When it comes to a rental business, the customer is your king. Customer satisfaction is the key to your business growth. For this purpose, provide your customers with choices, offer helpful solutions and define different packages for them. While some customers are on the lookout for an affordable rental, others do not want to compromise on facilities and convenience.
The rental business industry is full of competition. Keep an eye on your competitors and see what attractive offers they have for their customers. Accordingly, you can plan with your marketing team and come up with exciting deals. Make it clear how your customers can benefit from your services and products. You have to make sure that your product catalog appeal to your customer’s sense of worth.
1. The comfort of online rental reservations and payments
It is quite simple. Today, everyone wants things to be available ‘instantly’. If you want to attract more customers to your rental business and improve the overall rental experience, you need to offer them the ability to reserve equipment online and make online payments effortlessly.
The capability to make reservations or bookings online is going to positively impact the overall rental experience. This will drive more and more customers expecting you to offer the ability to reserve equipment online. If you don’t, you might just fall behind the competition.
Giving your customers a chance to immediately browse through your business’s online inventory surely is among the top desired features as it marks the beginning of improved customer experience.
After reserving equipment or any other item online, customers should be able to make payments online as well. Most people find online payments very convenient and useful. You can use apps like Square, PayPal, Stripe or simply a rental software that integrates well with these apps.
For regular rental customers, you can maintain a customer profile so the repeated renters can have a more seamless experience. That’s the essence of a rental software – you can do all that and more using a central system for your rental business.
Read more: Understanding Online Rental Software: Benefits Of Moving Your Business To Cloud
2. The chance to improve your brand
It won’t be wrong to say that you live and die by your reputation. That is basically your brand. You should want your business to stand for something that will instantly grab people’s attention. Sit down and think about it. Are you known for renting out your diverse and large equipment fleet? Is it your heavy duty machines or party items like tents? Maybe a very specialized market niche like car rentals?
Plan out something to emphasize things that are going to improve your reputation.
Customers usually rely on the brand or the price when opting for the company they should go for. In case the criterion of a brand is not clear, then the decision is eventually based on price. It is important for rental companies to create a clear brand position so that the customers in the market find what they connote with quality.
For instance, customers of car rental companies might connote quality with a foreign brand name, providing series of higher prices than the competition, providing only one type of cars to be associated with or the focus of services.
You need to understand how your customers perceive your brand and work on improving the brand by providing quality services, regular discounts, and promotions. Put up an offer or a promotion and market it, your customers are going to be attracted to you like a moth to a candle.
There are ways to position your products through a rental app and put discounts on various items in your catalog.
3. The opportunity to grow by focusing more on your existing customers
When you are a new rental business, it is all about attracting potential customers. You can only do that by addressing the needs of your customers by keeping your service available.
Stay where your customers need you most. An established business can easily attract customers by its brand name but a new business is required to be where its customers are. For instance, a car rental service should operate nearby a hotel chain where tourists can utilize their rental services.
On the flip side, established businesses should focus on their existing customers and work on increasing their satisfaction levels. It is not easy to earn a new customer no matter what the industry. Keeping your current customers happy ensures the continuity of your business and also attracts new customers.
You can offer bundled services to sell more than one service at a good price. In addition to this, you can also create loyalty programs for customers who repeatedly use your service.
4. The payoff by investing in digital marketing and bringing the change
Digital marketing – that includes social media marketing, email marketing, etc is growing for a reason. It helps to attract potential customers and attain more visibility in the fastest way possible. You need to create awareness of your rental business by using marketing methods that ensure improved return on investment.
You can communicate your brand services and value offered by using digital marketing. For instance, email marketing can be helpful as it targets a specific list of customers and measures their response rate.
Rental businesses like equipment rentals or car rentals can be very competitive, price-sensitive and fast-moving. If you really want to win, you need to drive the change and be the market leader in how you market your product or service, how you reach your customers, and what you offer.
After all, in the end, what you are offering is no different than what others belonging to the same industry are offering. You can be different in how you offer it.
5. The need to sell with uniqueness by hiring the right people
The key people in your organization and their motivation to work for you matters a lot. After all, at the end of the day, it is these people who make your business tick. The success of a rental business depends on the staff in place which is why you need to hire excellent people. You need to have people who have the know-how to do their job and deal with customers well.
Now if you have skeletons in your closet just because you hired your cousin who could not find his way out of the paper bag, it is high time you get rid of him. You need to sell your rental services professionally and you have probably got some time to review your key staff and plan out a strategy to upgrade them if needed.
You need to make sure your employees deal with your customers well. For instance, they need to guide them regarding specifications of the items to be rented, address customer complaints, resolve their issues, AND pitch in with a unique way.
6. Offer customers the comfort of curbside pickup during a pandemic
One important thing to keep customers happy, even during a pandemic, is to offer them the option to pick items up either in-store or curbside. This way, the need for any human contact, and the possible risk of infection is completely eliminated.
You can also add an announcement on your site that talks about all precautions you are taking to sanitize the package before it is ready for pickup. For example, talk about how you wipe down the rental items before putting them in the package, and then sterilize the package again once it’s packed and ready for pickup. No one touches the package again until the customer is here to pick it up.
While there is still a slight chance of virus transfer from a package, it is still significantly less than interacting with people.
Even in-store or curbside pickups can get crowded. To deal with this problem, you can ensure social distancing by specifying pickup time slots that customers can choose from. You can also further specify the number of customers that can choose a particular slot.
Share your queries about our rental business software
Without a doubt, a rental and retail business comes with challenges and unique needs. A rental business management software that addresses these needs is not just useful – it’s essential for your business. EZRentOut is a rental software for businesses, used extensively by organizations and rental businesses globally.
It comes with a bundle of awesome features. These can be used for streamlined rental management to increase business productivity and revenue – helping you attract more customers.
Learn more: EZRentOut’s Webstore Blueprint: The Rental Software Guide to Growing Your Online Business
For more assistance, drop us an email at support@ezo.io
