CHICAGO — While marketing isn’t why most dry cleaners started their business, it is a crucial element of building a successful company. Bringing new customers in and communicating with current clients to build loyalty is necessary for the long-term health of a business. Fortunately, there are more tools than ever before to connect with customers.
This was the focus of a recent online webinar conducted by the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute. Presenting “Four Digital Lead Generation Strategies that Drive Serious Results,” Cohen Wills, founder and CEO of Cleaner Marketing, and owner of Tampa, Florida-based Sage Cleaners.
In Part 1 of this series, we examined the value of Google Business Profile optimization and converting website traffic. Today, we’ll finish by offering Wills’ final two tips for driving results from your marketing efforts.
No. 3: Retargeting
Wills cautions that when dry cleaners attempt to retarget ads — that is, serve Google ads, Facebook ads, or any other type of paid ad strategy to a customer more than once — there is a tendency to overcomplicate this effort.
“There are hundreds of software packages and solutions for this, and it can get very complex,” he says. “The most important thing here is, if you do it, and especially if you do it without the help of a marketing agency, keep it simple.”
Wills says that paid online advertising has a bad reputation in the drycleaning industry as something that doesn’t work well — a stance that he believes simply isn’t true: “They work very well, but you have to know how to do it and how to set them up correctly.”
It’s vital to keep the right metrics in mind whenever you attempt to retarget a customer, he says.
“You’ll see the conversion rate of those customers — the percentage of customers who actually come in and do business with you — grows pretty dramatically every single time they see the ad,” he says. “While your click-through rate will decrease, you’ll see your conversion rate increase.”
Consider retargeting customers who are out of their pattern (such as customers who haven’t returned in a while), those who signed up but didn’t visit, and new visitors to your site that aren’t customers. While tech-savvy cleaners can find their own way through the retargeting maze, Wills says, a marketing professional can help set up programs to effectively use this strategy.
No. 4: Target Audience Acquisition
This is an area, Wills says, to which he attributes the greatest amount of route growth at Sage Cleaners. Marketing can become much more direct by knowing who your audience is — what they do, where they are and what they want from a cleaner.
“When you think of drycleaning customers, where are they?” Wills asks. For Sage, law offices and accounting firms are two main focuses. “In those two areas, every single one of them is my customer. They are high-income people that, on a percentage basis, are doing a lot of dry cleaning.”
The question Wills then asks is, “What is it that we can offer that employer that would make them excited to basically be our in-house salesperson?” For Sage, the law and accounting firms get 20% off as a corporate account and a $10 or $20 gift card for each employee so that the employer can give it to the employees as an appreciation gift.
Having a well-thought-out approach to these types of workplaces is important, Wills says. When going after this type of client, he first finds the person at the company who would be the most receptive to such an offer. There are both paid and free services — Wills has found success with Seamless.AI — that provide contact information for decision-makers at businesses.
Once the person is identified, Wills sends an email and a LinkedIn message simultaneously, and then follows up with an email two days later, then a phone call, and finally in person with a written card and a gift card.
“Even if that person doesn’t reach out in the first five days, eventually, whenever they have the idea to offer this to their employees, you’re the first person they think of every single time,” Wills says. “This makes for fantastic brand ambassadors.”
Yours for the Taking
By taking full advantage of these tools — available for little to no cost — a dry cleaner can start to see almost immediate results, Wills says.
“These are four things that I feel strongly that 90% of people aren’t doing,” he says. “By spending a little time to get an understanding of them, they can immediately apply it to their own business and be able to generate revenue.”
For Part 1 of this series, click HERE.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at [email protected].
