A few weeks back, I touched on a topic that many of you were blown away by; DIGITAL Direct Mail. If you missed the article or don’t remember, you can click on that link at the end of the last sentence. In the article I spoke about a proven, outside the box way of driving past sales clients back into your showroom (as well as conquest business) that is more effective than any direct mailer, email blast or BDC center. The reason being that it targets people on social platforms. Why is it important to target people on social platforms? Because the average person spends 27% of their day on social media.
While many will be interested in driving additional front end sales by targeting past sales clients and conquest clients, this technique can even be used for your fixed operations. Not just with service, but parts as well. Face it, your service department has lost service clients. No service department has 100% service client retention, we all know that. So it’s a no-brainer to take a different approach to bringing your lost clients back in the door, is it not? We call this, simply, Lost Service Client Recovery. It works in mostly the same way that Past Sales Client Recovery works, but in this instance, we target past service clients with an aggressive service offer to get them back in the door.
Some of the offers we recommend to our clients range from a $9.95 oil change or $50 front brake replacement to a free 107 point inspection or free nitrogen tire fill. Remember, these clients who have not returned aren’t coming back for one of two reasons. First reason is a bad customer experience, and the second reason is price. A bad customer experience can range from a rude service advisor to their vehicle not being fixed properly, or left dirty. Because of this, this system services a number of purposes. First and foremost, we want to get lost clients back in the door and onto the lifts. This is the reason behind offering an aggressive service coupon. But, more importantly, you now have the opportunity to have your management staff (GM and service manager/ fixed ops director) sit down with that customer and find out exactly why they left. Perhaps it was an unprofessional service advisor that left a sour taste in their mouth.
If that is the case, then you can take the customer around to re-meet the service advisory staff and show the returning customer that things have changed since they were last in for service. People buy from those that they know, like, and trust, so by re-establishing a relationship with the lost service client, you’ll have a better chance of them coming back to you for their future service needs instead of Al’s Service Center down the road. People WILL pay for an extraordinary customer experience, provide it, and you can be sure to see more return.
Earlier it was mentioned that this proven, outside the box strategy could work for not just sales, not just service, but for parts as well. How so? What we can do is, using this same technique, we can serve an offer to people who recently took delivery on a new vehicle and offer them a special on parts and accessories. Not everyone leaves the dealership with everything they way so why not get them back in the door one more time? You can choose to push one specific offer or several. Not everyone leaves with those premium floor mats upon delivery, but what if, three months later they started to see an ad that offers them 20% off on those premium floor mats? That would surely get a new customer back in the door to purchase more items. The possibilities are endless; wheel locks, valve stem caps, roof racks, coffee cups, etc…
Using digital direct mail for the entire dealership is an amazing way to keep in contact with your past, present, and future clients. It’s also an amazing way of increase front end and back end revenue. If you want to find out more information on this revolutionary system, get in touch with us.