Focus marketing on relationships
Marketing is really all about building
relationships. Focused marketing means building relationships
with the people most likely to accept your offer.
Who are the prospects that would make a
really big difference in your business, if they got to know you
and what your quality cleaning could do for them? How do you go
about building relationships with these people?
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What are you doing to make existing and
new customers aware of your services and the benefits of using
your services? Are you advertising? Are you advertising
consistently, or do you only advertise as a knee-jerk reaction
to a slow down in volume?
Advertising not only has to be
hard-hitting to get your prospects’ attention in an
evermore competitive world, but it also has to be constant.
There are no days when it’s O.K. not to advertise. No
days.
Once someone becomes aware of what you
have to offer, understands the benefits, and has the ability
and willingness to pay (a critical factor in a bona fide
prospect), you’re ready to take them to the next step.
Credibility. This could also be called
confidence or perception of competence. You say, that you can
clean and press my clothes and make them suitable to wear
again. But can you really? You say that you’ll have them
ready by Friday. But will you? Credibility is the belief that
you can and will perform as promised.
Credibility isn’t smoke and
mirrors. This form of confidence has to be built over time and
through experience.
A good way to jump-start this phase of
the relationship is to allow the customer to
“borrow” the credibility of others.
Testimonial ads, by other customers, who
may or may not be well known, allow the new prospect to borrow
their credibility. This can be accomplished by building a
display of customer photographs in the store or simply
providing a list of names and addresses of other customers who
live on the same street as your prospective customer.
Credibility lowers the risk of a
purchaser doing business with your store. So it is important to
build this into your store image.
Another question? What are you doing to
demonstrate that you’re competent to perform as promised?
Trust and credibility are closely linked.
A new customer must trust that you will perform as promised.
But trust means something deeper. It’s the kind of
emotion that creates a strong loyalty, the glue that holds a
relationship through good times and bad.
This kind of trust cannot be borrowed. It
must be experienced and, ironically, it is most often formed
when there is a problem.
A customer comes in expecting to pick up
her cleaning for an important function that night. The
counterperson is unable to locate their order. Even after the
manager is called to help, her clothes are nowhere to be found.
Shortly after the customer gets home, she
receives a phone call. Her clothes were given to another
customer in error.
The manager or a staff member is getting
into their own car and picking up the order. They will be
delivering them to the customer’s door in time to be worn
that evening.
The next time that customer chooses a
cleaner, will the fact that her clothes were lost influence her
decision, or will it be more influenced by the fact that
someone took great pains to meet her needs?
As service expectations rise, and as
young people enter the work force, they frequently demonstrate
that quality service is a new concept to them. It is a
tremendous challenge for most cleaners to get new employees to
understand how critically important sacrificial service is to
building long-term relationships.
The final stage in developing lasting
customer relationships is the emotional ties. This occurs when
the customer believes that you and your cleaners care about
them, not only on a professional level, but also on a personal
level.
These feelings are developed first by
calling customers by name. Then it is reinforced when they
receive a birthday card; congratulations on a birth;
condolences for a death. It is also reionforced when attention
is paid to individual details on their clothes, like replacing
buttons, sewing small seams, and packaging to specific
specifications.
Customer loyalty is largely influenced by
customer satisfaction. Still, up to 70 percent of all customers
who switch cleaners were satisfied with their former cleaner.
They just didn’t believe the cleaner cared.
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