#1 Free Lead-Gen Lever in Appliance Repair: Expand Your Hours
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#1 Free Lead-Gen Lever in Appliance Repair: Expand Your Hours
Background
Lead generation is a loaded topic which deserves a book in itself. One of the problems is there's no silver bullet and there's no fast bullet. Creating an impenetrable mountain of renewable ongoing leads takes a few years and it takes a lot of effort. However there are a few shortcuts you can get started with. This is one of them.
The single greatest thing you can do is expand your business hours on your Google Profile and anywhere else found from 5:00 AM in the morning to 11:00 PM at night, seven days a week. It's free. This will generate leads starting today.
Your competitors are likely spending anywhere from $1 to $10,000 a month on ads and you can get them because they're fighting for ads during primetime 9am-4pm. You can get them for free by simply pressing a button.
How Google Works ( to an extent )
Google's customers are its searchers. For example, if a person searches for "Chinese food in New York," the customer is the person looking for Chinese food and Google's job is to show the person the most relevant link the most relevant business. Google's motive is to appease their customers so they keep coming back and making Google money. The question becomes "How does Google determine who is the best option for our searchers? How is it going to show Chinese food restaurants in New York?
This is a very loaded question that cannot be answered too easily here. Google has stated they evaluate over 200 parameters to determine search results. But we know for a service-based business such as appliance repair naturally availability is going to be a big, e.g. who's open right now? Because again a customer with high intent to do a repair probably wants a company to be open. This is especially true for the appliance repair line of work because a lot of customers have an urgent need or it's an emergency need in their mind.
So I do speculate that Google probably looks at availability as opposed to say searching for a lawyer which that's probably never an emergency. It could probably be delayed until tomorrow or whenever. I am assuming that Google considers availability a high ranking factor for service-based businesses.
The Solution ( Free & Competitors Wont Do It )
With this said the single greatest thing you can do TODAY which is FREE is expand your business hours in your Google My Business profile to an extremely wide dragnet such as 5 a.m. in the morning to 11 p.m. at night, seven days a week. The benefits:
Common Rebuttals & Answers
"I don't want to answer my phones at crazy hours"
Answer: You don't have to! If you can answer, great. If you can't, that's okay. Remember the last time you called Walmart and no one ever answered when you called the sporting department. Remember the last time you called your local MVD to get information on your driver's license and nobody answered, you left a voicemail. Business hours are not a guarantee someone will answer. This is true of you. Our goal is just to cast a wide net and have people call you first AND have google show you FIRST.
A lot of people will also assume that calling and leaving a voicemail is the last thing they have to do. Some customers especially older patient customers which are the best customers coincidentally will leave a voicemail and not seek out any further help. Of course you also have customers that are serial voicemail depositors and we'll keep calling until someone answers. We call these people impatient and we don't want them anyway.
"I have a life"
Answer: most of us have conflicting needs: time off, quality of life, and work. If you're reading this article, you probably have a burning need for generating COD calls more than having a perfect banker's schedule. This is simply about temporarily expanding your options to get more calls so you can get the quality of life you're interested in the long run. There's no implication that you have to actually do calls from 5am - till 11pm at night or even answer the phone consistently during these hours. This is about casting a wide net to get as many calls and get promoted in Google search results
"Customers will be upset if I don't answer the phone and pick it up during my stated hours"
Answer: To date I have not had one customer complain that I was not able to answer during business hours that are stated. Most people understand that with appliance repair being dominated by small one- and two-man band shops, they may or may not get a call and they will get the call returned by voicemail at some point. To date I never had a customer ask me why I didn't answer during my stated hours.
"I heard Google will punish businesses with spurious hours"
Answer: This could be an issue. The problem is Google does not state how they verify business listings. They won't give away inside information for a manipulation. But I have seen on Google business profiles that "hours verified by Google phone call." It is likely that Google does use bots to verify business listings. I have not heard of any actual reports about it, a profile being suspended because the phones are answered. I understand that Google is suspicious of over 24-hour listings so that's why I recommend 5 in the morning till 11:00 PM at night in the short term. What I do recommend is answering the phone as much as possible after you change your hours. That way Google will be satisfied if they do send one of the bots to answer the phone. I can't imagine that Google regularly audits phone calls. Another site is I use Grasshopper & OpenPhone, these phone systems answer the phone and forward the call to me. Technically it's answering the phone gives when it gives the customer a IVR tree of options. I imagine that Google assumes this is a person answering. I'm not sure on this but as always when dealing with Google there are unknown unknowns. My mitigation is simply expanding hours 5am to 11:00 PM at night and answering wherever possible, at least temporarily.
What Does Google Call Analytics Show?
Here's what our Google business profile shows: we get the majority of our calls prior to 9:00 a.m. and then we get another bumper crop of calls after 5:00 p.m. By not expanding your hours you're literally giving away most of your calls to competitors for free. Keep in mind during business hours people are also running PPC ads. What this means is your competitors are probably spending anywhere from $1 to $5,000 a month fighting for calls from 9am to 4pm and you can get them for free after hours. Crazy huh?
The Results
Again you don't have to answer the phone necessarily. As a matter of fact I almost never answer the phone on Sunday. But look what I wake up to on a Monday morning: a basket full of COD calls ready to go. This is from the phone system we use called Grasshopper which is amazing because it has a mobile app and a desktop app. Even if you want to randomly answer a couple of calls and you have a CSR, you can set it up so either you see the calls on your phone or your CSR and still keep things separate from your personal number. You can always just turn this app off if you don't feel like bothering.
Here is a screenshot from a Monday morning. I woke up with over 10 COD calls ready to go. And of course Grasshopper gives you transcriptions so you can easily just thumb through the ones you desire the most first. Just read the voice mail transcriptions. For example I'm returning the calls about dryers and ovens not heating first..
Next Level Power Upgrade
So you can't answer the calls. What if you had a system that could do so around the clock? Well you can. The next level upgrade to this system is to take our now widened dragnet and to close the book rate. This is done by using an autoresponder to engage the customer and then a booking link to get them to book automatically.
A lot of your CRMs already have a booking link. For example we use Fieldpulse which has an online booking link, despite that we use an external ZenBooker for online booking. It is silky smooth and extremely customizable. Your CRM may not be all you have to do is simply transfer the Zenbooker bookings into your CRM manually by hand. If it sounds like a lot of work, it's not. I mean we're talking 10 minutes of work to book 10 calls while you're sleeping. Pretty good right?
We recommend using Grasshopper or OpenPhone to set up an auto-text responder if you're not able to all the calls during odd hours.
Step by Step Deadly Combo / Auto Responder with online booking
Insert your ZenBooker online link into your text message autoresponder
Manually Transfer To CRM
In this case we use Fieldpulse. Simply just add these into the program each morning as jobs.
The Results #2
About half of my calls are after-hours calls where my competitors won't answer the phone or has limited hours. Of these half, I capture about half of them. The other ones I may not have timed results. This results in about 10 cod calls a week while I'm sleeping. I literally get about 10 cod calls asleep when I'm unavailable or responder of the day or even just not able to respond after hours. This entire setup can be free but in our case we chose to add Zenbooker which is about $29 monthly
Other COD Links
Quick & Dirty Lead Generation Article
Tools Used
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