It’s never easy to implement price rises, but they are a fact of life, and your customers won’t desert you if you put up your prices. Sometimes they have to be increased due to the cost of raw materials, or maybe because utility bills or business rates have increased dramatically.
Once you can no longer absorb the extra costs you will have no option but to implement price rises.
It’s better to increase prices than to lose your business.
Of course from a customer’s point of view, price rises are never welcome but you should let them know in plenty of time about the imminent price rises, by letter or email.
When you write your letter, make it personal, and address the recipient by name.
This is what you should include in a letter announcing a price rise:
- An apology for having to implement a price rise.
- A short reason why, for instance the increased cost of raw materials.
- An acknowledgement that this will be unwelcome news.
- A date by which the price increases will take place.
- Which specific products or services are affected.
- A wish that they will continue to be a valued customer.
Being upfront and honest about the impact of this decision will help continue a good relationship of honesty and openness with them into the future.
Letter to announce a price rise – sample 1:
[Contact Name]
[Address]
[Date]
Dear [Name of Customer],
We would like to inform you that we are unfortunately planning to increase the price of certain goods due to the sudden increase in the cost of the raw materials we use in our production process. Since we still have a limited stock of those raw materials, the price increase will not be made until [Target Date].
We have tried to prevent this price increase for as long as possible because of course we want to provide our products at a competitive price. However, the recent increase in the price of the raw materials is now too great for us to absorb, and we regrettably have no choice other than to implement a slight increase on the items listed below.
[list items here]
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to call [person’s name] on [phone number]
Thank you for your understanding.
Yours Sincerely,
[Name]
[Title]
[Name of Company]
Letter to announce a price rise – sample 2:
[Address]
[Date]
Dear [Name of Contact],
We regret to tell you that we will be conducting a price increase on some of our products due to [Specify Reason].
Below is the list of products that will be affected by the price increase:
[List of Products]
We have of course tried everything we can to avoid a price increase, but unfortunately not to do so would directly affect our ability to trade. We would like to apologise in advance for any problems that the price increase may cause.
We hope that you will understand our situation and will continue to support our products.
Sincerely,
[Name]
[Title]
[Phone Number]
[Company Email]
Informal announcement of price increase – email sample:
Hi [Name],
You might have seen in the news that [news headline about raw materials price rise] this year because [reason]. We wanted to reassure you that we don’t need to increase our prices yet as we buy our [product] 3 months in advance.
We told you in [month] that we might have to increase our prices again if wholesale costs remained high and unfortunately, they’ve gone up by 5% since then. This means we’ll have to increase them in [month].
We understand that price increases are never welcome and of course you can leave us at any time, but of course we hope that you will stay with us as a valued customer.
[optional sentence – We’ve written a blog post with more information if you’d like to find out more. (link here)]
Best Wishes
The team at [company name]
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