Top Discount Strategies to Skyrocket the Success of Your Roofing Business

Whilst discounting is an intrinsic aspiration of almost all customers, it is arguably the most significant pricing strategy for all businesses and your roofing company is not an exception. It, nevertheless, requires a great amount of prudence in execution.  

The problem arises when marketers will – oftentimes – offer sitewide discounts to their entire audience, without considering where visitors are in the buyer’s journey. Whereas it can allure customers and drum up more sales, it may hurt your bottom line in the long run.

Wanna know the most effective discount strategies and tactics that keep your roofing leads moving upward without “killing” your profits? If your answer is “yes”, then let’s read on!

Before diving into specific roofing practices, it’s important to first take a look at some basic concepts of the discount marketing world.

Discount Pricing Strategy: The Fundamentals

1. Pricing Strategies

Understandably, every single business has to develop a pricing strategy for a product or service they provide after performing a marketing analysis. Product/service distribution, positioning, and promotional decisions are made and demand is estimated. A pricing strategy is formulated taking into consideration all influencing factors – typically product/service cost, competition landscape, and profit objectives.

Possible pricing strategies include a full-price strategy, competitive pricing, discount pricing or a mix of these.

2. Discount Pricing Strategy

Discount pricing is one type of pricing strategy where you mark down the prices of your offerings. The goal of a discount pricing strategy is, typically, to boost customer traffic, clear old inventory from your business, and drive sales. Most businesses alternate pricing strategies so they don’t depend on discount pricing for long periods of time.

And again, let’s proceed with discount pricing strategies cautiously! If you continually mark down costs, you could wind up losing money. Your customers might not feel a sense of value or urgency if everything is always marked down. Furthermore, discounts used too often begin a downward pricing spiral that may eventually damage your ability to offer the service at full price.

Plus, you can’t rely solely on discount pricing. It’s obvious that large companies often have lower prices as they can get bulk pricing, which makes it challenging for small businesses, like your roofing one, to compete with them. Thus, it’s a “must” that you pay close attention to the uniqueness of your provided services, and occasionally offer discounts for the most effective.

3. Types of Discounts

There are some most popular types of discounts that’re well worth your consideration:

• Quantity discounts

It is getting more and more popular to offer quantity discounts to customers who purchase in bulk or use many services at the same time. Plus, it generally rewards customer loyalty. These discounts can be cumulative, such as discounts given to customers who place multiple small orders/bookings or loyalty cards that give a free item after a certain number are purchased.

• Seasonal discounts

Such type of discount strategy aims to both reward customers who make a purchase during off-peak times and boost sales at the beginning of peak seasons.

• Promotional discounts

If you want to generate customer traffic and sales, consider offering promotional discounts! These are discounts you offer for a limited time.

Some businesses choose to offer promotions during holidays or other big events such as New Year Holidays. Promotions you can offer include:

• Buy one get one (free or half off)
• Percentage off certain items

• Loss leaders

These refer to discounted items designed to bring customers into the store in the hope they’ll also purchase more profitable products or service offerings as well. Loss leaders should be well-recognized brands that are used frequently. Plus, items for sale should also change regularly to keep customers coming back.

Now you’ve gained some basic understandings as to discount marketing, it’s time to move on the most critical part of our article – the best practices for a winning roofing discount effort.

Best Discount Strategies for Roofers

#1. Nudge New Visitors with a Special Offer

When a visitor first enters your site, they might not be ready to “buy”.

There is every likelihood that he or she is still in search of the best service providers for their roofing problems, going visit some roofing sites, performing some search and then comparing amongst them.

Thus, offering them a discount code to use right the moment they land on your own site isn’t always the best strategy. Instead of asking new visitors to buy this early into the buyer’s journey, you should ask them for a smaller commitment, like giving you their email address in exchange for a discount code.

Once planning such a discount campaign for your new site visitors, it’s a “must” that you:

• Target a specific visitor segment 

To ensure you only offer this discount to new site visitors, place a cookie in new visitors’ browsers. Doing so allows you to track new visitors vs. returning visitors and hide or show campaigns to this segment.

• Refine your discount campaign by personalization

Once you’ve defined your target segment, it’s more than vital to make sure that these target audiences know the offer is exclusive to them. Their feeling of being “special” makes your message and offer more relevant, which does help to increase your conversions rate.

• Give people a reason for your discount

Understandably,if you want people to accept your discount, give them a reason. The best part is, it works even if the reason is obvious. For instance, it can be as simple as in the example above where visitors get a discount because they’re new visitors.

#2. Reward Loyal Customers

In practice, building loyalty starts from the very first interaction between a customer and your business, which requires a great deal of time and patience to change clients from newbies to loyal ones. Fortunately, discount pricing strategy had been long considered to be a super-powerful tool to instill loyalty.

Discount marketing is a part of most majority loyalty programs. However, before you define a program structure, it’s vital to first clarify who your loyal customer is. Don’t make the common mistake of trying to drag everyone into a program! Such a strategy often gets you nowhere but ends up with wasted resources due to dozens of cards being given out, forgotten by customers with time.

So how in the world could you correctly determine who is your targeted audiences for such loyalty discount tactics?

The answer is amazingly simple: A segment of loyal customers is the one that include the part of your audience that brings the highest revenues. Maybe they are your business customers who regularly hireyour company to provide roofing services for their large-scale construction projects. The point is, to show them your appreciation and build strong relationships to not only keep regular customers but also gain brand advocates.

One report shows that 76% of customers want personalized offers based on their purchase history.Thus, thediscounts you prepare should be personalized, outstanding, and distinct from ones offered to customers outside the loyal segment.

What’s more, the type of offer is just as important as the way you present those offers to your loyal clients. Each message with a coupon code or gift card should create a feeling of getting something “exclusive”, far more than the standard. A feasible idea to deliver such an “exclusive” feeling is to inform a customer in the message about how few people got the deal you have just sent them.

After all, the role of discount marketing in your loyalty program much depends on how you’ve designed it. Though there is no silver bullet rule, you’d better off combining personalized discounts with gamified experiencesand amulti-level reward structure to harvest the best results.

#3. Celebrating Discount On “Big Dates”

In addition to the loyalty program, you can foster your customers’ loyalty by celebrating the dates important or meaningful to them. Adopting such an advanced personalization approach requires your additional efforts in paying some attention to particular customers, which also explains why you shouldn’t overextend your loyalty segment. 

In practice, birthdays and anniversaries are perfect events to amaze your best customers with a coupon code or gift card. Even a small birthday coupon gift, which may seem a standard idea in discount marketing, still may be a surprise that your customer will truly remember and appreciate.

Again, the proven success formula is to make your message highly personalized and the discount aesthetically attractive. Should you get no idea as to what to offer your customer, then just go through order or booking history and figure out what discounts and service offerings would fit him or her best.

#4. Reward Referrals from Existing Customers

If you’ve been in the business world, especially in the service sector, for a little while, you must have known the significance of referral marketing.

The problem, though, is only a few adopt a predictable and repeatable referral system into their marketing campaign. And the numbers couldn’t be more revealing. Based on ReferralCandy, 83% of satisfied customers are willing to refer to products and services. Yet, only 29% actually do.

Discounts, then, are an effective incentive for inviting customers to refer loved ones. Thus, never should you underestimate the importance of referral as well as ignore the necessity of building a well-designed referral rewarding discount!

With such types of discounts, customers can be rewarded if their referral empowers you to acquire new customers, and also it helps you to spread your service offering via word-of-mouth. For instance, you can offer a 15% discount for customers who refer at least three clients (who purchased) and an additional 5% discount if the referred customers shared your social post. Ultimately, a reward ladder should engage customers with more and more attractive rewards along with a growing number of referrals.

To perform it effectively, referral marketing requires advanced tracking to keep it under control. No matter which discount type you apply, remember to use “unique codes” that can be assigned to particular users and tracked to measure a number of referrals. In the case of social media share, it’s a great idea to use specific tags to manage the referral activity of your customers.

#5. Increase Discount Offers During Holidays/Special Events

Event-based discounts tend to happen around a specific date or season, and they are often recurring. During holidays or special discounting days (such as Black Friday), most people tend to be in a “buying mindset”. Your roofing business can have a share of that influx of customers if you offer discounts during these special times.

In fact, during specific holidays- typically Valentine or New Year Holidays, individuals and families usually have an intention to decorate their houses. So, why don’t you capitalize on the increased traffic during holidays and guide your visitors to relevant offers?

It’s also smart “move” to offer a discount at some cases of urgency – climate events that possibly damage the house quality such as hail, wind or storm.

The Bottom Lines

For discount pricing strategies to pay off, it’s more than vital that you adopt a strategic approach. By clearly defining your goals and matching it with the right type of pricing discount, you can avoid the common challenges that come with discounting and instead bring in more qualified leads and service revenues for your roofing business.

Building discount strategies for your roofing company is already overwhelmed with several planning and communication activities but keeping your service image visible online is also crucial to ignite the profitability of your business.