Marketing: Finding Your Repair Shop’s Best Marketing Blend
Auto shops have unique opportunities for marketing to new, existing, and lost customers. Marketing-aimed efforts such as improving customer experience, creating tailored strategies for each type of customer, and collecting the right metrics can make a huge difference for your business.
On May 31, 2022, we hosted a webinar entitled “Marketing: Finding Your Location’s Best Blend.” Our key presenter, Jeff Tremper, is the Founder | Executive Vice President at Throttle, which is a marketing platform helping some of the best auto shops execute successful marketing programs. He presented information on how to develop a winning auto repair shop marketing strategy, along with tips on how to integrate the R.O. Writer repair shop management with Throttle. Throttle is a product of Matrix Imaging Solutions.
4 key takeaways from the webinar included:
1. Superior customer experience is essential to retaining customers.
The key goal of any interaction with customers: to build trust. It’s important to focus on an excellent customer experience in your shop before choosing to do anything else. Without this groundwork, any marketing plans will be for nothing.
And thinking along these same lines, customer experience efforts that go beyond the doors of your shop can work in favor of your auto repair shop marketing. By taking small, meaningful steps to up the convenience level for your customers, you will see more success in your marketing efforts as well. Some of these small steps can include focusing on accurate data capture to ensure well-personalized interactions, deleting inactive coupons, and simplifying operation codes.
Integrating R.O. Writer’s repair shop management with Throttle’s marketing platform also offers tools for exemplary customer service, such as vehicle-specific services created out of manufacturer recommendations.
2. Commit to a marketing budget
A marketing budget is essential. It means that you are committed to following through with making sure your brand is top of mind when your customer is due for their next service visit.
In Jeff’s words, “when it comes to marketing, in this industry, our recommendation is to dedicate 7 to 8% of your gross annual revenue towards marketing. With that, you want to establish a solid game plan. That game plan has to handle the gamut of your customer experience from new customers to existing to lost customers…if that’s not a number that you’re comfortable with, then choose your number- maybe it’s 4 to 5%. But whatever it is, make sure that you are dedicated to continuing to put that budget towards marketing, year over year.”
The R.O. Writer-Throttle integration can make tracking budgets much easier. With our repair shop management platform linked to Throttle’s marketing solution, you can view daily transactions in a single feed and receive comprehensive reports on your customer communications.
3. Create a marketing customer journey strategy for 3 different audiences: new customers, existing customers, and lost customers
Jeff also brought up the importance of creating separate marketing initiatives for three different auto shop customer journeys and developing distinct tactics for each one. These three categories include:
- New Customers
Direct mail and guerilla marketing cards are both effective ways to reach out to your shop’s surrounding zip codes and locales. Google and Facebook ads can also target by location and serve as great ways to reach new audiences. Utilize your existing auto shop customer demographics in order to learn who to target and how.
- Existing Customers
For existing customers, it’s helpful to send post-visit material such as surveys and “thank you” emails. Another way to keep customers returning is to focus on educating them with service reminders, social media engagement, and newsletters. The best method for marketing to existing customers: focus on keeping your brand top of mind with an omnichannel approach (utilizing channels such as email, direct mail, and text message reminders together)
- Lost Customers
Lost customers are an audience who already experienced your auto shop and are tracked in your system, but who haven’t returned for more services. When it comes to marketing to these customers, it’s important to focus, first and foremost, on the highest-paying lost customers. Marketing tactics for reaching out to them include using direct mail with personalization, pushing for social media engagement, sending your most aggressive offers, and making phone calls.
For all of these efforts, a consistent, omnichannel approach to auto repair shop marketing is necessary. R.O. Writer’s repair shop software and Throttle’s marketing platform integration can help make this a reality. For instance, with these two powerful solutions working together, you can send out intelligently timed communications to each unique customer. The integration also enables shop owners to utilize other retention opportunities for existing and lost customers, such as fleet and state inspection reminders.
4. Track your marketing KPIs
Tracking success is just as important as executing a great auto shop marketing program. KPIs can show if your tactics are working, or if you need to modify them in any way. Jeff recommends tracking a few specific metrics such as:
- Car counts per day
- Intervals between visits
- Web traffic to your site
- Valid email/mail addresses
- Rate of return
- Ticket average
With R.O. Writer and Throttle, your team can perform mail list cleanup and maintain all customer records in one, easily accessible repair shop CRM.
Throttle provides an omnichannel, end-to-end approach for marketing to different audiences. Throttle has an example graphic displaying some different touchpoints that a business could put into play with their platform.
If you’re interested in learning more about auto repair shop marketing and how Throttle-R.O. Writer’s partnership can kick-start your efforts, you can watch Jeff’s entire presentation here. You can also reach out to our team at sales@rowriter.com to learn more.
