Advertising and Marketing Ideas to Create Phenomenal Profits In YOUR Small Business

How To Turn 75% Of Your “Try Before You Buy”, And “Free Loaners” Into Sales. PDF Print E-mail
How To Turn 75% Of Your “Try Before You Buy”, And “Free Loaners” Into Sales.

(I got this idea from Julius Toth, a mentor of mine.  It’s one of the most profitable marketing ideas I’ve run across.)

Do you have a “Free Loaner” program?  Do you let customers “Try before you buy”?

We have used this technique (that follows) to increase our “try before you buy” sales from 20% to 75%.  It might be worth a listen.

It started with selling air purifiers, several years ago.  Please forget for a moment any thoughts about the product.  Selling a different product would give the same results.  Anyway, the program we have was to offer a 3 day free rental on our air purifiers.  It worked well.  About 20% of the people you loaned a unit to would keep it.  80% brought it back.  But still profitable.

Our idea was to offer the 3 day free loaner, but to also offer a “2 week safe ownership program” after they came in.  In other words, once the person came in the store, we would select the right unit (demonstrating all the way) and say something like,;
“You know, many of our air purifier owners told us that it really took a little longer than 3 days to see the total benefits of using the unit.  So we came up with the “2 week safe ownership program”.  It works like this:  You buy the air purifier and take it home for a no-risk 14 day trial.  If you have a question during that time, please just call.  If, at the end of  the 2 weeks you are happy, just keep the air purifier.  If, for any reason, you are not happy, just return it at the end of the 2 weeks, and we’ll give you a refund.  Fair enough?”

Here’s the difference.  If they take the machine home and have not paid for it... in the customer’s mind, it’s not theirs.  They have only borrowed it.  If they paid for it, in their mind, it’’s theirs.  Now if they want to return it, they have to do something.  They have to come into the store and  get a refund.

When the customer got a free 3 day rental, 20% kept it, and paid for it..  When they paid up front, with the option of getting a refund, 75% kept the air purifier.

The results were so positive I decided to try it with our vacuum cleaners.  The only reason that it doesn’t work every time with a “free loaner during repairs” program is that there has to be some interest before they take it home.  In other words, they have to see a complete value building demonstration to open their minds to owning a new machine.

The 75% sales rate was with air purifiers.  The rate of sale on vacuum cleaners is almost 99%.  Here’s the reason for the difference.  Almost everyone will take the ““2 week safe ownership” program on air purifiers (we’ve found) but only about half will take the same program on a vacuum during repairs.  But the ones who take it almost always stick.

This also works well if a vacuum cleaner is “almost sold”.  On our vacuums, if there is a hesitancy to decide, we say, “We even give you a full 2 weeks to decide.  If you return it for any reason in 14 days, you’ll get a full refund.  Fair enough?”

The most important part is that if they say, “Yes”, then we spend about 15 minutes explaining (read demonstrating) how to use the machine.  We also give them some extras they did not expect.  Usually a dozen free vacuum cleaner bags.  If you skip the demonstration part, none of this will work.

In the last 12 months we have had 2 returns that we could not save (or exchange).

It’s like the customer went from “almost sold” to “barely sold”.  To the customer the difference is little.  To our bank account, the difference is everything.