Home Inspector Marketing Question: Are You Using A Cash Discount?
For many years Southern Home Inspection Services offered a $25 cash discount as an incentive to get people to schedule their home inspection with our firm. There were several things I didn’t like about the cash discount. First, it was a straight cash loss to the business. Plus, many of the customers just felt like we mark the inspection price up to take the $25 off. While that wasn’t true in our case, I’m sure many businesses have done that.
So for several years I’ve been searching for an alternative to the cash discount. Over the last 15 months or so I’ve been using different types of incentives to get people to schedule their inspection with us, to get prior clients to refer us more and to help the real estate agents grow their business. And I have to report the incentives have had the desired result, plus they didn’t cost me anywhere close to the $25 I was giving away as a cash discount on each inspection.
While the rebate certificates I was giving away were very attractive to consumers, to many of the rebate companies have been unable to keep their promises to the customers because of the high redemption rates. I’m not interested in giving my customer something that will create any negative feelings about my company. So I won’t be using rebate certificates anymore.
With that said, I’m still as excited about incentives as I ever have been.
The incentive that I’m most excited about is called Savings Bucks. I’ve been using the Savings Bucks Program at Southern Home Inspection Services for the last three months and the results have been as good as they were with the rebate certificates, without the worry of will the customer get what they were promised.
The Savings Bucks Product is really two products in one. The first product is discount coupons with over 119,000 local and national businesses participating all across the US. The second part of the product is the actual Savings Bucks.
Think about them is customer rewards dollars. You purchase either the $500 or the $1000 books to give your customer. Once you complete their inspection, they can register the book and spend the money that they have on their account immediately, if they so desire (instant gratification). As a matter of fact, Beth and I have already spent the $500 on the first book we registered and we just registered a $1000 book yesterday for us to use.
Offering a quality incentive in addition to your professional home inspection will increase your closing ratio dramatically. One of the things that we noticed was that able to charge higher prices without losing any potential clients. So the incentives have helped us increase number of inspections that were doing and we are getting more money for those inspections. Where’s the down side to that?
