You have recently opened a limousine hire service targeted towards tourists and others who are looking to enjoy a luxurious chauffer driven ride on a special occasion. Your biggest problem is that business spikes at certain times during the year (college graduations, wedding seasons, etc) and experiences a lull the rest of the year.

This strategy will help you stabilize your business all year round and keep the cash coming in even during times of traditional slowdown.

Who is your customer?

Be it a college graduation, prom night, wedding day, or tourist’s day out, your customer is typically a luxury seeker. He or she prefers to drive around in style, but can only afford to do

so on special occasions. To work around this, you need to focus on customers who can afford limousine rentals on an everyday basis. Hence your target profile should be large corporate companies who have their head offices located in the vicinity of your service. This way you would be able to ensure business all year round by becoming the preferred vendor for the company’s board of directors and other staff entitled to luxury cars.

What is the best thing you can do for that customer?

Corporate offices expect the very best in terms of service from their vendors and are willing to pay a little extra to get it. Offer dedicated cars and chauffeurs to each corporate that signs an annual contract. Offer value added benefits to retain such customers by guaranteeing them additional cars within a one hour notice period and so on.

How are you going to do it?

Ensure you have a sufficiently large fleet of new limousines as well as professional chauffeurs. If required, you could enter a sub-contract with other limousine hire services located around you to make up for excess demand. Create a database of all the offices within a predetermined radius of your rental office.

Invite them, via email, to join your Privilege Club of customers who are entitled to special benefits when they signed up for half-yearly or annual contracts. Incentivize such deals not only

with discounted pricing but more through value added services such as dedicated cars and chauffeurs.

Don’t forget to say thank you

Every new member of the Privilege Club gets a thank you email and a gift hamper. Also include a link to a survey with the following suggested questions and others of your own.

What is your company’s daily requirement of luxury cars?

Is this a fixed or flexible requirement? Are there any times of the year when the can foretell a spike in requirement? What are the key factors that decide their choice of a car vendor – service, pricing, availability, newness of fleet, etc?

When to communicate with your members

In order to maintain ties, send out email newsletters on monthly or quarterly basis. Use the newsletter to inform them of any special offers for employees and one time hires as well as

of upgrades to your fleet or service.

Of course you must also contact them one month prior to the expiry of their contract urging them to renew it. If you do not hear from them, send a follow up email one and two weeks after your initial mail.

How do you measure success?

Conduct quarterly surveys of your existing customer database to judge their level of satisfaction across various service and pricing parameters.

Build Build Build. Measure new as well as lapsed corporate partners on a monthly basis and compare numbers and turnover with like periods across the past few years. The more people that sign up for annual Privilege Club memberships, the more stable your business will become!