This blog post will show you how we effectively leverage the daily discount feature to organize our bookings and company better. In the home cleaning industry, at least for our company, some spots fill out faster than others. Typically, those quickly booked spots are weekend spots, with Mondays being the slowest. Monday spots for us also have many providers who want to work those days compared to wanting to work the weekends. 

Can you spot the problem? There are many openings on Mondays, but customers prefer weekends, yet fewer providers want to work those days. This is where we leverage the daily discount feature to push clients towards Mondays.

We’ve been offering a $10 discount to push clients to book for a Monday for many years. Before this feature was introduced inside BookingKoala, we would offer this as an option over the phone. Today it’s also displayed on the booking form:

Keep in mind we turn off this option when we are understaffed. This often happens when we start to pick up bookings and don’t have enough cleaners to meet demand. We turn off the option when this happens because we don’t want to offer an extra $10 discount when all of our spots fill up for the week. When that happens, we also stop sending out coupons via emails/SMS because we don’t want to hand out discounts when all of our spots are full from folks willing to pay full price.

Back when we were scaling quickly from 1 million to 2 million in revenue, we would use this tactic on Mondays and Tuesdays. We offered $20 OFF for Mondays and $10 OFF for Tuesdays since Tuesdays would always be the 2nd slowest day of the week. This would help us distribute the work evenly and ensure there was enough work for providers who worked those slow days. Keep in mind that sometimes you need to take a hit and make sure your Providers have enough work to be happy. So if it’s slower on certain days, you may want to introduce something like this, so their schedules fill up. You’re still going to be making money because otherwise, there would be a lot of openings left early in the week.

Bonus tip based on years of experience

If you’re starting out in the home cleaning industry (I assume many similar industries will have the same benefit), focus on providing cleanings on Sundays (we offer cleanings on those days but no customer service support). Many clients want their homes cleaned on Sundays, but very few services offer cleanings on Sundays. It’s an excellent opportunity to charge more and get the clients that no other service wants to service. This will give you an edge when starting your business.

When doing this, you’ll find that many Providers will choose not to work Sundays, but if you tell them they will make more money and there will be more work, some will change their minds. Keep in mind this may change since I wrote this blog post, and enough people may start offering services on Sundays.