or IBM, you can afford to target different sizes of business. If you are not that large, you are better off focusing on certain size of companies.

Pricing doesn’t have to be set in stone.

Of course it does not. But what you need to do is to have a starting point. Staffing any project costs us around $1,500 to start with. Based on that we know that there is a minimum we charge per project. So, when publishing prices, we do not provide exact amounts but we do provide a minimum per project.

Rand from SEOMOZ moved beyond the discussion around publishing or not publishing the rates. He regularly posts standard rates for SEO services in his blog. Update: John Andrews had a different and an interesting perspective on the rates Rand outlined for SEO services.

To me, publishing fees online is a matter of usability for a website. The purpose of the site is to help a visitor convert to a client. To do so, every page and element on your site must be developed with the client in mind. If the client has a question, answer it.

If you are going to publish your prices, do it the right way:

That is the top mistake that many B2B service web sites fall in when publishing their fees. They include a single pricing page on their site to cover all the services they offer. The result usually is that page will be the most visited page on the site and average pages visited will drop. And the company or person ends up pulling the rates off the site. So instead include the rates for each service in that particular service page itself. That way, the client will have all their questions answered when they view a service page. The client will get to learn about your services, have their questions answered as well as know how much that particular service costs.

So although I concur with some of Andy’s points, I don’t think that they are reasons that would lead me to start encouraging clients to remove prices from the site. What do you think?

Tags: B2B-fees, increase-online-sales, increase-site-conversion-rate, online-marketing, site-conversion-rate
Posted in Sales & Marketing