You’ve done it! If you’ve been following along so far, you’ve built compelling pet care offerings that leverage customer psychology, packaged your offer with the services and add-ons your customers care about, and priced it appropriately. You’ve also optimized the way customers see your offers and trained your staff on how to best sell them. Whew!
Now that you’re here, I don’t advise changing your offers too often - you could end up confusing customers and your staff. To give yourself the ability to quickly make changes for seasonality and demand, I suggest building out all the offers you might use ahead of time and giving each a unique name. Then, you can activate or deactivate offers based on seasonality and demand. Of course, sometimes you will want to update your core offerings. Here are a few situations when it may be appropriate to revisit your offers:
If one of your offers hasn’t been selling well, it’s worth investigating. Sometimes, a simple fix — like changing the name — can make a big difference. For example, I used to sell an offer aimed at older dogs called the Geriatric Package. As you might imagine, it wasn’t very popular. When I renamed it to the Senior Package, it suddenly saw a lot more engagement!
In other cases, you may need to dig deeper. It’s possible that the service you included as an add-on isn’t as valuable to customers as others. Use data to drive your decisions and analyze what works and what doesn’t.
If you know you’re about to approach a peak period — whether that’s a specific season or a holiday — consider using an offer blackout rule to prevent customers from booking your most basic offers. This strategy naturally nudges customers towards those middle and higher-end offers, without needing to change what’s in each offer. This is a great way to take advantage of your busy seasons and drive more revenue through your existing offerings. Conversely, during slower periods, you want to prioritize availability and value.
You can learn about offer blackouts and other approaches toward managing revenue during peak and off-peak periods in my Revenue Management Guide.
Tip: Lean into holidays
Holidays are an excellent opportunity to enhance your offers with unique services you don't typically offer throughout the year. For example, you can offer a photo shoot with Santa during the holiday season or advertise a stress-free offer around the Fourth of July. Draw inspiration from local events as well. Being based in Indianapolis, I know that Memorial Day weekend is significant because of the Indy 500. This would be a perfect time to introduce a race day-themed offer.
At our facility, we have our peak and off-peak periods mapped out so we can be proactive about changes to offers and our pricing. It is amazing how predictable demand for our pet care facility is year over year. Take a look at this year over year graph of demand and how amazingly consistent it is each year.
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