Getting New Customers: A Dry Cleaning Story

A local dry cleaning company has taken the leg up on competition, and I’ve happily given them all my business. Not only that – they convinced me to pay more money than I was paying at the previous cleaner I had used for 3 years. How did it happen? There were a few things that enticed us to move our business to them and a few more that convinced us to stay.

The Introduction

The company introduced itself to us with some well-orchestrated techniques. They used:

1. A novel idea that got them noticed right away
   Their “ad” was hung on our mailbox. It was a wire coat hanger (that included the paper around the triangle part) that had intro material on the company.
2. An introductory discount
   It also had a little card hung around the “hook” part of the hanger. The card had a pre-printed message with an offer of 15 per cent off the first month of cleaning.
3. A personal message, and a better offer than their standard discount
   That message was crossed out with a pen, and the offer was changed by the franchisee to 50% off for the first month.

The Benefit

I don’t think they could have made a better introduction to us, to be honest. It hit all the right buttons. Then they hit me with the benefits. Here is what they offer:

They come to our house to pick up the cleaning, and then drop it off again. Pick up on Tuesday, drop it off on Friday. Pick up on Friday, drop off on Tuesday.

For free. (OK, in reality, they just build it into the price. Call it “overhead”…)

We are a busy family. We have three kids – our youngest, Kampbell, is still an infant, the other two are 3 and 5 years old, and are involved in various activities. I run my own business, and my wife runs hers. Both my wife and I play rugby. This company wasn’t offering me dry cleaning/laundering service. They were offering me less hassle, less co-ordination and more time to get the things done that I really want to be doing.

It was obvious to me that even though it cost more, it was worth a try.

Sealing the Deal

They had done almost everything they could to convince us to try them out. However, if my shirts came back and they weren’t pressed properly, they wouldn’t likely keep our business. They had to deliver.

When my first set of shirts came back, I was surprised to see them all nicely stacked in a paper bag with handles (again, a novelty). Each shirt was individually wrapped in plastic, with a piece of cardboard folded into it. Just like the shirts were new. Yes, it is a cliche, but I was not expecting them to under promise and over deliver like this.

I was surprised to see them folded so I asked my wife about it. Apparently you get to choose if you want the shirts folded or hung on hangers. Apparently they had told my wife that a lot of professionals that travel prefer their shirts folded and wrapped because they are much easier to pack. (Cater to the customer and offer options)

So now, I have that choice — folded or hung, and I can request to always have them done one way or the other, I can change at any time. I can make special requests for a week if I want, and it gets done. If I need them, I can have them packaged 3 shirts to a box as well, to help protect them in my suitcase.

I was skeptical at first about the folding (after all, I was getting them pressed! why would they wrinkle freshly laundered and pressed shirts!!???!). Honestly, they did a great job on it, and it takes about 30 seconds of ironing to take out the wrinkles that a shirt gets from being folded. Much easier than ironing shirts coming from the clothes dryer, and a small concession that is easy for someone travelling to deal with.

Cost

Cost is always a factor in purchasing decisions. It costs me about 40 cents more per shirt to get them done by this company — 40 cents that I gladly pay. I certainly feel that it is well worth it, even if the econonmics don’t make sense – that 40 cents is about 20% more than what we were paying.

People will pay more for convenience.

Other smart things they are doing

There are a few other things that this company did that made us take notice:

Some of my shirts came back with tags in them – ironed/steamed right onto the collar. There will be no more removal of those little paper numbers that are regularly put on shirts and pants. I was a bit put off at first, because my shirts and pants had actual bar codes in them! I am not a number! 30 seconds later, I got over it — I’m sure it makes it easier when they are processing orders, and I feel pretty comfortable knowing that they have that level of tracking for individual garments.

We had a lull earlier in the summer where we weren’t doing any laundering of business clothes – I was in the home office most of the time, and only had occasional reasons to head out of the office. We actually got a call from the franchise owner to check in because they had noticed they hadn’t done any cleaning for us in a while. A personal touch… nice.

They also provide a nice, blue bag with their logo on it for us to put our cleaning in. All we have to do is put it on our front steps and it will be taken away on Tuesday or Friday morning. It sits there like a beacon, begging for people to look at it. Smart.

So What?

As a person that runs my own business, I am always on the lookout for new marketing ideas and techniques — not just online, but off line as well. I try to keep track of what motivates me to buy a given product or a service, hoping to learn a bit from analyzing why I think it worked and why I made my decision. Even if the things that I think I learn from it don’t directly apply to marketing my services, I still store them in the memory bank to possibly implement for a client at a later date.

I have a few ideas of my own, but I’m wondering if you can spin any of these ideas into something useful for you or your clients…