Today’s consumers are bombarded with sales pitches by everything from pizza parlors to cosmetic surgery clinics. Between the coupon books, telemarketing calls, direct mail, outdoor billboards, and radio–not to mention the vastness of the Internet–your prospective customers are in a state of constant marketing hyper-stimulation.

So, naturally, they’re going to tune you out…that is, until their air conditioning conks out. Then, suddenly, finding the right auto repair shop becomes Job One. But by that time, your ad has long been forgotten.

Needing help now, consumers aren’t digging through the wastebasket for last week’s coupon book, reaching for the Yellow Pages, or recalling an outdoor billboard. Instead, they’re turning to their laptops, tablets or smart phones.

Not to fear! Your advertising isn’t necessarily doomed from the get-go. Consider including these three tactics in your auto repair advertising:

1. Create customer personas. Even if you’re on a first-name basis with some of the people who come into your shop, there’s a lot left to learn about what drives consumer purchase decisions. So why not “create” the perfect customer, then market directly to him or her? Personas put a face on auto repair marketing. Based on interviews with your best customers and prospects, personas become characters you can relate to and advertise to. An auto repair customer persona, for instance, may be named “Rick.” He’s in his late 40s, makes $45,000 to $55,000 per year, drives a late-model sedan to work and an old four-wheeler on the weekends, drives a little too fast, keeps his vehicles for an average of 7 years–and so on. Once you know Rick’s interests and concerns, you can better tailor your message to him. You can do this on your own based on what you know about your customers, or you can take it to the next level with CustomerLink’s smrt™ technology.
2. Talk about your customers, not about yourself. It might sound silly, but if your ads look anything like the picture in this blog, then this is directed at you! You’d be surprised how many automotive repair marketing efforts focus on the shop: its state-of-the-art equipment, its convenient location, its skilled technicians–without ever explaining how these features will benefit the customer. Take a look at your shop’s most recent ads or flyers. If the word “we” is used more than the word “you,” that me-centric approach may be costing you your audience’s attention. (If you need help knowing what motivates your customers to buy, that’s another area where smrt™ technology makes your marketing smarter.)
3. Be where your customers are. No matter how professional-looking your ad, if your customers aren’t around to see it, it’s wasted effort. Today, people go to the Internet first for virtually all their retail information. In fact, a recent survey showed that 50 percent of consumers spent 75 percent of their shopping time online! So if your customer research indicates they like visiting Facebook, then be on Facebook. Post interesting blogs on your social media pages that will drive interest in your shop and build credibility for your business. You can enhance your automotive repair marketing through the strategy of inbound marketing, which uses engaging content like blogs, videos, and images to encourage web searchers to find your site–and return there. Using SEO in your content helps push your site to the top of Google search result listings, where people can see it. If that sounds like a lot to handle, consider using tools to automate social media or automate customer reviews to make it easy and effective for your auto shop marketing.

Make Your Auto Repair Advertising Work

While there are many reasons advertising doesn’t work–an oversaturated marketplace, outdated marketing tactics, “me-centric” messaging–the good news is there are also ways to make your auto repair advertising work more effectively for you.  And, of course, whatever your automotive repair marketing or advertising needs are, CustomerLink has a solution for you.

Start with these 8 things that will market your business while you sleep (and while you fish, race, watch the game, or whatever else it is you’d rather be doing than spending time on marketing!).

1. Keep your customers happy. Isn’t it funny that the most effective form of advertising, word-of-mouth, is also the cheapest? Happy customers don’t cost you a penny, but happy customers will tell others about your business again and again. By keeping your customers happy with great service, you’ll regularly earn referral business. You can make it even easier with services like CustomerLink’s that automatically thank customers for their business, remind them their next automotive service is due, and get customer reviews and referrals.
2. Claim your Google Places page. Google Places pages are free advertising for your shop. It’s easy to claim your listing and set up everything in just a few minutes. After the initial setup, the listing lives on forever and helps new customers find you day or night without any work on your end.
3. Get reviews in Google. Get started by giving your customers a link to your Google Places page and ask them to do you a favor and leave a review of your business in Google. The more reviews you have, the better (of course that’s only true with genuine reviews, not paid or bogus ones). You can even do this automatically with a service like ours or by printing it on your business cards or invoices.
4. Set up a Facebook page. Face it, your customers are on Facebook. Your business should be too. If you spend just five minutes a day on your business Facebook page, over time you’ll build up a social media presence and have a major way that customers can find you 24/7.
5. Set up Facebook offers. The exciting part about using Facebook for automotive service marketing is that your customers can so easily share your information with their friends. If you set up a compelling promotion on Facebook and make it easy to share (which you can do in just a few minutes with our automated social media tools), you never know how many people might see your ad. With the typical Facebook user having 130 friends, it’s easy to see how just one of your customers sharing your offer could reach 130 people. If just one of those people shares it again, then you’ll reach another 130 people…and if one of those shares it again…you get the idea. That five minutes it took you to set up the promotion could quickly, and for almost no expense, reach thousands of local consumers. How’s that for marketing in your sleep?
6. Set up a Twitter page. If you think Twitter is just for kids, think again. Search engines like Google and Bing are relying more and more on links from social media sites to determine how popular web pages are. If your competitors have no links from social media sites like Twitter, but you do…you’re that much more likely to have customers find your shop when searching online. Save time by linking your Facebook and Twitter pages so that any content you post on one automatically posts on the other.
7. Get a Google+ profile. For a lot of the same reasons you ought to set up your shop on Facebook and Twitter, Google+ is a great marketing tool for making your business more visible to customers searching for automotive service. Especially since Google is the number one search engine, and they’re now factoring in Google+ activity into how they show search results, you ought to give Google+ a try.
8. Set up a Pinterest page. So far, there are not many auto shops on this rapidly growing social media site. Just by being one of the first, you’ll have a leg up on your competition. Pinterest is a cool tool to share info, and the links from Pinterest to your website can help new customers find your shop online. (If you’re using Pinterest, Pinerly will help you measure traffic and get better results.)

Ok, to be fair, some of these take some initial setup and a little bit of ongoing work on your part. But, in general, they require very little time or money to get started, and once they get going, they’ll boost your automotive service marketing while you sleep!

A recent Borrell Associates study found that small and medium businesses use an average of 5 to 6 different kinds of advertising at the same time. A big group of you (13%) actually use 10 or more kinds of advertising at the same time…. That’s a lot of money invested in marketing and advertising. Of course I’m sure all of those different ads are working 100% perfectly, exceeding expectations on every campaign and delivering the kind of income that would make Bill Gates jealous…? Yeah, right!  In reality, the big reason auto repair shop owners and small business owners try so many kinds of marketing is that so much of it just doesn’t work. A lot of that money might as well go right down the drain.

Don’t let that happen to you! Learn the 5 warning signs that your marketing is wasting money.

1. You don’t know the response rate.

How many new customers came in to your shop based on that newspaper or radio ad? How many called in from that Yellow Pages ad?   When you tried a different offer or coupon on that new campaign, did it work better or worse than the last one? Unless you know the answers to these questions, the sad fact is that your marketing is wasting money. The new norm in marketing is: if you can’t track it, don’t do it. That doesn’t mean don’t do marketing! It means do marketing that you can track, and find and use new methods of tracking such as phone call tracking, QR codes, landing pages, special coupon codes, etc. Whatever marketing you do, just make sure that you can tell at the end of the day what worked and what didn’t. That’s the only way you’re going to improve and get better results.

2. You don’t know the return on investment (ROI).

This is kind of like knowing the response rate, but it’s harder to determine and more important. I can’t stress this enough. Many people get hung up on response rate as the issue they care about. Maybe that’s because a lot of companies that sell auto repair marketing and advertising services brag about their response rates (probably because they’re the easiest thing to measure). Whatever the reason, it’s one thing to know which of your marketing efforts got more response, but knowing which one is more profitable is another question entirely. Can you link the money you spent on marketing to actual transactions at the cash register? If not, your marketing is wasting money.

There are entire books dedicated to this topic, so I won’t go on and on here, but one critical thing to look for in tracking ROI on your auto repair marketing efforts is the short-term vs. long-term ROI. Can you track the short-term ROI AND the long-term ROI? Especially when marketing to find new auto repair customers, the short-term ROI can easily be very low, while the long-term ROI rises as you bring back repeat customers for additional service and maintenance. The simple fact that most marketing companies don’t want to tell small business owners is that there’s almost always a cost to get new customers. In marketing speak: cost per acquisition. In plain English: every new customer your business gets costs you money. The question is, how long does it take to make that money back? This leads us to the next point.

3. You don’t know your cost per acquisition (CPA).

If you’re in the business of selling services, unless you’re either very good or very lucky, your new customer marketing will almost always cost more than your new customers spend on their first service. This is the dirty little secret that most marketing and advertising companies don’t tell you!

Think about it this way: if you’re paying $5,000 a year for a Yellow Pages ad, and you can track that the ad brings in 20 customers this year, then your cost to get new customers is $250 each. OK, that doesn’t sound so bad–my new customers spend $250 on their first service….  Not so fast! Now take what those customers typically spend per year (something smrt™ technology shows you)–let’s say $500 a year–and subtract your costs to provide that service–let’s say $150 to cover payroll, parts, overhead–and you have a gross profit of $100, or a margin of 40% (which would be a great number!).

Now, knowing that each customer spends $500 a year, and that your profit is 40% of that, or $200, you can compare that to the $250 it cost you to get them in the door… in the first year of that customer’s service, you’ve lost $50!

I hope you can see the importance of knowing your CPA and that you start asking all your marketing vendors to at least give you a reasonable estimate of what this number will be. If not, then your marketing is wasting money!

4. The new customers you get only come in once for a deal, then don’t come back.

This is a real killer, and one that plagues daily deal sites. Sites like Groupon and Living Social do a great job of helping their customers understand their cost to get new customers. A Groupon deal costs you essentially 75% of the cost of whatever you sell (half-price discount for the customer, then half again for Groupon). These sites can have really low costs to get new customers, but where they struggle is in keeping those customers coming back. Even if it only costs you $10 to get a new customer into your shop, if that customer never comes back, then you still lost $10. How do you fix this? Put a system in place to thank new customers for trying your business and then remind them to come back when their next service is due. CustomerLink’s auto repair service reminders work great for this.

5. Your marketing doesn’t have a unique value proposition.

In marketing speak: your offer is not differentiated. In normal English: your product or service looks the same as everyone else’s. If it doesn’t stand out, your potential customers won’t choose your service, and your marketing will be wasting money. For example, there are a lot of companies that offer auto repair marketing services, and there are a few that automate parts of it for you. What makes CustomerLink different? Only CustomerLink has smrt™ technology, which supercharges your marketing by personalizing every communication to your customers with powerful consumer data and lets you target only new customers who spend like your best customers. While we have some things in common with our competitors, we’re proudest of what makes us different.

It doesn’t have to be earth-shaking, but it does have to be unique to you and your shop. Are you the only local shop with a national warranty? Are you the highest ranked with BBB? Did you win a high rating from Angie’s List? Do you support a little league team? Have you donated time or money to causes your customers care about? You get the idea. Find something that is unique about you and your business, and tell your customers about it so they know what makes you special. Coincidentally, by giving you deep understanding of who your customers are and what matters to them, smrt™ technology makes this process a lot easier.

There are other warning signs that your auto repair marketing is wasting money: if it doesn’t have a call to action, if it’s too difficult for customers to respond, if it’s insincere and makes over-the-top claims, etc. But the 5 we’ve mentioned here are the most important factors to focus on first.

If you found this blog helpful, please share it with others! Or leave a comment and tell us your own warning signs.

The Value of Personalization in Auto Repair Marketing

To connect with today’s consumers, it’s necessary to optimize your communications so that your customer feels you are talking directly to his own values, needs, and interests. This is the value of personalization, and it’s essential information to have for your new customer finder and customer retention marketing to succeed. To achieve it, you need a lot of data to tell you exactly who is in your database and your neighborhood. This is the good stuff that’s going to allow your auto repair service to compete with the big boys who, until now, have been able to out-spend you and take advantage of every marketing tool in the book to help them succeed.

And that’s where our exclusive smrt™ technology comes into play for you. Not only does it drive our auto repair direct mail, email and Internet marketing programs by helping you choose the right messages to send, it can be used to guide your extra-curricular auto shop marketing activities too. Can you imagine how easy it would be to make business decisions about community involvement, advertising, or shop atmosphere if you knew your customers almost as well as you know yourself? Or do you think that’s an unachievable dream? Well, feel free to wake up, smell the coffee, and LIVE that dream because that knowledge is available to you in the form of your smrt™ report.

Consumer Intelligence That Translates into Targeted Auto Repair Marketing

Your smrt™ report will teach you almost everything you need to know about your customer: what his income and occupation are, his probable likes and dislikes, and his marital and family status and buying habits. You also gain valuable information about where he lives and works, and which of those places he’s traveling from when he visits your business.

With that kind of understanding in your possession, you can truly engage with your customers so that your shop stands out from all the rest. To get you started, we’ve listed several ways your smrt™ data can help you.

1. You might discover that most of your customers have kids involved in little league baseball or peewee football, so you choose to sponsor one of the local teams.

2. You can use your smrt™ intelligence to help you design your waiting area. If you’ve got mostly business people using it, then you can provide Wi Fi access and a quiet work space. On the other hand, if you know your customers are parents with small children, you can furnish your room with lots of toys and books and lay down a kid-friendly floor.

3. If a lot of your customers are into the local art, theater, or music scene, you can use this knowledge to decide which programs to sponsor. Know whether you’d choose productions of Shakespeare in the park, a special museum exhibit, or pop music festivals…or all three!

4. You can more wisely spend your newspaper, radio and television advertising dollars by knowing which papers your customers read and which stations and programs your customers are probably watching and listening to.

5. If you know that many of your customers participate in charity activities or contribute to scholarships, you can get your business involved in one of those efforts.

6. Decide what kind of car care clinic to hold based on the types of consumers living in your service area. For instance, you could have one that’s for women only, or hold one for young adults who are just starting out with their first car.

7. Take advantage of your smrt™ mapping to determine the best place to open a new location. Now that your current shop is a huge success, maybe it’s time to expand!

Have you made a business decision based on your smrt™ data that’s not in this list? Leave a comment below, and let us know what you’ve tried in your auto repair marketing that’s been especially effective.

Did you hear about how Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did?

Essentially, Target used data about the things she bought and compared that to what their other customers bought. When she started buying products that suggested she might be pregnant (unscented lotion, vitamins, dietary supplements, etc.), Target made a smart prediction and started sending her coupons for baby items. (Read the full Forbes article here.)

While that might sound a little bit like Big Brother (and kind of unrelated to auto repair marketing!), it represents the future of smart, modern marketing. Information is power. Big companies know it and have been using customer data like this to make their marketing more effective for a long time.

This is what smrt™ technology is all about: leveling the playing field and bringing that kind of information and power to you, the small business owner. Information is power, and used properly, it delivers some of the best auto repair marketing.

OK, Robb, I get it. Info is power, blah blah blah. Tell me something I haven’t heard 100 times before. What does it do for me? How does it improve my auto repair marketing?

Glad you asked!

It’s all about three key factors: smrt™ gets the right message in front of the right audience at the right time.

Let’s look at each of these a little more.

This is an example of an ad without smrt™ technology. Without knowing exactly who the audience is and what’s important to them, or whether or not it’s the right time for this message, it’s easy to see how this ad won’t be as relevant to as many people.

Right Message & Right Audience

I’m a middle-aged, married guy with one child. How much sense would it make to advertise lipstick to me? Sure, there’s a chance I could be interested in finding just the right shade to match my eyes…but odds are I’m not going to respond to ads selling lipstick, no matter how enticing they might be. A company sending me an ad for lipstick is getting the wrong message to the wrong audience.

In the auto repair marketing realm, let’s imagine a local auto shop mailing me an ad for their Jeep and four wheel drive specialty shop. I love Jeeps (my dad has an awesome ’55 Willys), but I don’t own a four wheel drive. This shop could offer me the most amazing deal on any kind of service or upgrade…but since I’m not the right audience, there’s little to no chance I’m going to respond to the ad.

This is what smrt™ does for your auto shop marketing, automatically. It gives you the power to customize the content of your email and direct mail marketing to make the offers, creative design, and copy exactly right for each of your current customers, as well as potential new customers.

Notice anything special about this piece? We did the design with a female audience in mind. Based on what we knew about the values of the target audience, we focused the message on what was important to them: values of honesty, integrity, and professionalism.

Right Message & Right Time

How often do you get ads in the mail for something you either just bought recently or probably won’t need to buy for a long time? In my house, that happens all the time. For example, it’s kind of funny, but also kind of sad, to think about the marketing dollars wasted when I get ads for carpet cleaning right after I cleaned my carpet. It doesn’t matter if they offered to clean all my carpet for free…if I just did it, then there’s just no chance that I’m going to respond to their ad.

The same might not be true for things that are not time-sensitive. Pizza, for example. I could eat pizza every night (if my wife would allow it!)…but for anyone marketing a service business (from auto shops to pest control or other home services, to wedding photographers, etc.), your marketing messages have to reach your customers at exactly the right time to be successful.

Seems obvious, right? But how do you keep track of when is the right time to communicate with your customers? Do your customers schedule appointments for their next service? That might make it easier. But how many of your automotive service customers schedule their next visit to your shop? Wouldn’t it be great if you had a system that kept track of which customers needed what service, and when they needed it? And if that system then would automatically remind those customers that the appropriate service was due, plus personalize the message to them based on who they are and what motivates them to buy? That system would be pretty cool. And it would be called smrt™ technology!

Notice how this service reminder has the right message at the right time. It’s personalized to John and clearly indicates what service John needs and what car needs it.

This is how smrt™ supercharges your auto repair marketing. It automatically sends the right message to the right people at the right time, in turn making your shop’s marketing more successful. This is how you get a leg up on your competition, big or small.

You don’t have to take our word for it. We contracted an independent third party data research team at the McClatchy Company to audit more than seven million marketing communications we sent for our customers in 2010. The results surprised even us. Our customers whose auto repair marketing was powered by smrt™ had 4% higher response rates. When most direct marketing response rates are in the single digits, 4% is a huge increase! Even more importantly, marketing powered by smrt™ earned 7% more revenue per dollar spent. Could your business use 7% more revenue coming in from all your marketing?

How smrt™ is your auto repair marketing?

Read more about the value of personalizing your auto shop marketing, or ask us to show you how it works with your own data.

We just got a copy of the 2012 DMA Statistical Factbook from the Direct Marketing Association, a leading group of marketing professionals from many industries.  Almost every one of this book’s 193 pages is jam-packed with marketing stats about all forms of direct marketing: mobile marketing, social media, direct mail, email, Internet and search.  We’ll be using a lot of this info to set benchmarks for how well our marketing services work compared to the high standards set by the DMA.

There are some really interesting stats that jumped off the page as being super important for your auto shop’s marketing:

1. According to the DMA, consumers who purchase by mail are a) 58% female and  b) 68% aged 45 and older. Translation: marketing specifically to women is increasingly important.  Many of our customers are already ahead of this trend. Lots are becoming Ask Patty Certified Female Friendly®.  And lots are creating their own unique ideas, such as Shade Tree Auto in Grimes, Iowa, which offers a popular program they call: An Automotive Crash Course – Ladies Night Out, which entertains and educates local women on owning and maintaining their vehicles. Check out what they’re doing at www.facebook.com/LadiesNightCrashCourse  and keep this fact in mind with all your marketing!
2. Consumers are receiving 16% less direct mail than three years ago.This is good news for you because it means your mailed service reminders and New Customer Finder mail is that much more likely to stand out.
3. Consumers in 81% of households either read or scan advertising mail sent to them. So, four out of five pieces of mail are actually being reviewed by your customers. Again, that’s great news for both your customer retention and New Customer Finder mail because it means it is really reaching people and keeping your brand at the top of their minds.

We’ll keep you posted as we uncover more opportunities and best practices to make your auto repair marketing super successful!

If you found this post helpful, please share it on Facebook or leave a comment below!

From watching people happily use a website that I created to the most minute details of choosing the right word to use in an email subject line, this stuff fascinates me. You, on the other hand, likely want to know the bare basics of auto repair marketing so you can focus on your passion — taking care of cars and the customers in your community.

For that purpose, I would recommend a CustomerLink marketing bundle to automate your more time-consuming and technical auto repair marketing tasks. In the meantime, I want to introduce a marketing tool so important that it should be sitting right next to the scan tool in your shop.

See how my copy is beaten up and held together with tape? That's a good sign.

I’m recommending that every shop owner buy a book called Guerilla Marketing by Conrad Levinson – now. I know that some of you just shut off your computer and ran out to the garage at the sight of the word “book.” If you are still with me, let me tell you that this isn’t some boring discussion of marketing filled with useless corporate buzzwords and high-level business school theories that mean nothing to the real world business owner. I’ve read those too, and I wouldn’t put you through that.

Guerilla Marketing is the real deal — it tells small business owners and entrepreneurs in plain English exactly what it takes to turn their marketing efforts into cash in the shortest amount of time possible without wasting money. The principles taught in this book really mean something in the real world. In fact, I got my first marketing job because I read this book before, and repeated exactly what I read during, the interview. My college degree and web design experience may have gotten me in the door, but this book started my marketing career because the ideas and concepts mattered to the business owner I was talking to. That is 100% true.

What Is an Auto Repair Marketing Guerilla?

I can’t sum up this entire book in a paragraph, but if you want to do your auto repair marketing like a guerilla, it really comes down to a state of mind.

This was probably cheap to do, really stuck in people's minds and made them laugh. Classic guerilla marketing.

You need to have a laser-like focus on your customer’s needs, wants and desires as well as your own bottom line. I hate to burst your bubble, but nobody really cares about your business — they care about themselves. It’s also very important to realize that people very rarely remember the exact details about an experience (that includes price); they remember how experiences make them feel. So make your customers feel great when they do business with you! Real auto repair marketing guerillas know that the most profitable marketing is spent on current customers, so when yours receive their reminder postcards, make sure that they remember having an awesome experience with your company.

How Do I Become an Auto Repair Marketing Guerilla?

So, do you want to take your auto repair marketing to the next level? Here are the steps:

1. Buy, and read, Guerilla Marketing. If you enjoy being a business owner, you’ll enjoy this book.
2. It will be great to understand the “why” of marketing after reading the book above but trust me, you want your auto repair marketing to be automated so you can focus on your customers and your craft. That’s what we do. If you haven’t already, get yourself a CustomerLink marketing bundle!
3. Follow along on our blog! I’ll be going through this book highlighting the most important ideas and pointing out how you can use these ideas in your auto repair business. I also hope to get some great discussions going so we can all learn together (yep, I plan on learning from you guys, too).

Are you already an auto repair marketing guerilla or have you already read this book? If so, leave a comment below telling us one way you used what you learned in your business!

Many of the elements from this program offered by the Car Care Council are available for little or no cost. The Car Care Council gives you everything you need to provide your customers great tips on how to keep their vehicles safe, dependable, and on the road longer. Just by sharing this information, you’ll help build and reinforce lasting customer relationships that are so important for the success of your automotive marketing, and your business itself.

The Car Care Council makes it easy too. Check out their toolkit for options such as adding Be Care Care Aware and National Car Care Month banners to your direct mail, website or social media profiles.

Their latest tool was announced in their March 15th press release, which provided a link to a complete Car Care Guide that helps consumers understand how to maintain their vehicles for maximum safety, dependability, and value. This is a free resource that you can share with your customers to reinforce the importance of proper maintenance.

They offer a wide range of printed materials for very reasonable costs to display in your shop, as well as plenty of options you can download and print on your own.

All in all, these are great automotive marketing tools that are easy to use, inexpensive (or free), and truly engaging to your current and potential customers.

Did you find this blog post helpful? Tell us what you think below, or get more automotive marketing ideas on our blog.

What kind of response rate will my campaign get?

This is a great question. First, let me say response rates can be very misleading and difficult to compare across different types of marketing and advertising. Response rates by themselves are useful for comparing one campaign to another, and for evaluating changes you make to improve results, but they’re not the end-all, be-all number to focus on. It’s much more important to look at the return on investment (ROI) – the actual revenue generated by your marketing campaigns – than it is to focus on response rates.

Remember, New Customer Finder campaigns target not just any new customers, but the best new customers: the ones who are just like your best current customers. Also, unlike some other forms of automotive advertising which can be seen by anyone, including your current customers (I’m thinking about Groupon and social deal sites, flyers at local events, etc.), New Customer Finder campaigns target only new customers who haven’t visited your shop before. Because we’re targeting only NEW customers, and only high-value new customers, we’re raising the bar for response rates and actually making it more difficult to get a response than some of those other automotive advertising options do. That said, through continuous testing and improvement, shops that use our New Customer Finder services have an average response rate of 5.04% and a median response rate of 3.0%. Translation: more than half of our client campaigns get 3 out of every 100 target prospects to pick up the phone and call their shop. For the sake of comparison, the Direct Marketing Association (The DMA is an association of direct marketers- marketing pros in many industries) publishes an annual response rate report that shows stats for campaigns run by DMA members (again, these are pretty savvy marketers with plenty of marketing tools, tricks… and money to spend…). Last year they reported an average response rate of 1.3% for DMA members. This means that shops using our New Customer Finder program to bring new customers in to their auto shops are getting more than double the national average response rate, despite narrowly targeting only high-value customers. We’re thrilled at the idea that our small business customers are trusting us for their auto shop marketing, and we’re delivering results that are so much better than what the big guys (DMA members) are getting.

What about the return on my investment?

This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Or where the money hits the cash register. If your auto repair marketing isn’t bringing back more money than you spend, what good is it?

Every New Customer Finder campaign we do has complete reporting on how many new customers called, how many came in, how many times each one came in and, most importantly, how much they spent.

On the whole, shops that use our New Customer Finder program are seeing an average ROI of $3.72 for every $1 they invest. (Note: that’s after a few months of running the campaign and giving prospects a chance to respond to it.) And that’s just the average. Some of our customers do much, much better and generate some pretty phenomenal ROI. If I could sign CustomerLink’s Marketing department up for a program that generates this kind of results, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

You can get started bringing in new customers and enjoying great ROI with a New Customer Finder campaign for as little as $40 a week. Read more about auto repair marketing with New Customer Finder, or ask us for a demo to see it in action.

We just want you to know that if you’re using CustomerLink’s Facebook apps, we’ve got you covered. Your automated customer reviews, offers, and appointment scheduling apps will continue to work just as they always have.

To see what the new pages look like, go to Facebook’s example pages.

For more details and full questions and answers, see Facebook’s help center.

If your shop isn’t on Facebook yet, check out our tools to manage Facebook and Twitter automatically.

If you need any help, just give us a call.