In the car-washing business, there are three main objectives: to acquire new customers, to increase customer frequency, and to increase the average amount spent by a customer on each visit. Over time, you will likely loose a number of customers for various reasons, so the acquisition of new customers is made even more important.
Strategies for Achieving Objectives
There are various tactics and strategies that car wash owners can employ to maximise their earnings. For instance, to acquire new customers, a franchise might do some of the following:
- Offer discount programs or coupons that reduce the price of a car wash
- Run contests that give away free car washes
- Introduce a new product or service at the business
To increase customer frequency you could:
- Have a promotion which offers a book of several tickets to be used within a defined period
- Work with area organizations to promote and plan fund-raisers which funnel business to your location
To increase the average amount of money spent on each visit, you might try:
- Coupling two or more products and services at a reduced rate
- Selling next-visit tickets at discounted rates
Obviously, these are not the only things you can do to achieve any of the main objectives of car wash systems, and what works well with one particular business may not work well at another location.
Benefits of Connecting With Other Car Washes
No matter how thoughtful and creative any business owner may be, and how successful at tapping into the collective mindset of the car-washing public, no single person will come up with more than a few good ideas for increasing business.
That is where the value of collaboration comes in between other businesses and other cities. Establishing a good working relationship with car wash businesses in other cities can be a win-win situation for both parties, and since they are remote from each other, they are not in competition. As they serve different markets, the sharing of information will not lead to loss of business for either.
It could very well be that a recent brainstorm promotion has been very successful in one of those cities, and the business in the second city could benefit by trying the same promotion in that location. It’s never easy to predict just which kind of special strategies will appeal to the public, so a success story in one place is a good indicator that the same strategy might work in a different city.
New products or washing techniques that are piloted in one city with success would represent valuable information to a car wash in a collaborating city.
Car wash businesses between cities might also want to share relevant business statistics from a certain time period concerning:
- Number of new customers
- Number of lost customers
- Average amount spent per customer per visit
- Average frequency between visits per customer
- Promotions, discounts, and fund-raisers that were run during the period
- Total number of car washes issued
- Total value of car washes issued
Admittedly, the sharing of such statistics as those above would call for considerable trust and confidence between dealerships, but the benefits derived from information-sharing could be significant.