5 Essential Steps to Launch Your Rental Offer

Consumer expectations have radically evolved: new conscious consumers are gradually moving away from ownership.

They no longer need to own a product to use it. What matters now is having easy and flexible access to it.

Thus, they think month-to-month in the short term: they buy fewer and fewer goods that serve little purpose and opt for other consumption modes that are more economical and responsible, such as rental.

How to launch a rental offer step by step?

Why Launch a Rental Offer?

Rental is a model that increasingly appeals to consumers. 76% of French people prefer renting a product rather than buying it.

Mindsets are changing: with growing environmental awareness, customers prefer to buy fewer goods that they barely use and opt for other consumption modes that are more economical and responsible, such as rental.

What are other reasons that encourage businesses to offer rental services?

The 7 Strategic Advantages of Rental

• Innovate: the rental model allows testing a new model at lower cost, helping customers access quality products at competitive prices while preserving the environment.

• Bypass ownership constraints to relieve customers of repair or maintenance obligations.

• Reach new customers: rental allows reaching new clientele who don't want (or can't) invest in purchasing expensive products.

• Increase product lifespan: rental optimizes utilization rates, preserves resources, and extends the usage phase of products.

• Transform occasional buyers into regular customers: the rental model transforms customer relationships and multiplies touchpoints with customers throughout the lifecycle.

• Better customer retention: acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 10 times more than retaining an existing one. The rental model significantly reduces acquisition costs.

• Generate recurring and predictable revenue: by definition, rental is a long-term relationship where it's easier to forecast and generate recurring revenue, unlike one-time sales.

How to Launch a Rental Offer Step by Step?

Here's how to launch your first rental offer step by step.

#1 — Identify the Right Rental Offer

Designing a new rental offer begins with thorough analysis of consumer needs.

This step is essential to ensure your future offer will find a market.

If you already sell your products, you certainly have some data to begin your analysis work, namely:

Key Questions for Analyzing Your Existing Market

• How do your customers consume your products?
• What specific need do your products address?
• How frequently do your customers buy your products?
• What volume do they purchase?

You must then define your rental offer's objectives. In other words, why do you want to launch rental?

You can choose one or several of these objectives:

Possible Strategic Objectives

• Retain your existing customers (if you already have a business and are considering launching a rental offer)

• Reach new customers (for example, those who would be interested in your products but want to access them more economically or not worry about ownership constraints).

• Generate more traffic in physical stores (if you have both online and offline business) to establish strong customer relationships and avoid delivery barriers.

• Ensure (generate) recurring revenue.

• Increase your sales with current inventory (inventory turnover).

Next, you'll need to define the types of products to offer for rental.

This step is important because not all products are suitable for rental. Indeed, it's recommended to estimate the "lifespan" of each item before putting it up for rental.

This involves determining how many times it can be "reused" (rented) before its end of life and whether it can then be resold second-hand.

#2 — Build Your Rental Offer

Once you've determined your target's needs and the product(s) you want to offer for rental, it's time to build your offer.

To do this:

The 3 Pillars of Building Your Offer

• Define your offer's pricing: analyze your rental offer's profitability, considering the lifespan of each product you want to rent.

• Define the type of rental you want to offer. Following the product logic and your target's habits, you can choose between several rental types: date-to-date, long-term, subscription-based, or rental with purchase option.

• Define inventory dedicated to rental: what percentage of your products do you want to reserve for rental? Depending on the model you adopt, you can allocate only part of your products to rental and keep a fraction reserved for sales.

#3 — Carefully Choose Your Partners

As a business owner, you already have many things to manage.

Many entrepreneurs considering launching a rental offer encounter technical difficulties. Indeed, it can quickly become time-consuming (and very expensive) to consider building your own technical solutions from scratch.

Thus, you can partner with a specialized provider for:

Essential Technical Solutions

• Setting up your rental platform: it's important to choose an agile platform offering powerful functionalities while ensuring an optimized, secure, and fast process.

• Choosing your payment solution: this is one of the main challenges of launching a web-based rental offer. Your payment solution must be flexible, secure, and adapted to recurring payments.

• Refurbishment management: Product restoration is essential when offering your products for rental. It's a product life extension process, so you can rent them as long as possible. At the end of each rental, it's possible to restore the product and give it back its original glory. Not only does this give new life to a product, but it also reduces the need for raw materials, which positively impacts pollution reduction and greenhouse gas emissions. It's a win-win situation for consumers and the environment!

Depending on your business type, you can opt for an internalized service or establish a partnership with a specialized company.

To learn more about rental platform models, check this article!

• Choosing the logistics solution: in addition to your traditional sales model, in the rental model, you'll need to rethink your logistics to make goods available to customers and find solutions for material recovery at the end of rental. Managing round trips, quality control, and resale circuits are key steps in a rental business.

#4 — Prepare and Launch Your Offer

Once you've determined your offer, you'll need to prepare its launch.

Several steps are necessary to successfully carry out this operation:

Launch Checklist

• Creating your rental website: to make your new offer known and propose it to your customers. Different from a traditional e-commerce store, this platform must handle the rental process management from A to Z.

• Connecting your web and retail (offline) store: if you already have an online store and/or physical store, associate your new platform with your existing store to benefit from current traffic.

• Configuring offers: this involves materializing the different options of your offers.

• Connecting your payment solution: the payment solution you've chosen must be well adapted to rental specificities.

• Stock synchronization: your rental platform must be able to synchronize inventory in real-time.

• Billing management: to save time, your platform should integrate an automatic billing solution or easily connect to the billing tool you already use.

• Managing and tracking product returns and inventory: the tool you've chosen must allow you to track inventory and product returns clearly and smoothly.

#5 — Manage and Monitor Your Rental Offer

Once your offer is launched, you must anticipate its monitoring procedures:

Operational Management Dashboard

Domain	Key Actions
Product tracking	Ensure detailed tracking of your items' lives and what they bring you
Planning	Manage rental calendars
Analytics	Drive detailed views of your customers, products, and transactions
Logistics	Track shipments and inventory in real-time
Multi-site	Manage inventory at each point of sale
Operations	Ensure daily synthesis of pickups and returns from each store in your network
Payments	Collect payments online, by SMS, or in-store
Decision-making	Access clear statistics to make quick decisions and maximize your revenue

Launching a rental offer isn't necessarily a time-consuming or expensive mission. The key is partnering with trusted partners who already have technology and experience in launching this type of offer.

Evolution Towards Omnichannel

Rental offers evolve through digitalization and an omnichannel strategy, where digital channels play a crucial role.

In a multichannel and digital marketing strategy, customer relationship management is paramount.

Emphasis is placed on customer knowledge and customer journey to personalize relationships, thus offering an enriched customer experience.

Using customer data and Big Data helps improve this knowledge, leading to more targeted marketing actions.

Personalization and Loyalty

Segmentation and relationship enrichment through relationship programs and specific mailings strengthen the bond with each customer and improve the shopping experience.

Thus, a multichannel and connected customer relationship is essential to retain new customers and offer a personalized and integrated experience.

Optimizing the customer experience and personalizing services are essential to retain customers and better meet their expectations.

Tools and Technologies

Inbound marketing and effective CRM use allow targeting and understanding customer journeys.

These digital levers transform customer engagement into a personalized relationship, thus increasing customer satisfaction and conversion rates.

Digital transformation with tools like ZIQY is crucial for effectively managing this new approach to personalized services.

This is the case with ZIQY's new rental solution, chosen by companies like Norauto, Eram Group, and Decathlon to launch their rental offers.

Do you want to transform your product offer into a service offer? You can entrust the creation of your entire value chain to ZIQY.

Test our platform for free.