Four ways to offer special deals for home-based businesses

Running a special offer for your home-based business is a great idea to drum up some extra revenue. Home-based businesses often have smaller budgets, so it’s essential to find creative ways to entice customers. In this blog post, you will learn four unique but straightforward ways you can run special offers for your home-based business!

Who doesn’t like freebies?

It’s hard to say “no” to someone who’s offering a free sample of ice cream, isn’t it? Everyone likes freebies, even if it’s something as small as a chocolate chip cookie. Free samples are the lifeblood of every small business. They appear expensive, but when you compare that cost to the revenue you’ll get by getting loyal customers for a lifetime, they’re worth it!

Start by offering a free consultation or estimate. Whether you’re a virtual marketing agency, software house, or content mill, your clients know your services aren’t free. The problem is that they won’t reach out to you and ask for a quote unless you sprinkle in a little incentive for them. A free consultation might do the trick and entice your potential clients to keep knocking on your door all day long.

Some clients will still be skeptical about your services even after the free consultation. It’s here when you offer them a free trial so that they can get a glimpse of what you’re all about. This is where you prove you’re not only an expert at what you do but also willing to go the extra mile for your customers. This kind of loyalty reciprocates sooner or later!

It’s all about flash sales and discounts.

Don’t sales just make your heart throb faster? Sales are limited-time events that make it seem like you’re saving money but encourage spending more! That’s magic, isn’t it? That’s why occasional flash sales and discounts can do wonders for your home-based business. Not all sales take the cake, though. The trick here is to make sure they’re limited-time, so people feel they need to take advantage of it before it expires.

For example, you could offer a 50% discount on your services for the first ten clients who sign up. By doing this, you’ll create a sense of urgency and encourage people to take action fast. You can also increase the excitement by marketing your business on social media or create an email marketing campaign – just make sure the offer is time-sensitive!

That’s all very nifty, but how do you take this to the next level? Once your flash sale has brought in a flood of customers, you can give out small complementary products. For instance, if you have a home-based website development company and a client pays you for building a website, you can provide them with two months of free SEO services for free. That’s like telling your customer that you’re as much invested in their business as they are.

Reward loyalty

While special offers are supposed to attract new customers, what if you designed them in a way that keeps your existing customers happy too? A great way of doing this is by offering special pricing and discounts for repeat customers. Not only will this encourage them to come back for more, but they will also recommend your services to others. After all, word-of-mouth buzz is a potent marketing tool!

Consider creating a loyalty program for your repeat customers. You can give them special discounts or even free products/services after they have reached a certain spending threshold. It all depends on what you offer and how you want to structure it, but the key is to make it worthwhile for your customers.

Speaking of discounts, why not give out gift cards to your customers? Gift cards are simple to set up, easy on your customers’ pockets, and an excellent way to bring in new clients or reward repeat ones! One advantage of gift cards is that there’s a good chance the recipients won’t use them. Statistics show that since 2005, $45 billion worth of gift cards have gone unused.

Go BOGO

Buy one, get one free (BOGO) deals provide an excellent incentive for your customers to try out your services. While discounts are great, consumers value free stuff more than discounted stuff. If you can take advantage of that, you would have swarms of loyal customers. 

Think about it – if a dentist offers a patient free teeth-whitening at their first appointment, the dentist only loses a tiny amount of money but gains a loyal customer for a lifetime. Now, let’s translate that to your home-based business. Let’s say you are a web development company. You could offer a special deal where the customer gets a free website template for every website you create for them. Similarly, if you’re a graphic designer, you could create a free logo for your client.

BOGO deals require heavy advertising, especially on social media. In fact, all your promos should go up on social media. It’s better to post flyers and posters than to write walls of bland text. I recommend these social media templates tailored to each social media platform: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, to name a few.

Final thoughts

While deciding to run special offers for your home-based business isn’t rocket science, how to run them is the challenging bit. Special offers can drive up your sales significantly and attract new customers if done right. Whether it’s BOGO deals, special pricing for repeat customers, or flash sales – any special offer you run for your home-based business will be successful if you market them the right way.

There’s no one correct answer to that, but perhaps the cheapest and most effective way to run your promos is by advertising them on social media. As discussed, you need to craft appealing flyers and posters. The only problem is that every social media platform is different, so you’ll have to tailor your flyers to each one accordingly. To get around this problem, you can resize designs for different platforms in a few clicks and have your promos up and running in no time!