Coin Laundromat Business Plan: How Marketing Can Increase Profits
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Marketing works! If you as a coin laundromat owner market your business and most of your competitors do not – you’re going to be miles ahead of them.
Like any business, you don’t want to forget about promotional marketing. I think that’s a common mistake between most people that own laundromats where they don’t budget much of their allotted income towards marketing expenses.
For most laundromat owners primary marketing is by word-of-mouth and that’s it. Sometimes they’ll do something like give away a free box of soap or leave soap out on the counter and let people just have free soap or something like that. It’s pretty rare that in laundromats they have real marketing campaigns. I think that’s a mistake.
I would recommend, probably, having somewhere between 3 and 5% but probably no more than 10% of the gross income to go to the marketing expense. The amount that you use would really depend upon what kind of net income you have and whether or not it makes sense to spend more than your allotted budget for it. With laundromats, you can do some relatively inexpensive marketing.
One thing to do is you can print up flyers on neon paper just talking about the laundromat and distribute them. Another popular form of advertising is postcards – direct mail.
From time to time we send emails to customers. I love emails because it doesn’t cost you anything for the marketing as opposed to a postcard. The savings you get by using emails allows you to pass some of that savings on to the customers by giving them coupons even if they are existing customers.
The other thing I like to get customers to do is refer other customers. I normally only do this with online marketing where I will send out an email and I’ll say, “Refer 5 people and you win a prize.”
The other type of marketing, which also really works well, is there are some online services that review different companies. Customers come in, they will wash with you then they will go online and they will rate your business from 1 to 5 stars. They get to write it up and it’s in their own opinion. Basically, it’s a testimonial of your business.
It is important to track everything otherwise you don’t know what is effective and what is not. Every marketing promotion that we do has a different give away or a different promotion. We advertise in one of those “Penny Saver” magazines and on that we have a different ad with a different coupon. We even advertised on shopping carts in supermarkets and that worked pretty well.
Advertising is one of those things that is always evolving. If you find one that works, keep doing that. If you find stuff that doesn’t work, stop doing that and go on and try a different type of advertising.
The experts say in marketing for ads to be effective, you want to touch your customer at least 6 times with some sort of marketing plan. It could be 6 different types of marketing, such as postcards, flyers, and the name of the business as they are driving down the street. Whatever that happens to be. I think it’s important to have some sort of consistent regular marketing approach.
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About Brian Brunckhorst
Brian Brunckhorst is one of the top experts on laundromats. He is dedicated to teaching entrepreneurs how to find, evaluate, analyze, and buy a coin laundromat. Brian is also the author of the best-selling eBook, “Secrets of Buying and Owning Laundromats”, and the Laundromat Teleseminar System.
