Renegade Conservatory Guy

In these extremely challenging times for conservatory and double glazing companies it is vitally important that sales enquiries continue to flood in. With less potential clients in the marketplace this means ensuring your competitors don’t get the enquiry - you do!

In otherwords, to ensure your double glazing business succeeds in the coming years then you need to take market share from your competitors by focussing on lead generation and making sales.

So, I have itemised the 5 best ways to generate leads (and sales) as follows:

1. Do a good job.

This may seem obvious but the best way to ensure the survival and profitability of your double glazing company is to ensure you look after your customers. By not cutting corners, by installing good quality products, by providing a great customer service you will find future business will take care of itself.

You will pick up plenty of recommendations - the life blood of all good window businesses. Crucially, it is easier to sell a conservatory on a home, when the next door neighbour has already had your company install one, and they are singing your praises.

And, recommendations are free! You don’t need to have a massive advertising budget when you have a ready supply of recommendations and good will.

Also, by doing a good job, you will ensure that you get loyalty from your existing customers when they wish to purchase again - when they need more work doing, or move house. Also, customers who are already happy with you, or have been strongly recommended, are less likely to get other quotes or try to chip you down on price.

I would recommend that you don’t just wait for this business to come in. Encourage it by offering your happy customers incentives to recommend you by developing a ‘recommend-a-friend scheme’. Also, work your database, especially during the off-peak periods. We regularly mail shot our existing customers in December with special offers, so we can keep our fitters busy in January and February.

Building a great reputation is the key to a successful business, but to grow a business you also need to look at investing in advertising.

2. Internet

I believe that online advertising is the future!

Most window companies haven’t a clue when it comes to online marketing, which makes it so much easier for those that do pay attention to it to succeed. The national companies, such as Safestyle UK and Anglian are having real success online, but most of the smaller regional companies are way behind.

So often I hear the owners of companies stating ‘We have a website but we don’t get much from it’. To me it’s a bit like stating:

‘We have a showroom in the middle of no-where, but no one ever comes through the door!’

Websites need constant attention to make them get seen and deliver results.

We have recently improved our websites to ensure the user experience is better. From every page there are clear calls to action:

The telephone number is always in the top right hand corner and there’s always somebody at the end of the line 24/7.

There are clear prompts for people to make an enquiry, request a brochure and request a quotation.

I also feel we have good content, and it is easy for customers to find the products they are interested in.

But, as our website is our online showroom, we ensure it is well positioned on the busiest highway around - Google!

To appear well on Google, we have an SEO company who ensure the keywords, Meta tags and coding is optimised to ensure it is Google friendly for terms important to us, such as conservatories wakefield. The SEO company also continues to build links to our websites which improves our positioning subsequently on Google and other search engines.

But Google can be fickle, and it takes time for SEO to start working fully, so you can have a quick fix by using Google Adwords.

Pay per click allows you to target the search terms you feel your customers are searching on, such as conservatories wakefield or double glazing yorkshire, and bid to be at the top of Google’s search listings.

It’s not easy to get your Adwords campaign working fully, but is definitely worth the effort. As you can see from the graph below our Conservatory Outlet website has made real progress over the last few weeks at generating quality leads:

It is worth mentioning also that internet leads are as strong (if not stronger) than other advertising lead sources.

You can purchase leads from specialist lead generating websites, such as Trusted Local Suppliers, Price Engines and eBuilders, but my experience is that only leads from your own website are good quality enquiries.

3. TV advertising

In the past, we’ve put large amounts into TV advertising with mixed results.

The only option for regional window companies is to advertise with ITV, as you can choose to just broadcast from local transmitters. We could not advertise on Sky, for example, as we would waste leads in areas we don’t have the ability to install.

But, it is important that the advert is right. We invested £250,000 in this advert a few years ago and did very badly from it:

From memory we generated around £750,000 worth of sales, so the numbers clearly did not add up.

However, more recently we decided to give TV another go with this advert for West Yorkshire Windows:

The advert is clearly cheesy and watching my brother, Andrew, in front of camera makes me cringe - but we found the showroom was full of customers and the telephone was ringing after every advert. It’s no good having a fancy advert and no enquiries, better to have a tacky advert that generates sales if you ask me.

We then rolled the advert out to the full Yorkshire TV region and added our other dealers in the advert. We also now have the advert now running in the Granada region with different special offers for the conservatory showrooms in the North West.

With only 30 seconds to get your message across, it’s important that you stand out and give people a reason to call. Safestyle UK have been experts at this for many years - in fact I’d go as far as to say they are the only double glazing company in the UK which has fully understood how to generate leads from the TV.

TV is also important for building brand awareness. We have found that all other lead sources improve when we are advertising on TV as people recognise the name.

I appreciate smaller companies just don’t have the money to throw at ITV, but for medium sized installers a decent campaign can cost around £25,000.

4. Radio

Like TV advertising, Radio can be great for building brand awareness. When we first advertised on a local radio station we were disappointed with the results - we didn’t get many leads and felt we’d wasted the money.

But, when we decided to leave a campaign running for months, we found the leads gradually came, and after a while we suddenly realised everyone knew who we are. People trust names they know, so when they look through the Yellow Pages, or search on Google they are more likely to ring the company they recognise than the ones they’ve never heard of.

In Yorkshire we have now advertised on Real Radio pretty much every week for 4 years, and as the station is well listened to, we find that people are aware of West Yorkshire Windows and our Conservatory Outlet showrooms.

5. Leaflet dropping

We’ve tried leaflet dropping in numerous ways, but the only reliable way to do it seems to be by using the Royal Mail Door-To-Door campaign.

The beauty of using the Royal Mail is that you can target specific postcode areas. So if WF4 4 is a nice housing estate then you target that area, but if WF4 3 is mostly council houses you leave that area alone.

Obviously, most people throw your leaflet in the bin, but it’s a numbers game and if your leaflet lands on the door step when someone is just thinking about a conservatory or windows and doors then you stand a good chance of getting the chance of quoting.

Advertising we don’t use:

Tele-canvassing
We will not use tele-canvassing. I don’t like receiving these calls from companies myself, and I feel it’s old hat. By pestering people in this way all you’re going to do is create your company a bad reputation and the industry as a whole.

Foot canvassing
Again - old hat and bad for the industry’s reputation.

Newspapers
We haven’t advertised in newspapers for years. I feel it’s a dying advertising medium, and you tend to be competing with all the cheap companies who are likely to cease trading, do a bit job and cut margins.

There are clearly many other ways to generate sales, such as Yellow Pages, having stands at exhibitions etc. But, for me, the smart money is being invested in online advertising and that’s the way we will be focussing on in the future!