Maintaining clients is one of the keys to success for any business owner. In fact, the top 10% of your current client base will spend 3x as much as the average customer, which means that much of your marketing should be directed toward customer loyalty and retention. This makes the following business practices essential for every auto repair shop:
Know Your Customers
It’s important to know what works best with the customer base that visits your shop. What type of sales and discounts work best? What times of year is it best to offer tire and service promotions? Being able to see how frequently customers are visiting your shop and how much they’re spending can help you determine when to offer incentives and what type of incentives work best. Not sure how to get this information? BayIQ’s reports and dashboards can help!
Don’t Get Comfortable
Each customer should be viewed as the most important customer. A mistake many shops make is becoming complacent. Complacency in operations, offerings, and especially customer service can be a death sentence in the current market.
When it comes to any shop, each customer is vital and should be treated as such. That’s why it’s important to track down anything that might be causing customers to go elsewhere and use them as opportunities for improvement. This is where reviews can be extremely helpful. While garnering customer reviews are a great marketing tactic to increase interest in your shop, they should also be used for feedback. Where were you lacking? What are your strong suits? This will help your teamwork to be better and improve customer satisfaction.
Stay Connected
Since vehicle repairs aren’t something customers need every day it’s important to stay top-of-mind so they think of your shop when it’s time. Here are several ways you can make sure that you remain at the forefront of your customers’ auto service and repair needs:
- Email- Customers are accustomed to getting emails nowadays and it’s a great way to incentivize them to come in proactively by including reminders and promotional offerings.
- Text- Consider utilizing text message marketing to stay connected with your customer base. This direct connection allows you to send deals and reminders directly to their most used device.
- Social media- More than half of the world's population uses social media. Online marketing is only getting more essential for businesses by the day. The key is to not oversaturate with too many posts, but instead publish meaningful content that gets their attention.
Reward Customer Loyalty
Rewarding repeat business can show your returning customers how much you value them and benefit you both in the long run. In fact, 58% of consumers shop monthly at stores where they belong to a loyalty rewards program.
A good loyalty rewards program will allow your shop to configure how much every dollar spent is worth in rewards points, exclude low-margin line items, and settings to control your email and text message marketing. BayIQ’s loyalty rewards program will help significantly increase your shop’s car count and average repair order.
Invest in Marketing
While marketing is essential for all areas of your business, it’s especially paramount for customer loyalty and retention. After all, your loyal customers will not only spend more in the long run but they also cost less than acquiring new customers. That’s why it’s important to invest in them early and often. Not sure how? That’s what BayIQ is here for.
