LAUREL, Md. — According to Dave Coyle, owner of In the Bag Cleaners in Wichita, Kansas, and founder of the Maverick Drycleaners coaching group, there are three levers behind every dollar he spends: winning more right-fit clients, getting existing clients in more often and getting them to spend more per visit, all aimed at the most affluent 20 percent of his community and client list.
Coyle spoke at a recent webinar for the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute (DLI) about marketing methods that have worked for him and his group. In Part 1 of this series, we explored why marketing should be built around being different rather than better. Today, we’ll look at clients already in the database: the ones who've drifted away, and the ones who could be spending more.
We Miss You
Lost or lapsed clients are the lowest-hanging fruit in the industry, Coyle says, and the response should scale with how valuable the client is. For his top clients, sometimes called "whales," a manager makes a personal call.
For everyone else, Coyle uses a mix of tools. One is an old-fashioned letter, mailed in a No. 10 envelope along with a small plastic boomerang: "We recently pulled records here in the bag and noticed you hadn't been in for over a month," it reads. "Like a boomerang, we want you back. When you look your best, you do your best." The letter offers 33 percent off the client's next order.
"This did really, really well," Coyle says of the boomerang mailer.
His preferred tool now is a text message: "We really miss you. Are you okay?" The question is deliberate, meant to start a conversation rather than just push a discount.
"Once you get a conversation going, you can know how you can serve people," Coyle says.
The results have been substantial. A recent text campaign reached more than 20,000 lapsed clients in two weeks and generated about $110,000 in sales, at a total texting cost of $320.
"You might have a company that could do it for you," Coyle says, noting that he now uses Simple Texting for the campaigns, after using Textedly for years.
Doors That Go Nowhere
Route growth, Coyle argues, rarely works well as a stand-alone acquisition strategy, since new route clients need to build trust before letting a stranger into their home. Instead, In the Bag focuses on converting existing retail customers, who've already built that trust, over to routes.
The challenge was getting the conversation started. Retail staff, Coyle found, are rarely comfortable pitching the route service on their own.
"It made it where the client saw this, and they started the conversation instead of it being reliant on our team member on the counter to start it," Coyle says, of a house door his team installed in each retail lobby that leads nowhere, mounted with route branding and a QR code linking to the service page.
"It's so odd to see a door that doesn't go anywhere that it gets everyone's attention," he says. The prop cost about $75 to build, including the doorknob. Combined with the underlying strategy, focusing conversion efforts on the top 20 percent of the client list, In the Bag's route business is up 55 percent over last year.
"We really focus on getting our top 20 percent of the community to retail. And then we focus on getting our top 20 percent of clients to route and subscriptions," Coyle says. A client on botha route and a subscription plan, he adds, is close to bulletproof against losing them to a competitor.
Farming Dream Neighborhoods
Coyle's fifth strategy asks operators to pick five to 15 of the most affluent neighborhoods in their market, based on home values, and treat them like a plot of land to be farmed continuously rather than hit once.
The tool is the U.S. Postal Service's Every Door Direct Mail program, which allows a business to mail an entire carrier route, typically 500 to 600 homes, at a relatively low cost. Coyle sends a mailer to his dream neighborhoods two to four times a year, aiming for seasonal changes in spring and fall.
He's candid about expectations. At any given time, he says, only about 3 percent of prospective clients are ready to buy, which keeps typical direct mail response rates around 2 percent even when the piece is done well. Coyle says he's seen his own return climb to 8 or 9 percent by following direct-response principles closely.
The real payoff, he says, comes from repetition inside the same neighborhoods rather than any single mailing.
"You gain momentum in a neighborhood. You start seeing trucks around," Coyle says. "These affluent clients don't want to be last to the party."
Come back Thursday for the conclusion of this series, when Coyle covers recurring revenue subscriptions, a low-cost cleaning offer that keeps clients coming back, and the 10 rules he uses to check every piece of marketing before it goes out. For Part 1, click HERE.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at [email protected].
