BY JASON BAUMGARTNER

Jason Baumgartner, Co-Founder and President at Suds Creative, talks about the importance of engaging customers so they are enthusiastically involved in your cause or brand. A little creative thinking, a little applied strategy and the right team can go a long way in helping a car wash maximize and track its return on investment.

When I coached boys’ basketball at a high school near Boise, Idaho, our team held an annual community service project before Thanksgiving, to raise money for the local food bank.

We set up a table at the entrance of a nearby Albertson’s and welcomed customers as they entered the store with a pleasant smile and a donation request. My job was to supervise and assist where needed.

As my players greeted the customers, they were friendly and polite, saying all the “right” things. Every customer was engaged, and a few donated. At the end of the first hour, we’d raised a whopping $19.50.

I couldn’t help but wonder if we could do even better. What would I do as a marketing strategist to increase conversions in this scenario, turning more Albertson’s customers into cause donors? No longer was I a coach tasked with watching 16-year-old boys for three hours. I was a Chief Marketing Officer tasked with raising the most money possible.

The results of my experiment with my players were irrefutable – a 2100% increase in donations. How did we do it and how can the principles that we implemented to create our success help you create success for your car wash membership metrics?

THE FOOT-IN-THE-DOOR TECHNIQUE

• The Cart

“Hi, there. Do you need a cart?” In our experiment, that was the first question each customer heard as they approached the store.

Politely offering each customer a cart is a classic implementation of the foot-in-the-door technique, or what social scientists call “successive approximations.”

Successive approximations are a successive series of rewards that provide positive reinforcement for behavior changes toward a final desired behavior. If the customers needed a cart, they thankfully accepted one from one of our players, then entered the lobby where our table was set up. When a customer agreed to take the cart, a small acquiescence, he or she became statistically more likely to be open to progressively larger offerings, and ultimately a request from the players.

The positive impression was already made, and the customers were primed for what came next.

At your car wash, using the foot-in-the-door technique effectively means starting small with your customers by helpfully offering something that’s of value to them with no strings attached, and gradually building value for them with more offers until you invite them to become unlimited members.

Implementing this principle might mean offering small freebies or discounts to your customers first, before you ask them explicitly for their loyalty as a member. What’s a small no-brainer offer that your customers will benefit from and be thankful to receive? Can you offer this as a first step toward building a customer relationship?

In addition to warming your customers up to your brand, these small gestures also build trust. Instantly, your customers, mentally and perhaps even emotionally, connect with your brand. You’ve created a first impression that your brand is personally valuable to your customers. This impression is the first step toward capturing new members.

• The Cookie

When the Albertson’s customers entered the store with their carts, our team was in their direct line of sight. Our table featured signs declaring our school name and the charity for which we were fundraising, so starting our sales pitch by reiterating our purpose was just repetitive. It wouldn’t grab people’s attention.

We had to find a way to avoid people’s natural instinctive objection to responding “yes” to a yes-or-no question. I call this instinctive objection the “No thanks, just looking” response. When we’re presented with a yes-or-no option, we’ll often choose “no” by default, just because it’s easier to maintain the status quo.

That day, our team chose to be disruptive instead of predictable.

Our disruptive choice was to provide free fresh-baked gourmet cookies from the Albertson’s bakery to the customers instead of asking for donations outright.

“Would you like a free cookie while you shop?”

The players didn’t say anything about why we were there or where we were from unless the customer asked. Instead, they asked customers if they’d like the cookie, no strings attached, and waited for them to respond.

In the principle of successive approximations, when a second, slightly larger offering is provided to the customer, a bond is created between the customer and the player. Even though the customer may only agree out of politeness, a bond is still formed – one that creates a felt sense of affinity with the player, and possibly even a more vested interest in what the player is asking.

Nearly 80% of the time, a customer who took a cookie also donated. And the donations were, on average, seven times higher than the previous hour.

1st Hour Earnings: $19.50

2nd Hour Earnings: $422.40

A 2,200% increase!

What does this mean for your car wash? As a business, your customers expect you to ask for their money, and often have their guards up by default. Instead of being predictable and asking them to become an unlimited member right away, choose to be disruptive. When you provide multiple small kindnesses for your customers without asking for anything in return, they’ll often respond with proactive kindness, affinity and loyalty.

We played around with other variations to dial in our strategy. We noticed that some customers shied away from the table immediately upon entering, avoiding eye contact, preventing our table from asking about the cookie. Thanks to some morning snow, there was a “Slippery When Wet” sign on the floor near the entrance. We simply moved that sign to the right about a foot, encouraging more traffic directly in front of our table.

More traffic equated to more opportunities for conversions.

What can you do to increase the traffic at your car wash and on your website? What intuitive, feel-good offers or promotions might give you more of an opportunity to connect with customers and potential customers? By creating attractive, no-strings-attached offers that increase your traffic, you create more opportunities for conversions.

THE LESSONS

As my team and I learned from our community service project, it doesn’t take much to get engaged customers enthusiastically involved in your cause or brand. Sometimes it just takes a little creative thinking, a little applied strategy, and the right team.

I walked away from this experience more motivated than I can ever remember. I’ve taken the lessons from this experiment with me in my role as CEO at Suds Creative, where we help car washes just like you maximize and track their return on investment. Let’s distill the lessons:

Provide value early on for your customers, offer progressively more value over time, and when you’re ready to ask your customers to be members, present them with value-rich options instead of just asking a “yes-or-no” question.

To ask for unlimited members strategically, focus your energy on the action, not the outcome. If you’re focused on the action from the start of your customer relationships, your results will speak for themselves.