Who would you trust to take care of your dog?
Aaron Hirschhorn and Karine Nissim, who live in LA, came East to visit family. In 2011, hey left their dog Rocky with a kennel. When they returned, they got a $1400 bill, and Rocky stayed under their desk for days. Eric knew there was a better way.
So Aaron and Karine started offering dog sitting services out of their home. The response was beyond their expectation, and they knew that they were barking up the right tree. Dog Vacay is the product of their experience.
Today, their business, Dog Vacay is celebrating its fourth anniversary. It is a service matching dog owners with dog-friendly families willing to care for pets. Think of Uber matching drivers and passengers. He developed a website with a few sitters and a few customers and let the business grow organically. Slowly and carefully, they learned along each step how to make the service more helpful and valuable to the dog owner, the sitter and the dog.
Trust is the Core of What Dog Vacay Market
They cover 3,000 cities and offer services beyond daycare like grooming and dog walking. One of their biggest strength is that they understand that people are leaving a member of the family with a stranger. They use technology to help make sure trust is earned. Several times each day, their sitters will send photos or video of the dog to assure the customer that everything is okay.
They add value on every “care occasion.” They only accept 15-20% of those who apply so they careful screen sitters. 24/7 customer service also is necessary to make sure that someone is available to help solve and problems that may occur.
They encourage meet and greets before client books a service with a sitter. This way, there is, even more, confidence and trust in the service. Aaron recognizes that this is a word of mouth business that grows because of satisfied customers having outstanding experiences.
Two Enthusiastic Paws Up
There are several valuable marketing lessons from Aaron and his dogmatic approach:
- Technology alone isn’t enough to bring value to customers. Facilitating human interaction first helps.
- Customers in one city have different needs than another. Learn, adapt, evolve.
- Ads alone aren’t going to convince someone to work with them, so he relies on multiple community partnerships events to become part of a local neighborhood scene.
- Keep things simple without complex rules and fees. Make the process easy.
- People buy from people – (products or services). Humanize everything and never sell to a customer, sell to Sue or Fred or Bobby.
- Make work fun. Happy employees treat customers much better than unhappy employees. Sounds obvious but so many business owners/managers forget this simple idea.
- Could you text quick photos or videos that you share with customers frequently to show them something of interest and that draws them into your company? Imagine sharing a photo of a customer’s product being made just for them?
Are you studying what other businesses are doing successfully so that you can improve your marketing?
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Photo: Screen grab from Dog Vacay website. All rights reserved.
