It’s an accepted truism in email marketing that sticking a 9 or a 5 at the end of a price brings more customers than rounding up. No one argues with that basic fact and so we continue to knock off 1p or 5p. Ludicrously, when I sold my last house, the estate agent set the price at £5 below our agreed level. He was a professional, so followed his norm. Everybody’s doing it.
Take a wild, but probably dependable, guess of how many of your competitors glibly knocking 1p or 5p off totals have tested the process to ensure they are doing something that will give them a decent return. Your answer would not be far from mine of zero. In email marketing anything that is done without thought is probably costing a company money. We must always test our practices.
We have the example of the 99p store, established, so rumours suggest, to beat the £1 store as customers, they felt, would walk past the latter in order to save the 1% on their bills. I had my doubts. I also had my doubt that it had been tested. Did they calculate the additional cost of all those 1p coins that had to be picked up from the bank as, if the customer was going to walk past the £1 store just to 
save that 1p, there is little doubt that they refuse to leave until they had their change.
If you reduce your asking price by 1p, or perhaps £1, you are costing yourself money, especially if you are selling these items in bulk. The problem with everyone else doing it is that if you just round up your prices without obvious reason for doing so, you will have difficulty convincing your subscribers that you are offering your base price. There are alternatives though.
‘Less than £10’ has a certain ring to it despite the fact it’s expressing prices as a whole number. There is also a certain psychological advantage. There’s another way to make the price on your marketing email attractive.
We will all need to look at our pricing in the months to come, and the headline figure is one we can usefully exploit without hurting our ROI. If people are so attracted to just 1p off, despite them obviously understanding that it is such a small amount, we need to convince them psychologically that we are selling something which is priced as low as possible. We need to be believable though.
If you claim that you have pared the price of the item featured in your marketing email, and it comes out at £72.43, all of a sudden it becomes different. No longer are people looking to save a penny; instead they will think 56p is much, much better.
You will need to produce arguments to convince your subscribers that your price and product is the best for them. You will also need to test. We started with a truism and will end with one; anything that everyone in email marketing is doing can be done better.
