Should You Offer Samples?
Just about every business can boost their clients by offering free samples. Whether you offer a service or a physical product, samples can be just what some potential customers need in order to help them make the decision to buy or hire you. If you are just starting out with your home business or just want more clients, then you may want to consider offering a sample or two.
Physical Products
If you sell physical products such as soap, candles, cloth diapers, etc. all you need to do is scale your products down to make a sample size. Make up a batch of your best selling soap, but use molds that are 1/4 the size. Make some mini versions of your scented candles, or turn your famous cake into mini cupcakes for people to try.
Some products, such as cloth diapers just don´t work as scaled down models. In this case, you need to decide if you can afford to give one away (if it is a product that a happy customer will buy multiples of) or just offer a materials sample. For example, you can put together a swatch card with all the different flannels that you use in your diapers and let people feel the quality and choose the colors they want.
Make sure that your samples are readily identifiable as yours. Simply handing out a bit of soap doesn´t mean that the client will return to you. Perhaps they will use the soap a few weeks down the road and like it, but not remember where they got it from. Always make sure that your business information is attached to the sample. This can be as simple as tying a business card to your candles with a raffia cord, or you can be more inventive, but if you don´t remind people where they can get more of this fabulous product, you are going to lose out on potential customers.
Services
Service samples can be a little trickier. People like to know what they are getting for their money, but you don´t want to be losing money, either! What type of sample you offer will depend greatly on what type of business you have.
If you are a writer of any kind, you can put up a few samples on your website. An excerpt of your novel or an article that you think is one of your best will give future clients a good idea of your writing style and whether or not they want to hire you.
For those of you involved in consulting, things are a bit more difficult. Many consultants off a free ten minutes or a free evaluation. During this evaluation, you would help the person understand where problems are and how you can help them sort things out. Then they can pay for any actual sessions. However, this depends entirely on you and your business. If you are getting plenty of traffic just through word of mouth, you may not want to offer a free evaluation, but rather a discount. Any service that involves teaching, talking and helping can be turned into a sample, just like consulting.
Do you use samples already? What has your experience been?
Well samples are now an integrated part of any business. But for a business like, web designing, it becomes expensive to provide samples after samples (designs) sometimes.
This is true. However, a business just starting out may want to try doing a few sample layouts and having them up on their site for folks to look at, as well as offering a sample of their designing skills (a logos, etc.) Once you are well-known, in web designing, as you say, samples wouldn´t be necessary.
Hey I Really LOVE Your Site… I Am ALL ABOUT FREE STUFF!!! Hehe. I’ll Check Back Soon…