Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey

Let’s face it. 

There’s no one price point that will be right for all of your customers. Every customer has a range of prices they could pay. See prices are really viewed on a spectrum. 

Imagine you visit a fancy cocktail bar. You’ve just got a raise at work and you’re celebrating your daughter’s graduation. How much would you pay for a cocktail? $15?

Now imagine you visit the same cocktail bar but you’ve just heard your company is making redundancies and you’re concerned about your job. Would you even buy a cocktail now? 

It’s a simple example that raises an important point. There’s never one price that’s right. Our willingness to pay changes. 

The Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey will help you narrow down the appropriate price for your product or service.

With this survey, you'll learn:

1. Discover an acceptable price for your service

2. Find the relationship between price and features

3. And learn the best combination of price and features

Make it your own:

• Tweak each question in the template or add your own

• Change the color scheme

• Remove Hotjar branding (with Scale and Business plans)

• Pick between full screen, pop-up or external link Surveys

The Goldilocks price, not too much, yet not too little

The Van Westendorp pricing model involves asking a set of questions to help figure out the price your audience would be willing to pay. The questions pinpoint your customers’ price sensitivity by asking them four important questions: 

• At what price would my product be so expensive that you would not consider buying it? 

• At what price would it be just getting expensive but you would still consider buying?

• At what price would it be a bargain and such a great buy for the money?

• At what price would it be so cheap that you would actually be worried about the quality of my product? 

With these answers, you’ll be able to narrow down on the appropriate price for your service. See, by plotting customers’ answers on a line chart (like this great example from Focus vision), you’ll be able to discover a range of acceptable prices.

These are the prices that—for the majority of your customers aren’t considered too much, but also aren’t considered too little. It’s what most customers would be happy to pay.

3 questions you’ll be able to answer

1. Am I undercharging for my product?

Every entrepreneur’s fear is that they’re potentially throwing away money. Undercharging is a sure-fire way to do just that. With the Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey, you’ll discover what customers consider to be an inexpensive offering and an expensive offering, helping you learn if you’re undercharging.

2. Can I increase my prices?

Most businesses feel the need to increase their prices over time. Whether you’ve recently invested in your product quality, added new features to your SaaS offering, or are simply accounting for inflation. Price increases come around fairly regularly. To figure out if you can increase your price and by how much, use the Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey.

3. How much should my new product cost?

Launching a new product is daunting for many reasons, with price being close to the top of the list. With the Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey, you can take the guesswork out of pricing your product and figure out what price would be acceptable for your audience before your launch.

Set up the Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey in seconds

Getting started with the Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey is fast and easy. Start by clicking the ‘Get started with this template’ link at the top of the page. 

Once you’ve pressed that you’ll be asked to create an account and verify your email. 

After you’re verified, you’ll be taken straight to the survey template which will be ready for you to send out to customers to start collecting insights. 

However, you’ll also have the option to install the Hotjar tracking code on your site. This tracking code will allow you to host the survey live on your site rather than via an external URL. This might be useful if you want to show the Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey to users on a certain page. It’ll also mean you’ll be able to access all four of the Hotjar features.

Don’t worry, installing the tracking code won’t slow your website down. And it doesn’t cost you anything (our free plans are free forever). So, to set up your full Hotjar account and install the tracking code, follow these steps.