Winter may be a downtime, but it’s also the chance to offer seasonal promotions to your clients. These extra services create more revenue streams while retaining your clients and sharing your full range of services.
Lauren Hoogewind, marketing director at Designs by Sundown, based in Littleton, Colorado, shares tips on offering these promotions to clients.
Services to Discount
“Services that are best for discounts tend to be material-heavy, as it’s easier for us to take advantage of bulk ordering and reduce our costs,” Hoogewind says. “Then we can pass on those savings to the client as a promotion. Projects that tend to be more labor intensive (for example, holiday lighting) are challenging as we don’t have the opportunity to pull from our margin on labor as we do for material goods.”
It’s also easier to focus on services that can be streamlined.
“Projects such as irrigation systems can be challenging to include in seasonal promotions because there’s such variability with each system that make it challenging to offer a discount,” Hoogewind says.
A few services to consider for promotions are seasonal color installs, shade structures, and holiday décor. You can also use these promotions to cross-sell services your clients may not already use.
Planning a Seasonal Promotion
Understanding the pain points of your client is the key to successful planning. Timing is also critical.
“Ensure you’re looking at YOY trends to identify anticipated downtimes to plan these promotions,” Hoogewind adds.
Another thing to consider is how these extra services will affect your clients and staff.
“Think about how you can increase additional revenue streams without impacting current clients,” Hoogewind says. “This includes considerations for current labor, schedules, and material availability.”
Another step is assessing your mailing list to ensure the team can handle the additional projects if those leads become sales.
“The biggest risk in offering seasonal promotions is the potential of not being able to service our existing clients or overworking our crews,” Hoogewind says.
That lack of balance can also lead to lost revenue and low-quality work.
When it comes to planning, focus on the times that allow room for extra work. Also, use that time to promote lesser-known services that are easily forgotten during the peak season. Designs By Sundown offers fire mitigation throughout the year, which benefits clients living in areas with wildfire risk. By shifting the focus to quieter times of the year, there’s also less risk of displacing existing projects. A complete awareness of your services may be the spark needed to land that next project.
“We had a client that used us for occasional maintenance projects that often expressed a desire to make their yard more cohesive,” Hoogewind says. “This past year, we sent a seasonal promotion to our active clients’ list, offering a discount on design services. That promotional offer incentivized the client to finally reach out and act on a long-time desire.”
Since that relationship was already in place, the design and maintenance teams could work together to create a design that benefits everyone.
