Please help me decide the price. I set it at $1500 for now just so the price is not still $200. I can change it in a jiffy. Please just put a vote on the price on the comments here.
We discussed this in the meeting, but did not agree a price. Member benefits include free use of the boats when not in club use in a club event or regatta….
- If it costs 200 to rent the Hobie for a half day, we need to raise price immediately for non-residents. (it was set at $200 per year)
- Ideally, the non-resident membership should be a revenue earning thing for the club
It should be expensive in my opinion because the program is first priority for local kids, so if yacht club sailing types from Annapolis, DC, Richmond, Hampton etc want to support the growth of sailing and maritime heritage on Hatteras, they know it cost money to do so. A good benefits package should come with it .. big boat rental discounts, launching and transient dockage, news and updates, apparel discounts, event reciprocity, enjoyment of club facilities as they grow…I don’t know…but I like it high, then it needs to be marketed intelli.
But what is high? $1500, $5000 per year? There are a couple retail strategies relevant here.
1) The multiples strategy – this principle would say set a membership at just above the single rental offering for a whole day and work towards volume on a lower pricepoint with fewer benefits. Basically it is an easy upsell if a membership is not that much higher than a rental.
2) The higher the more attractive – when our club is ready and offers an attractive set of benefits, setting it lower like $1500 would be silly. $1500 may be prohibitive to the volume strategy, but not high enough to attract a certain level of yacht club member. In other words, the higher end yacht club members would expect a membership to be upwards of $5000 per year in my opinion. I don’t think we really want a ton of non-resident members so ideally it would be very high and attract non-resident members who can also be sponsors.
These are my initial thoughts. I do not have a strong opinion either way and default to whatever others feel is the best strategy. Ideally, I would love to have analytics and A/B testing. We just don’t have enough volume to ever get a good metric so we are going to have to go on experience and instinct.