How to Develop an Impactful Customer Loyalty Program for Your Laundry Business
Consumer loyalty is mighty fickle these days. In fact, it’s been estimated that 77 percent of current brands could simply disappear and no one would really care.
This likely applies to laundromats as well.
In the laundry business, you don’t build loyalty simply because you have a room full of washers and dryers. Loyalty is established through other factors – such as making sure your facility is sparkling clean, your hours of operation are what the marketplace demands, your attendants are friendly and helpful, your store is warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and so on.
However, many laundromats exhibit those qualities and services, so it takes more to become amazingly unique.
It takes a big difference to make a big difference. Doing so requires a lot of effort, which most owners aren’t willing or able to make. In truth, most laundromats rarely establish what I would describe as true customer loyalty – or “fans who would blindly follow them anywhere.”
The idea is to create a highly loyal, extremely passionate customer base, similar to how sports franchises and rock stars do it. And, once you understand how customers think, you will know how to create loyalty programs that provide the perfect customer experience, and turn them into overt evangelists for your laundry business.
Everything you do as a laundry owner must take human psychology into account. The fact is that your customers need to invest emotionally in your laundromat to demonstrate loyalty.
This includes everything about your store, including your exterior signage, your interior colors, your social media presence, and literally everything you do to broadcast your worth as the place to wash and dry clothes. No element is insignificant to the customer (or potential customer) when it comes down to growing your customer base.
Penetrating the minds of consumers becomes easier if you understand what they require from your store. Utopia is when customers’ problems are completely solved (in their minds) when they come upon your laundromat.
A psychologist named Dr. Abraham Maslow developed what is referred to as the “Hierarchy of Needs” in people. According to Maslow, it’s natural for the human brain to thrive on feeling wanted and accepted. As a result, effective marketing will focus on messaging that caters to these needs.
Based on Maslow’s theory, customer loyalty is specifically tied to customers’ needs to feel as though they belong. This “belongingness” is defined as our universal desire to crave acceptance and attention. People are greatly attracted to loyalty of all kinds, and brands that foster a sense of a strong connection have an opportunity to establish feelings of loyalty within their customers.
Of course, the lack of a feeling of belonging in customers is, in turn, a feeling of being left out. Think about it – the possibility of influencing a group of passionate customers who thrive on the need to belong to a community of like-minded people – such as those who happen to share the same consumer behaviors – offers your brand an extraordinary degree of marketing leverage.
Here’s the “secret psychological sauce” – treat your customers like royalty and show that you appreciate them. One of the best, most powerful tactics is to offer loyalty programs to help develop strong customer relationships.
Yes, several laundromats offer loyalty programs, such as a “Frequent Washer Club,” “Free Soap Wednesdays,” “Free Lottery Ticket Tuesdays,” etc. I argue that these programs are (1) completely boring and (2) largely ineffective at building customer loyalty.
Boring doesn’t produce loyalty. These types of programs are used because they are essentially mindless to implement. Mindless and easy-to-create loyalty programs will not produce loyalty.
To the contrary, intellectually superior and challenging loyalty programs are the only types that will work wonders for you. I’m convinced that free-soap and free-lottery-ticket types of programs are so popular because laundromat owners tend to simply imitate other laundromat owners. Unfortunately, the path of least resistance is attractive to most of us.
For educational purposes, let’s discuss the history and development of successful loyalty programs that businesses have used in the past. Such programs have been around for hundreds of years, with approaches becoming more sophisticated over time. The ancient Egyptians practiced a type of reward program similar to modern frequent flyer programs, including status tiers and the ability to redeem a variety of rewards.
For much of the pharaohs’ years of rule, they didn’t have money because it simply had not yet been invented. Instead, citizens, conscripted workers and slaves were all awarded tokens (similar to today’s loyalty points or miles) for their work and temple time. The most common were beer and bread tokens. The tokens were physical object made from wood and then plastered over and painted and shaped like a jug of beer or a loaf of bread.
Arguably, the first modern loyalty program was launched in Sudbury, N.H., in 1793, when a merchant began rewarding customers with copper tokens. These tokens could be accumulated and used for future purchases, thereby generating repeat visits.
However, based upon available evidence, the true “godfather of modern loyalty programs” appears to have been Benjamin Talbot “B.T.” Babbitt. Born in 1809, Babbitt made his fortune in New York City in his early 30s by designing an original and inexpensive process for making “saleratus,” a key base ingredient in baking powder. He soon expanded his product range to include yeast, baking powder and soap powder. In fact, he became the first to sell individually wrapped bars of soap, with Babbitt’s Best Soap becoming a household name across the U.S.
To boost repeat sales and create loyalty in the 1850s, Babbitt launched a truly revolutionary promotional program, where he invited customers to cut out and collect trademarks from the product packaging of Best Soap and Soap Powder. The trademarks could be mailed to the company and redeemed for colored lithographs. Soon after, the rewards program was expanded to include more comprehensive offerings.
In the 1860s, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (later known as A&P) launched a comparable program to reward its customers for purchasing a selection of its products.
Clearly, customer loyalty programs have been around for quite some time. That’s largely because consumer thought patterns are well ingrained in our basic psychology. The idea of getting “something for nothing” is a strong motivator of consumer behavior, and the key factor in its effectiveness is the element of surprise. From a marketing perspective, it’s a tactic that – when used in the right context – can build your clout and foster stronger relationships with customers whose loyalty matters most.
Here are three campaign strategies that strategically utilize the principles of human psychology to increase customer loyalty over the long term:
The Exclusivity Campaign Strategy
As mentioned, some of the psychological factors of brand loyalty stem from customers feeling that they belong to a community. Creating a sense of belongingness will feed into your customers’ desires to be part of a well-liked, well- established group.
For example, even getting an exclusive discount code or free gift helps validate our consumerist instincts by subtly coaxing individuals to believe they’re part of a unique community and encouraging them to remain loyal to the brand (your laundromat) that sends out the offer.
In 2017, a large, well-known company designed an event that was as outlandish as it was hard to get into. Because this company had such a massive following, it knew the buzz it’d receive would make it worth hosting such an extravagant meetup.
The event was a trip to view that year’s rare “Astronomical Eclipse Experience” from a special viewing point – and it included access to an exclusive campsite, food and beverages, shuttle bus service, movie screening, and more.
In the company’s invitational emails, which went out to its entire customer base, words like “experience” and “exclusive” were used to make customers feel like they were irreplaceable parts of the company, even if they were ultimately just one in a million. This was an enter-to-win structure designed so that many people would win. Needless to say, the promotion was highly successful.
The Gamification Campaign Strategy
Another popular approach to building loyalty is the gamification approach. This describes the incentivizing of people’s engagement in non-game contexts and activities by using game-style mechanics. It also leverages our natural tendencies for competition, achievement, collaboration and charity.
Gamification works by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors by showing a path to mastery and taking advantage of our human psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. Smart marketers use it to increase consumer engagement and influence consumer behavior.
Six examples of highly popular brands using gamification include KFC, Under Armour, M&Ms, Starbucks, Nike and Duolingo. All six use gamification to transform loyalty programs, exercise, learning and marketing into something much greater.
For example, the Starbucks brand is iconic. So, to align with its brand identity and logo, Starbucks created a tiered loyalty program structure that consists of two levels – Green and Gold. To award its customers, the coffee retailer enabled them to earn “stars” with each purchase. Through earning these stars, customers then earn free products or free “top-ups,” along with additional personalized rewards.
By adding gamification to your laundromat’s loyalty programs, you’re creating FOMO (fear of missing out) among your customers to get them to spend more money to reach higher tiers within the loyalty program. Highlighting the benefits at each tier makes customers fear they are missing out on desirable features of the program.
The Referral Campaign Strategy
Nothing says you’ve made it as a successful brand quite like your customers singing your praises from the highest mountaintop.
The psychology of persuasion simply cannot be underestimated. Just as Google and Yelp have created a culture of people who check the reviews before agreeing to visit a certain restaurant, shoppers also have become very careful about purchasing almost anything unless there is enough social media proof to back up their investment.
And few things are as persuasive as someone they know suggesting to them what they should or shouldn’t buy. Current research findings indicate that nearly 84 percent of consumers swear by word-of-mouth recommendations, so your chances of obtaining new customers by relying on the influence of current ones is extremely high.
Of course, not all of your customers have the same needs. Your patrons are all unique individuals with different preferences and motivations. For example, think about the difference in shopping styles between Baby Boomers and Millennials. One practically brought about the online shopping revolution, while the other is still trying to keep up.
On another level, research shows that Gen-Z feels less enthusiastic about shopping altogether, focusing on quality rather than the mental rush that a quick buy might give them. They also are less impressed with loyalty programs, so targeting them with a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t necessarily going to float their boat.
Keep in mind that, to develop your own effective customer loyalty programs, you must thoroughly understand and dig into your own unique customers’ psychology as you attempt to incentivize loyalty to your laundry business. Rather than guessing what might work or imitating others’ programs, apply your insights into customer psychology to develop loyalty offers that are right for your business and your specific marketplace.
When you do your research and truly get to know your audience, your loyalty strategies will come into sharper focus.
