See if you can spot the pattern among three of my recent culinary purchases:
1. Last week I bought a bag of roasted chestnuts from a seller on the street. The smallest bag was 4 euro, the middle 7 euro, the biggest 14 euro.
I got the 7 euro bag, and was thinking how expensive everything has gotten when a middle-sized bag of chestnuts costs that much.
But when I got the bag — about the size of a futsal football — I couldn’t even be mad.
2. A few days ago, I sat down with my friend Sam for a beer on the Rambla de Catalunya, Barcelona’s most touristy street.
The beers arrived and each was the size of a fishbowl, I’m guessing 1 liter of beer or more.
I was wondering how much we’d get ripped off for this. I was pleasantly surprised when the bill arrived that the huge beers were only 9 euro each.
3. Today I had lunch beneath Montserrat, a mountain close to Barcelona.
The lunch was a fixed menu including appetizers, a main course, and dessert. The price was 30 euro, which frankly is outrageous for the kind of countryside restaurant this is.
The way they justified it — again, I couldn’t even be mad — was that along with the single main course and the single dessert, each menu included not one but five separate appetizers.
So can you see the pattern?
If you’re not 100% sure, or you simply want to hear me pontificate on a Sunday afternoon:
Marketing guru Jay Abraham, also known as the “$75 billion man,” for that’s as much business growth the man has supposedly created, likes to say there are only three ways to grow a business.
The first is more customers, which is what everybody focuses on, until they get it, and realize that it’s not what they really want.
The second is to increase the frequency of purchase, and its logical conclusion, continuity offers. This sounds like the dream, and is no doubt good for some people, but comes with issues of its own.
The third is the least discussed, and it’s to increase the transaction size. There are various ways to do increase transaction size, but a simple way is simply to sell a barrel rather than a bucketful, a giant bag instead of a normal bag, a fishbowl of beer rather than a glass, 5 appetizers instead of one.
That’s something to consider if you too sell things and are looking to increase your prices and grow your business.
I’m considering it because today marks the end of the first week of my revived Daily Email House group, where the core promise still remains, “Use your email list to pay for a house.”
It’s hard to pay for a house with an email list selling $27 offers.
It’s fairly easy to do if you’re selling $2,700 offers.
It’s an afterthought if you’re selling $27,000 offers.
I had something to say about this inside Daily Email House, and I’ll have more to say, and hopefully some of it will help some of the folks inside the group. If you want to join them: