Question:
How about some discussion on how to kickstart our business in this sagging economy? Direct mail, unique advertising, sale pricing plans? I am ramping up my direct mail to new areas that I have not serviced in the past.
Answers:
We send reminders to existing customers (homeowners). The sad part is, less than 10 percent reply to the reminders and less than half of them are willing to get the tank pumped. We also have found that over 50 percent of the customers we send reminders to call us within two years because they are having a problem.
Lowering your price, not a good idea.
We tried a 5 percent discount if they get it done during the winter months, no help.
We ask our customers how they heard about us. Most are word-of-mouth. Most found the number in the Yellow Pages. We have a small ad in the “septic” heading in all the books that cover our work area. Seven books times $140/month times 12 = $11,760 year.
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We use reminders for every three-year pumping with about a 30 percent success rate each month. We keep a small ad in the local paper and, of course, have the Yellow Pages ad. In the 27 years I have been doing this, only a small percentage will do routine pumping, and the majority wait till there’s a problem. I also do a lot of praying, which works the best. Hold your prices, cut extra spending to the bone. The economy can’t be down forever.
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One thing that helped in Wisconsin was the mandatory pumping on new systems. This was implemented, I believe, in 1995 and boosted our pumping of septic tanks. And if a county is tracking pumping of holding tanks, this will be a big help. So on that point, get involved with state government about the positive side of regular maintenance. In Wisconsin, there’s a state program for helping low income homeowners get help with septic systems.
Every system installed since the beginning of the program is on a maintenance schedule with the state for pumping or inspection. Now the state is getting an inventory of every septic system, old or new, to be done by 2011. Then they will try to have these maintained also.
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We’ve had to resort to going door-to-door and leaving cards or door-hangers. Since the economy has hit us hard in Alabama, our work has dropped off about 75 percent.
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As bad as that sounds, have you seen any results from the door-hangers? A poor economy forces us to try things we would never have considered, and sometimes we could have used those strategies to improve during the good times.
And do you track your Yellow Pages response rate to verify your effectiveness? We have cut our Yellow Pages rates by half with no change in response. Smaller ads with bolder phone numbers, and offering “mention this ad” savings has helped tremendously. With seven books on the street there is probably some overlap.
We are moving some of our ad dollars to the Internet and have seen a fairly nice response increase.
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We have four Web sites, all covering different parts of our business. They are cheap to maintain, you can add and change things as you wish, and they do get found by surfers looking to do business. We always look at our Yellow Pages entries and an ad with little competition may be halved in size and cost, and with another entry added somewhere else in the book at little or no extra cost.
