Recent figures released by the automobile industry report a downturn in the number of new cars being bought in the United Kingdom. This is bad news if you are a dealer selling new cars, but reasonably good news if you are running a car repair and servicing business.
There may be many reasons for the drop in new car sales, and I am sure one of them is the cost of even a reasonably priced family car. This means that people are holding onto their vehicles longer than they used to, it appears the average time people are keeping their cars is around eleven years; and these cars are going to require maintaining.
If you are a garage offering car maintenance and servicing, you have a large market right on your doorstep, and with every car over three years requiring an MOT every year, you have the opportunity to obtain loyal customers who will keep coming back year after year. And loyal customers are worth their weight in gold.
Fuel Customer Loyalty
Did you know that it costs five times more to find new customers than it is to keep existing loyal customers?
Despite this, less than 20% of a business’s actually run a customer loyalty programme, so how do you start a customer loyalty programme.
First, you have to find your customers, and the best way to do this is by running a door to door leaflet campaign. Leaflet distribution has been found to be one of the best ways to obtain new customers from your local community.
Once you have found a customer, you will be able to garner all the information you need to start your customer loyalty programme. Make a record of the make and model of the vehicle and service record. You can then contact them when an anniversary of a service or MOT is approaching. In our opinion, a personalised letter is the best way of contacting your customer, people like things that come through their letterbox.
Start Your Leads Engines
If you run a business repairing and servicing cars, then every home or business in your community is a lead, and if you can convert these valuable leads into customers they will eventually become loyal customers. By using a leaflet campaign as a way to generate more customers, you can then select other marketing channels to convert these leads.
Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing means simply using more than one marketing channel to increase your company’s profile.
Say you’re going to have a sale on a specific service e.g. MOT’s for £20 when you have the car serviced at the same time. You can run a leaflet distribution campaign to advertise this, use a similar message and graphic design for a social media campaign and run automotive Google Ads to coordinate with your direct mail and social media. That’s omnichannel marketing. And you can do it.
Choosing The Right Channel
Choosing the right marketing channel for your automotive servicing business will depend on your budget and what you wish to achieve. Make sure you plan your marketing campaign from the beginning to the end by identifying the methods to measure performance.
Effective, targeted marketing involves knowing who your ideal customer is, know your competition and decide on the area you would like to cover. The great news is that all of these can be accomplished by using a well-planned door drop campaign.
Build Up Trust Bank
Trust is a significant factor when people choose the company to maintain their family car or their business’s vehicle. By continually providing high-quality maintenance and after-sales service you will build up a huge bank of trust with your customers who will return to you year after year. This trust can be used to recruit more customers; a survey taken discovered 80% of people would purchase if recommended by a friend.
Use your after-sales service to invite your customers to recommend a friend. Offer them an incentive to do this; a discount on their next service bill could be one incentive you can offer.
Print direct marketing is outperforming digital marketing as people are beginning to suffer from electronic overload, and leaflet distribution is in the vanguard of print-based marketing. You can increase the results of your leaflet campaign by using digital marketing alongside to help raise your company’s profile. If you want more information on how this can be achieved, contact us today.
