Once you have started your dry cleaning and/or laundry pickup and delivery service there are 2 important things you need to develop for it to succeed: Marketing and Customer Retention.
Marketing:
In today’s market, nobody in your area will book in with your services if they have not heard of you. Therefore marketing is essential in getting your brand and services out to your customer base. I suggest looking into these 4 main forms of marketing to grow your business:
1. Targeting Your Local Area
Targeting your area of service is a great way to effectively grow your service. This can be through simple fliers through doors, messages to community websites/forums and buying ads in local newspapers/magazines.
As you know your area best, think of the best ways to interact with your local community. More tech-savvy communities will respond better to online interaction attempts, whereas traditional areas will respond better to traditional media. Overall, it may be best to try and see where you get a good amount of customer response. But overall it is a better idea to try and appeal to a younger audience who are more engaged with apps and booking tools. This is because they are the most likely to take up and adapt to your new offering.
2. SEO
SEO (search engine optimisation) is an especially effective tool in the Dry-cleaning/laundry industry. This is because of a high volume of people simply Google ‘dry cleaner near me’ or something similar. If you are able to put yourself at the top of your search rankings, especially if you have an online booking tool, you will be well placed to gain customers online. Just note, this does not need to be on a large scale you can locally target your SEO so you only reach the people who can actually book with you.
For more info on structuring google ads and SEO see our blog article on how to use google ads here > How To Use Google Ads
3. Social Media
Social Media is an extremely useful tool when it comes to marketing. You have the ability to specifically target the people you are looking to convert as a customer. This can be done by an area, age and every other way of narrowing your customer base down.
Here is a guide to using social media marketing > Social Marketing
4. Customer Referrals
Using your current customer base is one of the best ways to actively grow your business. The customers you have are the best ambassadors to get new people, such as their friends and families to use your services. If they are happy customers, it is likely they will be happy to spread the word and bring in others.
To push this you can use the discount services available in CleanCloud to incentivize current customers to refer others and incentivise new customers to join, such as discount codes. I will talk about this in more detail in the Retention section of this article.
Customer Retention:
Keeping a current customer is more valuable than getting a new customer, especially if you can get them to increase and grow the amount of business they do with you. There are a number of ways to increase your customer retention rates. However, I identify these 4 to be areas to focus on to grow your pickup and delivery service:
1. Simple Booking Service
Having an easy to use customer booking service is essential to growing your service. This is adaptable to your market, in some areas simple to book pickup tools will work better than customers inputting exactly what they are giving you. Through the App settings in CleanCloud, you are able to customise these options to suit your exact market and customer base, ensuring high retention rates.
2. Good Organisation
A well-organised system from the driver side to the store management is key. Especially if it gives your customers visibility of what is happening during the process. With our Drivers app and customer app, your customers and drivers will be able to see exactly what needs to be done and the process of their orders. By providing this level of customer service, you are giving customers a piece of mind that their items are being treated properly.
Finally, the driver's app and the system itself ensures that you keep track of and do not lose any items. This will help reduce the number of customer issues that your store faces and ensure they are more likely to book with you again. As a result, by ensuring a good organisational structure you are ensuring your business grows.
3. Incentives
In CleanCloud you have the option to enable loyalty rewards to customers who continue to book with you. Do not underestimate how useful these can be, especially to incentivising customers to continue to use you. Through loyalty points, customers can accumulate credit in proportion to the amount they spend with you. You can define how much this credit is in proportion, as customers build credit they are likely to use this credit with you.
The second option is using loyalty rules to encourage customers to continually book in orders with you. These discount rules can be a percentage discount in their order value if a customer spends more than a certain amount or has more than a certain amount of orders in the past few days. E.g. a customer spends more than $100 with you in the past 14 days they receive a 10% discount on their next order. Through this form of loyalty rule, you can encourage larger customers to continue to use your services. The more they use your services, the more they are likely to continue to use them.
For more information on the discounts available through CleanCloud have a look at the following link. > Loyalty Discounts
4. Recurring Services
One of the most convenient and profitable ways to grow your pickup and delivery service through existing customers is to schedule recurring pickups and deliveries. When customers book recurring pickups you are ensuring you have a steady stream of business happening regularly. Therefore, the more recurring pickups you can book in the more you can grow your pickup and delivery service. Booking in a recurring service is easy to do through CleanCloud, it can happen in the store, through the app or through the website.
5. Non-Active Customer Re-targeting
There is nothing worse than losing out on old customers no longer booking in orders with you. Through the metrics section in CleanCloud, you can export a list of customers with no recent orders. With this list, you can send through email marketing messages and offers through to re-incentivise old customers to use your services again. This is significantly cheaper than trying to gain new business. Not only do you have their details and preferences at hand, but they also have experience of your service. Therefore you are able to grow your pickup and delivery service based on past customers.
6. Product Performance
Through the metrics page, you are able to see your order performance, revenues and more. However, for the purposes of growing your pickup and delivery business, you can go into your top selling items and refine by delivery contribution. From here you can see what products are popular with customers who are ordering through pickups and deliveries. With this information, you can structure marketing campaigns and more to ensure you can target what your consumer base wants.
Furthermore, with this information, you can see the difference between what is popular in your store versus the app and appeal to your customer base to increase the profitability of some items that are ordered.
Overall, there are a number of tools at your disposal through CleanClouds software and through online platforms that can significantly help to grow your pickup and delivery dry cleaning/laundry service. If you would like more information get in touch with us directly or alternatively start a trial with us with the links below.