One of the pleasures of owning a local business—that is, if you’re doing it right—is the feeling that you are an integral part of your customers’ lives, as important to their daily routine as the newspaper and the mails. If properly nurtured, they can develop a relationship with your business that no competitor can disrupt, giving you an important base for future growth.
Bob Devaney knows this, and he’s using that knowledge. Devaney owns three dry cleaning stores in the South Boston suburbs, operating under the brand name “Drycleaning by Dorothy”. (His father took the stores over from the original Dorothy back in 1976.) The stores have a “family” feel in many senses of the word. That’s not hard to convey literally: Like most small dry cleaners, they employ several members of the Devaney family, including his wife Barbara and daughter Nicole.
Devaney admits that it was the cost savings and the offer of a free trial that first got him to test e-mail marketing four years ago, when he saw a promotion from Constant contact, an e-mail service provider catering to small businesses. “Like most small businessmen, I was running around like a headless chicken, fixing machines and talking to the customers,” he says. “I was always sitting down to design my coupon ad campaigns at the last minute, and paying a lot of money to do so.”
Devaney had been an early computer and Internet adopter himself and had put up a Web site for his stores, so he saw no reason in 2001 not to take a shot at promoting business via e-mail. He signed on with Constant Contact and got his free trial, as well as the first 50 e-mails per month free. He put sign-up sheets at the store counters and offered $5 in free dry cleaning for customers who submitted their addresses.
He knew he’d stumbled onto a good idea when that first wave of promotion brought in so many e-mail addresses that he could barely add them to the list by hand. Four years later, the list now numbers 3,000 names and grows by 25 to 30 names a week. Devaney says his other promotion efforts—mostly coupons in “marriage packs”—include a request that visitors come to Dorothy’s Web site and sign up for “free coupons in your mailbox”.
The other thing that helps to grow his e-mail list, Devaney says, is the “refer a friend” feature on every e-mail. “Customers forward the e-mail to their sons and daughters in the neighborhood,” he says. “So I often get twice the business from a piece of e-mail, and even some new names if those users then sign up to receive my e-mail too. As a result, the list is almost building itself at this point.”
Of course, sending e-mail is one thing; getting it opened is another. Devaney believes that any marketing promotion, whether in e-mail or direct mail, has to offer an eye-opening deal to get the consumer’s attention. And it can’t be just an incremental deal; 10% or 20% discounts on regular prices won’t do the trick. “You have to have 2-for-1 deals, or 3-for-2, 30% off, 50% off—that’s what creates action by the consumer,” he says. In early March, a Dorothy’s e-mailing offered a one-day sale: half off any dry cleaning order brought in on St. Patrick’s Day. Devaney says his stores all got “bombed” with business on that day.
The cost of the special offers is not a big concern for Devaney. “I’m not trying to make a profit off my e-mail promotions,” he says. “My first aim is to solidify current customer relations and make new ones.” In fact, the e-mails always draw in some recipients who don’t take advantage of the print-at-home coupons. During that “50% off” St. Patrick’s Day sale, for example, a customer came in with a $100 order. The counter person recognized him from the e-mail list and asked if he’d received the coupon for the one-day sale. The customer said he had, and that was what motivated him to bring his business in; but he hadn’t printed off the coupon and was willing to pay full price.
So the e-mail offers have to be real and valuable, but the customers seem to appreciate the initiative almost as much as the savings, Devaney says. Customers actually call the stores if Devaney slips up and neglects to send out his weekly e-mail offer. He settled on that frequency because most of his customers make dry cleaning a weekly habit, like grocery shopping. But Drycleaning by Dorothy periodically surveys customers on how often they want to be mailed (weekly is still the overwhelming vote) and includes prominent opt-out links in every mailing. In four years, Devaney says, he’s had three customers unsubscribe to his list.
“Dry cleaning is largely a convenience business; you patronize a store because it’s on your way to somewhere,” he says. “I’m interested in making my customers feel more like they’re family. Just the fact that I’m always visible, sending them something each week—that helps make me their dry cleaner.” In a recent e-mail, Devaney printed his personal cell phone number and said, “Don’t give out the number—it’s just for family. And now you have a dry cleaner in the family.”
Nobody has used that number yet, but Devaney feels he made his point that customers can reach him all the time for quick answers to their questions. The Drycleaning by Dorothy Web site also lets customers e-mail the store managers—some of whom, of course, are Devaney relatives.
As for the time spent composing his e-mail offers, Devaney says he’s climbed the learning curve quickly, thanks to the simplicity of Constant Contact’s self-service platform. Where he once took two hours to design and set up an e-mail campaign, he can now get the job done in about 20 minutes. And ongoing software upgrades are making the task progressively easier. Early in his e-mailing career, Devaney had difficulties adding images to his copy. But Constant Contact’s new image hosting feature, subscribers can store five images for free and more than 1,000 for $5 a month. “You can put all your images into the database one time and then grab and drop them into the promo as you need them,” he says. “They’re also automatically sized to fit.”
One thing Devaney admits he’s not using that saved time doing is poring over his e-mail campaign metrics. He lets Constant Contact do that, and settles for periodically comparing his results to their national ROI averages. “I’m always a bit above those,” he says. The stores are computerized, so they automatically keep track of e-mail coupon redemption. Other than that, Devaney—like a lot of small businesses—relies on the results provided by his cash registers to test the success of his mailings.
“My gut feeling is that I get a 30% take-up when I run a promo,” he says. “Over time, I think e-mail marketing has produced a 20% boost in sales. And I know we get more hits on our Web site after each mailing, because the e-mails link back to the Web site in a number of places. So that means more exposure for Dorothy’s.”
Most small dry cleaning enterprises, and indeed most small businesses of any type, don’t have a lot of ad dollars to spend and don’t have the time or know-how to get started running an e-mail campaign on their own, Devaney says. But he believes they should at least investigate the online options available to them in the marketplace today. "I’ve been marketing for 25 years, and e-mail is by far the best thing we’ve ever done,” he says. “I can contact up to 5,000 addresses for $50 a month. I can envision some day not doing any other promotion.”
But even for those small businesses that still shy away from e-mail marketing, Devaney has a word of advice: Get those e-mail addresses, even if you don’t have a use for them now. “Start collecting e-mail with your other customer data,” he says. “That’s the address of the future, to my mind.”
