Own a laundromat and want to expand your services?

Offering delivery laundry service to reach double-utilization of your staff and your equipment makes sense. But, this new vertical is not as absentee as a traditional self-service laundromat. It is a logistics and warehousing business. On top of that, you’re marketing playbook is going to need a facelift…

Marketing to delivery laundry service customers is a different game than marketing to traditional laundromat customers. You’re not competing against local laundromats, you’re competing with digital-first laundry apps. These digital-first laundry apps do not process any of the cleaning – instead pairing the customer with a cleaning partner (whether laundromat or freelance contractor) to do the laundry. With no laundry to worry about, these apps hone their focus on marketing.

You’re starting off at a disadvantage. Here’s how to catch up.

3 Beginner Tips Get More Delivery Laundry Service Customers

New to the digital marketing world? Unsure what email automation funnels BI tools are? Start here. We’ll start you off with the basics before we get into the big leagues below.

1. Know your ideal customer. Catch them when they’re looking for you.

Before you start any advertising, it’s best to know who your target customer is. This takes time and thought, not money. So spend some time creating customer personas.

Customer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide your ads to suit the needs of your target customers and align your message. As a result, you’ll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business who you’ll be more likely to retain over time.

More specifically, having an understanding of your customer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow-up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.

Let’s imagine busy moms are your ideal customers for a residential laundry delivery service. Hint: They are a very strong demographic when it comes to residential delivery laundry service customers. Your marketing is going to be different than a service that targets commercial accounts like gyms, spas, and Airbnbs. Is a busy mom likely to convert on an ad targeting commercial linen contracts? Likewise, is an Airbnb going to convert on marketing that is geared to folding residential laundry? See where we are going?

Now you need to know where to catch them when they are looking for you.

It’s our experience that marketing for home services does better with pull marketing (drawing customers interest in your service once they’re already looking for a solution) instead of push marketing (pushing your brand in front of audiences (usually with paid advertising or promotions). Your laundry delivery service falls in the same bucket as other home services that your customers use: plumbers, landscapers, HVAC, carpet cleaning, etc.

Have you ever clicked on an Instagram ad (push marketing) to have their carpets cleaned? It’s much more likely that carpet cleaners convert more from ranking well for relevant Google searches (pull marketing). When you have a pest problem, do you remember the ad you saw on Facebook a couple of weeks ago or do you Google it?

2. Start investing in a professional online presence – which is more than just a website.

Nowadays, most people head straight to Google or Alexa if they need the answer to a question. If customers search for “a laundry pickup and delivery service near me” and a local laundromat has a poor web presence, what happens to those potential customers?

They go elsewhere. A business with a subpar online presence loses potential customers to competitors.

SEO ranking is crowded in the space these days. And, it’s only getting more and more crowded. How can a new laundry delivery service get started building an online presence?

• Long Game – Create a clear and engaging website. You signed a long-term lease for the laundromat and you’re financing the equipment over the next 7 years. Don’t kid yourself. Your entire investment is a long-term investment. Treat your website the same way. Monthly improvements into website development and SEO will cost more upfront but the benefits of a high ranking is well worth the cost.
  
  Having a roadmap for development will prevent years of sunk costs into the same keywords. Instead of always targeting “laundry delivery service,” we change our web focus quarterly. Just last year, we spent 3 months on each of the following four delivery laundry service customer personas – building out landing pages and complimentary funnels for each: Airbnb owners, massage & spa owners, curious residential customers, and cash-strapped apartment dwellers.
• Short Game – Post to Google My Business EVERY…DAMN…DAY. Not only does a verified and optimized Google My Business profile stand a better chance of being in the local 3-pack, putting your presence at the top of search results, it can also indirectly help your website rank.
  

  It does this by providing social signals to Google, by driving traffic to your website, and by providing social proof in the form of reviews.

  Google says local search results are based on “relevance, distance, and prominence.”

  Relevance: How well a listing matches the intent of the searcher.
  Distance: Google pairs searchers with verified businesses in close proximity.
  Prominence: How well-known your business is.
  
  Post often. Share links. Share photos. Do not sleep on this. It’s return on time invested is exponentially more than Facebook, Instagram, and all those other things you’re tempted to waste your time on.

• Bonus Tip – Invest in professional photos. A web developer can help with copywriting but they can’t help much with photos. Hire a professional photographer to bring in a professional camera – put your iPhone down. Look at the difference between the photos our professional photographer takes compared to the stock photos – the same stick photos all of y’all are using online right now…

3. Target your marketing geographically. Your profitability comes from route density.

Topline growth is a great performance indicator of your laundry delivery business as you get started. However, your profitability comes from density. You can’t depend on new route customers alone because sometimes they come from across town. These sales might be easy to close, but do you already have a route established in the area?

Less time in a vehicle + more time servicing customers = more profit. It’s simple.

Route density improves efficiency because it reduces your windshield time. The benefits of route density go beyond the ability to deliver service faster. You can be more responsive to service calls when drivers are close by. And, you can leverage supervisors and maximize their time when they can oversee accounts that are in the same geographic location.

Once you get a base business established with your existing delivery laundry service customers, target desirable work by density. If you get a referral that doesn’t fit certain density criteria, take the time to consider if it’s the right delivery laundry service customer for you. If you decide to take the opportunity, think about how you can build density around that job.

Route density is ultimately a function of assertive marketing strategies and solid sales efforts.

Here are some guidelines to consider when building route density. Be patient – density doesn’t increase overnight, and it takes planning and lots of diligence. You’ve got to focus on the plan to tighten up routes and stick to it.

Balancing efficiency and customer satisfaction isn’t easy. Some customers prefer a certain day for services; others want services delivered during a certain time of day. Many customers appreciate continuity – but not as much as your staff appreciates it. Laundry service delivery drivers get more confident and more efficient when they are working on the same routes. When your routes are dense, accommodating these preferences is much easier. As your delivery mistakes decrease, your retention increases which leads to increased density on these routes.

• Density First. Make this your top priority when acquiring new customers. With less travel time, you’ll reduce mileage and related expenses, while improving supervision quality and maximizing efficiency.
• Beat the traffic. Understand traffic patterns near the office for morning and evening commutes, and organize routes to travel against traffic whenever possible.
• Utilize routing features from your laundry delivery service software. Routes can be optimized to minimize the amount of travel between stops. Your laundry delivery software should include options to onboard customers who are not yet serviced. This will show you which unserviced neighborhoods have the warmest leads already in your CRM. You can quickly add them onto a route once the waitlist gets dense enough.