Have you ever overcooked a steak or planted a garden that didn’t bloom? Chances are, you didn’t give up cooking or gardening afterward. Yet, when it comes to advertising, shop owners are often ready to quit marketing altogether after one failed campaign.
If you don’t advertise, you’re limiting your shop’s growth. If your past efforts didn’t produce the results you expected, you owe it to your business to investigate what went wrong, so you can make improvements for the future. In other words, practice – just like in cooking or gardening – makes perfect. Now, marketing may not be as much of a science as those two pastimes, but there are strategies you can follow that will increase the likelihood of success.
Here are some steps to consider when implementing a successful advertising campaign. While I’m focusing on direct mail, these tactics should prove useful no matter what type of medium you choose to employ.
Determine your full market potential
Too many shop owners choose their target customers randomly, or worse, cast too wide a net with their marketing. Before launching any campaign, it’s important to figure out what the size of the market is for your services. One way to attack this problem is to review your current customer database. Look at where your customers are coming from and how much they are spending per visit. Those numbers can help guide your targeting efforts. If you don’t have that data readily available, another option is to consider the income levels of the households located closest to your shop. We typically recommend that our customers target middle-to-high income households within one to three miles of the shop. Shops in rural areas can stretch much further out, since the density levels will be lower and they’ll need to extend the distance of their campaigns to reach their full market potential.
Prioritize consistency over quantity
Hitting your full market potential every month is great, but some shops may not be able to afford sending postcards to that many homes. In that case, it might make sense to split your mailings, so you can reach them more frequently, rather than trying to send to your entire list just once or twice a year because that’s all your budget allows. Consider a shop that has a market potential of 13,000 homes, but doesn’t have the resources to mail to all of those homes each month. That shop can break that 13,000-piece mailing into two drops of 6,500 and mail those households twice a month to stay front of mind. Alternatively, the database could be broken down to three drops of 4,300 that are mailed to three times a month. Even though the number of customers the shop is reaching is smaller, by staying active, they are reducing the risk of being out of sight and out of mind when a customer needs a repair or service. For some shops, a smaller mailing might make sense, particularly if they don’t have the staff to support a large campaign. If a shop mails to all 13,000 at once and is inundated with calls, but has to turn customers away, they’ve likely wasted their money.
Be smart about your offers
You can mail the right people consistently and still not attract the response you want if you don’t give those folks a compelling reason to visit your shop. Because you can’t predict what might one household need versus another, the trick is to provide a range of offers. We always suggest including an oil change on your postcard because it’s the most frequent service customers typically have done. Putting an oil change offer on your postcard also indicates to customers that you are open to doing small maintenance jobs and accepting new customers. It also makes sense to feature a coupon with a tiered dollar or percentage off of a repair or maintenance job. For example, $50 off any repair or maintenance service of $250 or more. This may push people in the door who had been holding off on having a repair addressed. Finally, be sure to include a seasonal offer — such as a free A/C check – that will remind customers about service that may be coming due because of weather or time of year. A free check engine light scan is another great way to move the needle. This gives potential customers a good reason to sample your shop without a lot of risk.
Be realistic when measuring ROI
Keep in mind that a range of factors will impact your response rates, including your location, online reviews, the timing of your campaign, hours of operation and how well your front desk staff handles leads. You can’t do much about your location, but extending your hours or ensuring your staff is well trained on converting leads might improve the outcome of your campaigns. You’ll also want to consider more than just sales when measuring success, as it might not tell the whole story. For example, a sales spike that coincides with a late spring campaign might be due to drivers gearing up for road trips, not your advertising. We suggest that our clients look at the addresses of customers who came into their shop during the campaign and compare them to the addresses that were mailed to during that same period. That will give you a better gauge of how effective your advertising was in reaching your target market. We also recommend looking deeper at the customers who come in once your campaign has been activated to see if they are first-time customers, regulars, or those who were in your database, but haven’t visited in a year or more. That information will help you determine how well your campaign succeeded at achieving goals beyond just driving sales, such as winning back former customers and retaining existing ones.
Like anything, advertising requires a certain amount of trial and error to get right. But investing the time and money into better understanding the process can help you achieve the results you want.
