I hope your November is going well. It still feels like summer here in Kentucky. We have had so many 70 and 80 degree days I think we’re getting spoiled. Today we’re going to talk about discounts. Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season will be here before you know it. Your customers will love getting a discount from you.
- What kind of discount are you going to offer.
Think for a moment about your business and where you are now. How many customers do you have, how many additional customers can you handle for the spring. Or do you need more customers now? Do you want it to be a deal for one of your current programs or something new that you’re going to develop?We’ll pretend that we’re booked pretty solid for the fall, we’ve talked to our current students and know that in the spring we’ll have two or three slots open. We want to get some concrete numbers so we decide to offer a couple of different discounts. One for new students and one for current students.
- How much are you going to discount / creating the offer.
By now you should know how much a new student brings in with your current prices. We’ll say for our example that a new student brings in $150 / week or averages about $450 for a semester. We normally keep the students for 3 semesters so the life time value of our customer is $450 x 3 = $1350.00
We decide we’re going to offer three different discounts – this will help us learn more about our customers and help us test out some things for the future. We want to learn what kind of discount works best.
We will offer –
-20% off for current tutor students that sign up and pay for their tutoring in advance for the remainder of this semester and next.
-Buy one month get the next month of tutoring free if someone signs up to be tutored for all next semester.
For January and Feb – buy two sessions, get one free. - Implementing the discount
Create a web page on your blog for each of the discounts. Each of the discount codes need to be different. If you get most of your business over the phone, make sure that everyone that works for you needs to ask if they have a discount code. An easy way to keep track is by using a spreadsheet.
- Covering all of the bases
Limit the number of people that can take the discount and keep to those discounts. You’ll want to note this in your advertising and you’ll want to make sure to mention that on the web pages you create. Explain in detail how the discount works – don’t leave anything to their imagination.
Example:
20% off. Five current tutor students of Clever Apple will get 20% off for the rest of this semester and next semesters tutoring (Up to 25 sessions). Payment for these sessions must be made in advance. See below for pricing options – it includes the 20% off. Make sure to use 20off when you’re ordering.
List the prices.
I hope this will help you get some more customers.
Next time we’ll talk some about some ways that you can get the word out.
