Your marketing plan may be quite conservative or highly ambitious. In either case, an excellent place to begin is with your own customer base and those that contact your business for the services you currently offer. Given that nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population suffers from allergic illnesses, you will have a large number of customers and new callers who will immediately identify themselves as potential purchasers of allergy relief services if you ask the simple question, “Does anyone in your household suffer from allergies or asthma?”
When you get a “yes” response to that question, you have the opportunity to ask further questions, such as:
- “Do you know specifically what you or your family member is allergic to?”
- “Have you heard of environmental control?”
- “Are you taking any steps to reduce your exposure to indoor allergens?”
- What results have you obtained?”
These questions elicit information and create the opening for a conversation about allergy relief cleaning and treatment. You will need to put together a brief presentation you can use on the phone to explain these services once you receive permission. Use the brochures developed by your supplier during the face-to-face presentations, which can also be used as mailings and leave-behind pieces.
When speaking with people that do not have allergy suffers in the household, there is still an opportunity to discuss allergy prevention, particularly when there are young children in the home or a baby on the way. It’s very important that you be able to speak knowledgably about allergic illnesses in a general way and more specifically about environmental control. People with allergic illnesses often know a lot about them, and they are grateful for someone to talk to who can empathize with their problems and possibly offer solutions.
Given that allergy relief services need to be provided every six months (in extreme cases, every three months), these customers are ideal for maintenance contracts. If the customer chooses not to commit to a six-month cleaning cycle, contact them after the fifth month to schedule the next cleaning.
When offering services as preventive measure, these same procedures can be followed. Given that there may be less of sense of urgency when there is no active allergic illness, it may make sense to offer a cleaning package based on hypo-allergenic cleaning materials and allergy-preventive cleaning procedures like mattress cleaning.
You will find a good return on your investment of “Doing well by doing good.”