You’ve put a lot of work into making your car wash a top-of-the-line experience for your customers. But you can still take your wash one step further by adding car wash fragrances to your services. Scents are one of the-best kept secrets in car wash marketing, and now you can harness them to keep your customers coming back again and again.

The Science Behind Fragrance Perception

The process of perceiving fragrances starts with scent molecules. They land on special receptors in the nose that signal the brain to indicate what we’re smelling. Different smells result from different combinations of molecules, so each scent triggers a unique set of receptors. Even slight changes in the molecular combination changes the scent reported to our brains.

In the brain, smells trigger the same areas that process emotion and memory. This is how aromatherapy works to make us feel relaxed or excited. Have you ever smelled a perfume years after someone wore it and remembered them? Or triggered a memory out of the blue by smelling something familiar? That’s because it’s using the same area of the brain. Scent is one of the strongest memory triggers we have – making it a surprisingly good tool for marketing.

7 Reasons Why Car Wash Fragrances Boost Success

Consumers often associate pleasant scents with being properly clean. Dish soaps, laundry detergents, carpet cleaners, and personal care products all have a variety of distinct scents that make our homes and bodies feel clean when we use them.

Likewise, adding fragrance to your car wash services can create an impression of cleanliness when your customers leave. Pleasant aromas can also create a positive association with your business that will have customers coming back for more. For this reason, car wash fragrances are an investment that just makes “scents.”

1. Enhancing the Customer Experience

Adding nice scents to your car wash takes a customer’s visit from a simple wash to a sensory experience – often without them even understanding why. Depending on the scent you choose, it can make your customers feel comfortable, energized or just happy.

Retail stores have long used scents to make customers feel more relaxed, making them more likely to spend time in the store and make impulsive purchases. Although customers typically don’t spend much time inside a car wash, adding scents to your services serves a similar function. When your customer base associates your wash products with feeling clean or happy, they’re more likely to come back and spend more money on upper tiers.

2. Creating a Lasting Impression – at the End of the Wash

As mentioned above, scent is one of the strongest triggers for memory and emotion, even more than visual stimuli.

The ideal way to capitalize on this is to add a scent, like a foaming fragrance, toward the end of the tunnel or the end of the chemicals applied in your bay. This way, customers exit the wash with a lasting impression including pleasant smell. Scents are sometimes used in chemicals applied earlier in the wash, but at the end is the most opportune time.

3. Differentiating From Competitors

Adding car wash fragrances to your washes is a great way to set your wash apart. Not only does it make your service feel “better” or higher value, an makes your wash unique. If competitors are already using scents, the next strategy is to use unique scents – associating your higher quality of service with a unique olfactory signature.

Crafting a signature scent can be as complex as commissioning a unique formula from a chemical manufacturer or as simple as choosing a distinctive combination of scented soaps and additives to create a scent that’s wholly yours. Just be careful not to get overcomplicated. Research shows simple scents have a more positive impact on customer purchase behavior than complex ones, although either is better than no scent at all.

4. Masking Unwanted Odors

Scented chemicals can also help cover up offensive odors the car may have picked up. Cars can get very dirty while driving around, and that often doesn’t smell very nice. Car wash fragrances can mediate that. If your wash itself has acquired a few undesirable smells, scents can help with that as well. Obviously cleaning your wash properly and correcting for problems in your water supply is the front line solve for odor, but fresh scents that hide bad smells can’t hurt.

Outside the car isn’t the only place that can benefit from car fragrance.Many scent products work as odor counteractants to neutralize smells from food, pets, spills, body odor and beyond. Such chemicals target the odor source and bind to the scent particles, preventing them from reaching your – and your customer’s – nose.

If you offer any type of detailing or interior services, adding scents to those products can help remove offensive odors inside the car as well. This could range from using scented soaps to wash seats to hanging air fresheners as a finishing touch. 

5. Adding a Touch of Luxury

Just like updating your equipment, offering branded products, and adding bright lights or entertaining colors, pleasant scents can add a touch of luxury to level up your wash services. Car wash fragrances make it feel like you’ve gone above and beyond to provide not just a wash but an experience for your clients. That kind of perception is worth more than you think. 

6. Celebrating the Season

At NCS, we offer a fresh new scent every season – a unique formulation only from NCS Chemistry. These scents combine seasonal fragrances to evoke the pleasures usually associated with the seasons we all experience as part of our culture. Likewise, the new scents quarterly give people something to look forward to, and add interest to your brand.

One key to boosting revenue and profitability with such fragrances, is to add them only to your top packages, as a special perk. Another is to make sure your scents are well known, by advertising them in signage onsite, and featuring them in social media or on your website. The NCS Seasonal Scent program includes marketing signage to help drive your business.

7. Boosting Sales and Repeat Business

All of these factors work together to increase sales and bring your customers back over and over. When you have satisfied customers who associate your business with pleasant scents and a luxurious experience, they’re more likely to return. Happy customers are also likely to improve your customer ratings, bringing in more new business from savvy consumers who research their purchases before they buy.

How To Choose the Best Fragrance Products for Your Car Wash

There are so many wash chemicals and fragrance products to choose from, it can be hard to know which ones to pick. There are a few things you should consider when selecting the best car fragrance products to suit your customers.

First, think about the types of products you want to include. Car wash fragrances come in many forms. Products for external washes include scented soaps, additives for your chemical mix, and foaming fragrances. You also will want to choose the scent itself – which is a matter of personal preference. Having multiple opinions from your staff can help you make a decision.

Finally, ensure that any scents or chemicals you choose are compatible with your equipment. Some wash tools don’t work with certain products and can become clogged or break down too quickly if the wrong chemicals are used. Check with your distributor or manufacturer to ensure the solution you select will work correctly.

Calibration for Effective Fragrance Dispersion

It’s important to properly disperse your fragrances during the wash cycle to ensure the smell is noticeable without overpowering your customers’ senses. You don’t want overpowering jets of perfume in one wash and a trickle of fragrance in the next. This also ensures you’re using your fragrance chemicals efficiently so that you don’t go through them too quickly, nor are they wasted due to being too sparing to be noticeable.

The Best Car Wash Fragrances on the Market

If you’re looking for the best car wash scent products, wash equipment and the expert consulting to help make it all happen, look no further. The experts at NCS can guide you through every step of the car wash fragrance process. Contact us for more information regarding our Seasonal Scents programs and other car wash chemistry.