How to Create a Proper Laundromat Pricing Strategy
For those who own a laundromat, you probably already know that one of the toughest decisions to make is pricing your services and equipment. This is all part of the laundry service marketing planning and an important one at that. If you charge too much or too little, you can risk your business.
That’s why it’s crucial to have a laundromat marketing strategy in place when it comes to your pricing to have your business run smoothly. Here are a few tips to follow:
Perform a Market Analysis
A market analysis is crucial before you even open a shop! This is something you do before opening a business and is crucial to keep it profitable.
Even after opening your laundromat, make sure you regularly review crucial pieces of information about your market, such as:
- Competitor pricing strategies
- How your location affects the business
- Customer demographics
- Industry trends
- Market size and growth
Review Business Statistics
Besides understanding the context of your business, you must also look at the numbers before creating a pricing strategy. One thing you must determine is how much it costs to run your laundromat.
To do so, you must look into factors such as employee wages, property fees or rent, utilities, machine upkeep, and other costs. After that, compare those numbers to your machines’ revenue power.
Assign Prices
Once you begin assigning prices, you’ll need to keep a few things in mind, such as:
- Offer options to your customers. It’s important to have different options at your laundromat, as this can help your customers feel they have more control over the money they spend. If your customers think some of the prices are too high, they can choose other more affordable options. You can do this by varying your prices based on machine size and load.
- Keep things simple! Your customers should be able to add up prices quickly. Sure, pricing it at $4.99 instead of $5.00 may work for some industries, it’s best avoided in laundromats. The prices should be whole and easy to understand, so people won’t be coming in with pennies!
- As time passes, you’ll start to see that there may be changes you need to make to your pricing scheme. It’s best to keep your pricing scheme adjustable so you will always know what your rates are. For instance, some owners would set their prices based on the local area’s minimum wage percentage. When the wages change, the prices are adjusted to reflect the buying power of the business’s target demographic.
- Sales and discounts are an awesome way to bring more people into your laundromat, but they may result in decreased profit if you don’t use them properly! A trick here is to offer discounted rates during off-hours when your laundromat doesn’t get as much traffic. This encourages some people to switch their laundry schedule to free up space during peak hours while you get business during slow times.
Wrapping It Up
Make sure you keep all these tips in mind when pricing your laundromat services.