How to Grow Your Laundry Business?
Introduction to How to Grow Your Laundry Business
How to grow your laundry business and dry cleaners business is a question for the owners of this business. The laundry and dry cleaning business is a recession-proof business around the globe. What are the things needed for laundry business?
Apart from being a profitable business, this industry is less hit by the downturn in the economy. But still, all the laundry owners and Dry Cleaners are not Milliners. The major reason behind this is unorganized management.
Therefore, business owners are not able to make strategic business-oriented decisions. Here we will be discussing a proven practice that will immensely help to increase the profit and scaling of your Laundry and Dry Cleaners Business and a complete laundry business plan.
CHALLENGES: How to grow your laundry business?
How to create and grow the business is a crucial challenge faced by the Laundry Business Operators and the Laundromat. Laundromat business operators are facing the task of not only developing perfect business marketing strategies but also learning what laundromat business challenges they face in catching their targeted audience and methods to overcome these challenges.
While you are in the process of growing your laundry business, marketing strategies and targeting the right audience for your laundry business also plays a vital role as it ensures the protection of your laundromat business. Prompt and efficient customer service is an incredibly important aspect of any business to be a success.
TRAINING TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
It is very imperative to select and train the staff carefully. They should be very informative, transformative, possessing great communication skills with neat and tidy attire. They should be able to deliver a very professional message to the customer. Their behavior with the customer should be very noble, the person handling the customer call should be very articulate.
Always keep a positive attitude while communicating
with the customers and never be negative or hostile. Always offer the solution
never to talk about problems in the business. There is no business without
problems. Keep a positive and energetic body language.
When the customer drops his garments for washing, he should get the feeling that it will be taken care of, as if any staff is taking care of their own attire and clothes. Staff should be able to sort the garments correctly for washing, spotting, and dry cleaning.
They should also be able to put the appropriate finishing touch to ironing and folding and delivering the cleaned garments properly packed in a logoed plastic bag helping the further promotion of the laundry business. This tends to generate more business.
MARKET PENETRATION
Further penetrating and partnering with laundromats in the local market by collecting clothes to wash from local power laundry, laundromats, and dry cleaners can help enhance the business. Deploying laundry collection boxes at different housing complexes can save the pickup and delivery time of the laundromat operators.
INCREASE YOUR AVAILABILITY TO GROW BUSINESS
Customers should not wait to find the attendees at the laundry counter. Customers should never be left unattended on phones or emails. He should have promptly replied. A laundry attendant should be easily available to the customer. Regular blog posts and videos can help stay connected to the customers. “Cost of customer retention is less than the cost to find the new customer”.
Hence it is very important to retain the customer, if you find any old customer who has not come to your shop for a long time. Call him to try to find out what his problems are, solve his problems, never judge the customer on the amount of business he is giving you because once this customer is happy with your approach, believe me, he will bring multi-fold of the business through his mouth publicity.
People love to be given attention and treated with love, they will return to feel this experience in your shop. People never forget the experience and they will share it with others.
LAUNCHING CUSTOMIZED PACKAGES FOR GROWTH
Good business can be achieved by offering tailor-made schemes to the clients according to their requirements. You should study the trends of the customers. Let us say approximately, bachelors give around 35 to 45 garments for washing every month and a nuclear family gives 100 to 150 number of garments for washing every month. “Common flat discount” scheme will not do much good as it may fetch a couple of more garments.
Instead, if you provide certain prepaid packages to them it can
be of more help. Nuclear family prepaid packages can be launched, like pay
10,000/- advance and getting service worth 12,000/- if used within six months.
Customers won’t mind paying a lump sum amount as he will be saving a good
amount in six months. Only those customers who are satisfied with your services
will come.
Also, you cannot convince this to a bachelor customer as he cannot afford this package. In this case, youcan float the package to pay 1 K in advance and get unlimited garments washed and ironed out for the next entire week. Suppose he was giving the business worth 500/-, now he can give the business worth 1000/-. Similar to different packages can be launched to study customer behavior (Trends).
ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE GROWTH OF LAUNDRY BUSINESS
# Customer
Loyalty for the next 6 months.
# Business
in advance, no worries about keeping the bills pending, money is
not blocked.
# Developing
good reference business.
# If
it is a prepaid laundromat, customers tend to come themselves to
deliver and collect the garments. Hence saving time.
COLLECTION, DELIVERY, COMMUNICATION, AND TRACKING
It is very important that
laundrymen should go, collect and deliver the garments as per the customers’
required time. To eliminate this, a new concept of “DHOBI LOCKERS” has come
into existence.
Here the lockers are installed at
different societies or housing societies. When customers open the
locker, an automated text message is generated and delivered to the
registered mobile number of the Laundromat operator, with the message that
this locker number is loaded with garments for washing.
Once the locker is opened for collection, the customer gets an automated message from the laundry mobile that the garments are collected for washing. After completing the entire process of laundry and the ready clothes are placed in the lockers for the customers to collect. This message is automatically generated.
This way it is a good system
of collecting the garments at different locations of the city and the revenue
is enhanced. This way the garments are tracked at each and every process of the
laundromat.
MONITORING BUSINESS GROWTH
Measuring your business at a regular interval of time. It is very important to imply efficient decision making at the right time and to be proactive. A proactive approach makes things happen your way, instead of waiting for them to happen. It is very important to have tools for your business to give the right data through the right channels.
DOWNTIME AND UTILITY COST
Downtime of the equipment and
further extension periods of downtime on service issues can ruin the revenue streamline
of your business. It is always better to be over-prepared so that your
equipment is up to date and is maintained regularly. If your warranty is about
to expire, please renew the service contract or keep the local repair person
handy, who can help you out in a pinch.
Limiting water usage and energy usage can be a game-changer in the laundromat business. Limiting water usage and energy usage can save hundreds of dollars every year. Heat-exchangers can be used to get the hot water from the waste hot water and steam going out into the drain, which can be recycled as boiler feed to generate the steam.
GROWTH IN HEALTH CARE & PHARMA SECTORS
The Healthcare and Pharma Industry has shown tremendous growth. Growth in the health care and pharmacy sectors has enhanced growth in the dry cleaning and laundry business. New visions for the healthcare industry include not just easy access, availability, and affordability but also preventive, protective, proactive, and outcome-based care model promotions. Hospitals, healthcare centers, gymnasiums, and physiotherapy clinics are growing manifold, increasing the scope for a laundromat business.
INTERNET PENETRATION
Due to internet penetration in the hospitality industry, due to great opportunities in the franchise business, busy lifestyles of the people, digitization in the Laundry Business, due to all these factors laundromat businesses are experiencing exponential business growth. The offline distribution channel was the largest expanded segment compared to the online channel. Due to the ease in the operation of apps in the mobile, most of the business grows vertically and horizontally.
BRAND CREATION
When we see any logo or any
image, we collect the name of that particular company, this is what we call
brand recognition. Continuous work on digital media like Facebook,
Instagram, WhatsApp, Email Marketing, Hoardings extra are the sources for
creating the brand for the company.
Many of us believe that once we
design the logo and website, doing little advertisement is sufficient to
create the brand, which is a very wrong belief.
The logo and the name should
constantly flash in front of the customer. Once the branding is done properly
and the brand is established, then you will observe the automatic increasing
footsteps of the customers to your store.
Brand awareness is more of a photographic memory and emotional attachment. Keep making videos and banners for digital advertisements. This is a continuous process and the results are slow and long-lasting.
IMPROVE CUSTOMER SERVICE
Regular customers visiting your
laundromat outlet deserve unexpected rewards in the form of discount coupons,
referral income, movie tickets, or something that boosts them to stay linked to
your store.
For example, on the second visit
10% discount coupon, forth visit 20% discount coupon, sixths visit 50 %
discount, and a 10th visit free wash. Similarly, you can declare
a holiday voucher for the one who refers the most customers through his ID to
your outlet.
There are so many companies in
the market that do marketing by printing a bunch of coupons and marketing it to
the leads in the market. You can run a scheme for the hostel
students that if they (Entire Hostel) gives you a business of Indian Rupees
300,000/- in three months you will be gifting them 50 liter capacity of
water-cooler to their hostel. Similar schemes can be generated for
the promotion of the business in different sectors.
MARKETING TOOLS TO IMPROVE SERVICE
Customers faded after some time
watching their garments washed live in the Washer Extractor and Dryer through
the glass of the store. To generate additional business (Value Adding),
some coin-operated games or computer operated games can be installed in the
laundry premises, helping the customer pass their time with the additional
income generation for the outlet.
Another way is by introducing the
point collection system, whenever the customer comes to your outlet to wash the
garments some points are uploaded into these cards, which can be collectively
redeemed in the next wash.
Catch customers in the parking lot. Many supermarkets and malls have huge parking lots. Take, the permission from the authorities to market your product to the people entering the mall in the parking lot.
Pamphlets and Flyers
Printing and distributing the
flyers at regular intervals is also a very old and effective method of
advertising. This type of advertising can help those laundry businesses which
have a small territory. A huge investment is not required in this type of
advertisement. No need to have a very catchy pamphlet, it can be used to
deliver the message you want to. Layouts can be designed using Power-point,
Paint-brush or any other software available free on the internet.
Outdoor advertising like flex printing, as you see in the places where they are fixed to find the location of the outlets, is the most popular and inexpensive marketing tool. It explains all the services provided at the outlet.
CONNECTING WITH THE CUSTOMERS
It is very important to have a
good reputation with the customers. It is very well said, “First you
have to make the connections and then do the Corrections”.
If you are very well connected to
the customer, then the customer starts believing you and you can implant
whatever ideas you want to implement into his mind.
Whenever there is a dispute, like
any garment is damaged at your store, it can be very well explained to the
customer how it is damaged and he is in the position to listen to you calmly
because you have developed a good relationship with him.
The more visible you are, the
easier it is to handle customer relations. Improved connections will also make
businesses trustworthy and improve the feeling of safety.
PARTICIPATING WITH GOOGLE ADS
By now you have done everything you can to find people organically. Google Ads is Google’s online paid advertising platform. Here you create your advertisement through the website, using appropriate keywords.
Which will flash on the internet for a particular
circular diameter or zip code, whatever option is selected by you. When people
search for laundromat options in your area your advertisement appears, using
the given search keywords, they come to the landing page of your advertised web
site.
While advertising with Google Ads,
you can assign a proper budget for the campaign and have control, on your
spending, hence Google Ads is the most cost-effective and targeted medium of
advertising. You are paying per click. This is a proper process and you can change
the quantity of clicks per day you require for a particular day or week. Here
you have the proper control over the advertising budget and the time for how
long your advertisement should be visible.
ATTRACT CUSTOMERS
This platform should be used to
attract the customers with the proper schemes and huge benefits to the
customers because they will be comparing the other sites as well, located in
your area from the same business.
Many campaigns fail even after using google ads and receiving calls from the customer and customer, never turns up. This platform is used to generate business keeping in mind that the customer has called your office as he is in need of service.
It is your scheme, which should attract him and force him to come to your outlet. Once he comes to you, he should be shown with the other benefits for him in the next visit. In this way, he never goes in search of other outlets, as he gets everything needed here and he becomes a loyal customer thereafter. Appropriately using these Google Ads can fetch miraculous results.
SOCIAL PARTICIPATION
Micro niche blogging enables the
customers to send and read posts called “TWEETS”. Even unregistered followers
can read the tweet, and registered followers can post through the website, SMS,
or through a range of available mobile applications.
From a business point of view,
the tweeter can be used for fast communication for customer service, gathering
real-time market feedback, building customer relations, generating leads, also
marketing and sharing coupons, and discount deals.
It is word of mouth; this is a
great way of participation in the social community. We are peppering up the
information about your business and asking them to follow the link.
Facebook is also a very good
platform to keep the presence of your business on social media. Instagram, Telegram
and WhatsApp are also some of the social media sites used for the promotion of
businesses.
