If you’re like me, by the time you finish reading this sentence, you’ll have received another 10 emails – ten more promotions, spam, offers, bills, newsletters and on and on that need to be deleted before the box starts to overflow.
As shop owners, we don’t just have to deal with that in our own inbox…we have to contend with it when trying to reach customers. Electronic marketing has never been more widely used by automotive repair shops – or had more noise to cut through. Everything that was already true of junk mail in inboxes is now true of electronic marketing as well.
It’s not hopeless! Shops can cut through that noise, retain great customers, and attract quality new ones, but two things must be true:
First, the marketing has to target the right customers with the right message. If you look and sound like everybody else, you’ll never stand out from the crowd.
And second, the marketing has to find the right balance between under-communicating and over-communicating. In other words, creating sustainable top of mind awareness.
So how do shops stand out, cut through the noise, find the right message to use, and stay top of mind? It starts, like so many parts of running a successful shop, with measurement.
Measure your customers
If stopping to measure seems like it’s too much hurry up and wait – trust me for a moment.
Every shop struggles with losing customers, a number we call attrition rate. Its causes range from uncontrollable reasons, like when that great customer takes a job in a different state, to controllable reasons, like when the technician forgets to test drive a vehicle after a repair and it leads to a comeback, loss of trust, bad review and lost customer.
A shop’s attrition rate also gets worse when it uses bad marketing. This is either because the marketing is completely lost in the noise and never does anything…or worse, it does stand out because it uses gimmicks to grab attention.
When a shop uses marketing that attracts poor quality customers – by using big discounts, bait and switch tactics, empty promises and more – it works against the shop on multiple levels.
First, it fills a bay with a customer who won’t buy. This means your shop is unable to help your best customers, because it’s so busy helping no-value ones.
Second, it costs the shop money to send the advertising piece, and then subtracts the discounts from the margin you do make on the few services that do close.
And finally, that no-value customer will chase the next discount to a different shop and you’ll never see them again. This means you’ll never get to convert them into a loyal, trusting relationship.
All of which means your attrition rate gets worse, as you both lose your current good customers and the poor-quality new customers.
Which is why starting out by understanding your attrition rate and how it’s changed over time is the first step to turning it around. If attrition rate is high, and you’re losing customers faster than you can replace them with new customers, your shop needs a different strategy than one where your attrition rate is low and you have steady growth.
You won’t know this number until you measure.
Of course, measuring attrition is only the first part of successful marketing. Because after you understand what kind of marketing strategy to use, the next step is to understand how to use it.
This means understanding what your shop’s target market looks like, developing a strategy for identifying quality customers, and finding the right message to reach them.
Which might seem like an overwhelming project for a shop owner to undertake, but here’s the thing:
This isn’t what shop owners are supposed to do. This is what marketing companies are supposed to do.
And, if you have no idea how your marketing company is impacting your attrition rate, how they target, who they target, and what they target with…there’s probably a reason. And it’s probably because they don’t want you to know.
Maybe they don’t understand, or maybe they don’t care. The end result is the same: you’re spending money to lose money, customers, techs, time and your shop.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the marketing message is working though, and the biggest problem is striking the right balance between staying top of mind and being annoying. How does a shop strike the right balance?
Know what to measure
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it starts with measurement.
Open rates, bounce rates, click-through rates, engagement, views…these metrics all exist to shed light on a single question: how many people am I reaching with my marketing?
And really, the only way to create useful measurement is to test.
Test send times, subject lines, email layouts, landing pages, day of week, audience, message and on and on and on.
This is the difference between great marketing companies and those that are simply taking your money.
If the marketing company is testing messages, audiences and timing; if they’re measuring those things and reporting the results; if they’re helping you manage attrition and creating a plan to address it…this is a good marketing agency.
If they’re only taking your order, and fulfilling your request, they’re no different than a fast food kiosk.
Accountability
Shops are in a dangerous position. We’re facing a universal technician shortage that is going to make it harder to get work done and harder to take care of the customers we attract.
Which means every marketing dollar we spend needs to be hyper focused, and it needs to produce results. Otherwise, we’re taking time away from a resource that is already in dwindling supply.
Which means we need to start being real about our marketing resources by measuring them, and then using those measurements to act.
Start by asking your marketing company about your shop’s attrition, and whether it’s getting worse or better. Hold them accountable for better research, better reporting and better results. And if they resist, if they’re just there to take your order and hand you your burger and fries, start looking for a marketing company who isn’t afraid to produce real results based on real measurement.
