If so, make sure you call these convenient benefits out in your marketing and let your prospective customers know you are convenient to work with.
However, It All Starts With Scheduling A Service.

Allowing customers to conveniently schedule online is an important step in creating a great customer experience. With more and more consumers not wanting to pick up the phone, the convenience of having the option to schedule online is important and will appeal to all prospective customers. As we all know, the number of consumers who would rather schedule an appointment online has drastically increased in recent years.

When It Comes To Conveying That You Have A Convenient Way To Schedule Service On Your Direct Mail Marketing, Here Are A Few Powerful Tips.

1. Simply tell customers that scheduling service is convenient by letting them know they can either “Call Today” or “Conveniently Schedule Online”.

2. Provide a QR code that takes customers directly to your online scheduling tool. The key here is to have the right platform, such as AutoOps, that fully integrates with your shop management system. Not only does AutoOps provide a platform that allows customers to schedule live appointments according to your shop’s live calendar, but it can also provide valuable QR code insight to further enhance your marketing.

Interested in adding integrated online scheduling into your next mailer campaign?

The post Convenience is Key: How to Attract Auto Repair Customers by offering Convenient Ways to Schedule Service appeared first on Best4mailing.

With direct mail you can target the exact prospect you want, at their exact address with the ONLY MEDIA THAT GUARANTEES a 100% OPEN RATE and the highest attention rate of any media. Isn’t that the holy grail of marketing, being able to target the exact prospect  you want, at the exact time, with the exact message, and guarantee that they SEE IT.

This is exactly what direct mail delivers and just two of the many reasons that make direct mail so powerful when done right. Let me repeat that, when done right as there are so many things that will kill a direct mail campaign before it even begins. Furthermore, for most industries, direct mail is one of the easiest media to track response rate and ROI. Therefore, you can take if from does direct mail work to this is exactly how well it worked for my business.

With all that said, the reason behind asking the question “Does Direct Mail Work.” Boils down to either one or a combination of the following 6 reasons.

1. I have tried direct mail in the past and it just didn’t work.
2. XXXX told me direct mail doesn’t work. Often this comes from a digital marketing company trying to sell the direct mail or could be a friend or colleague has told them that direct mail doesn’t work.
3. I just don’t really understand marketing in general and/or do not understand the capabilities of direct mail and how it really works.
4. I just don’t think it will work for my business.
5. Let’s really break down each of these reasons and bring some transparency to the heart of the questions.
6. I’ve tried direct mail in the past and it just didn’t work.

If this is you, here are the important questions that need to be asked.

Do you know who and where your mailers were sent to?

There needs to be a sound strategy behind selecting the right areas and prospects to target. Nothing will kill a direct mail campaign more than a bad list and sending your mailers to the wrong prospects in the wrong areas.

Do you have a copy of your last mailer?

This is an easy checkpoint to identify If your direct mail marketing was designed properly both from an aesthetic perspective and content perspective.

If your direct mail marketing wasn’t easy to read, easy to scan, did not have a strong call to action, a compelling offer, contained technical jargon and did not include strategic ad copy that would resonate with your prospective customers, you might as well toss your money down the toilet.

How did you track and/or gauge the effectiveness of your direct mail response and ROI?

Tracking your marketing efforts and determining how customers are finding your business is arguably one of the hardest parts. This becomes even more difficult when deploying a multi-channel marketing approach.

I often hear that call tracking was used to a client’s direct mail response rate. Unfortunately, in 99.9999% of all cases call tracking is NOT an accurate method to track direct mail response.

The reason being is that many prospects who receive your mailer will go online, read reviews and call from the number on Google or your website. The minute a call is made from any number other than the call tracking number on your mailer, you have lost all accuracy.

Although call tracking will show some results and does have some merit, It will only show you those that called from the number on the mailer and is not inclusive or indicative of all calls made from the number on google or your website, thus making it grossly inaccurate.

However, for businesses such as Home Services, HVAC, Plumbing, landscaping, Power Washing, Construction, etc. Auto Repair, Dental Practices, Fitness Centers, Insurance, Financial, Education, etc. etc. etc. that acquire their customers address when they become a customer, it is very easy to attribute ROI.

This is done with a very simple report called a match back report. The match back report takes the new customers your business acquires after your direct mail marketing has been sent out and compares It to the list of prospects who have received your direct mail marketing matching back a detailed list of every new customer acquired that was targeted with direct mail.

Of course, it cannot tell you if your direct mail was the only reason,  they became a customer. For example, the direct mail got their attention but your website and google reviews is what pushed them over the edge. The latter you will likely never be able to solve for at scale and you could spend a decade determining if you want to consider it first, touch last touch, etc., but it surely does give you the ability to  attribute direct mail as one of the touches, if not the primary touch that got them to become a customer at your business.

For other types of business such as restaurants, retail, etc. that are not able to acquire a customer’s address at time of purchase, it is likely you will never know your exact response rate. In these cases, the best you can do is count coupons or try and track special offers with unique codes to tie them back to an offer directly from one of your mailers. Many suggest look at sales as a determining factor. As intuitive as those sounds, I have seen a customer who are getting a response and have declining sales due to operational issues.

XXXX told me direct mail doesn’t work.

First, we must ask, who is providing you with this information. If it is a company trying to sell you another form of marketing and they are bashing another marketing channel, then you should probably just disregard it and/or ask them to provide you with fact-based evidence to substantiate their claim as opposed to what they think or what they say they are seeing. I’d be willing to be they can’t provide you with anything accurate.

If it is a friend, family member or colleague, it can only have come their opinion or from an experience they have had in the past with direct mail. If it is opinion based and not fact based than it can be disregarded. If it is based on previous experience, ask them the questions above addressed above to uncover if they executed their direct mail campaign properly and/or accurately tracked their direct mail campaign results to substantiate their feedback.

I just don’t really understand marketing in general and/or do not understand the capabilities of direct mail and how it really works.

This is a fair concern. Most business owners and managers aren’t marketing experts. Even those business owner managers that do understand marketing or have some expertise may not be the authority on a specific channel of marketing like SEO, Direct Mail, etc. Therefore, it’s always a best practice to find an expert in that field and rely on them to help you.

The key is finding the right expert which is the biggest challenge. Fortunately using google can help make this process much more efficient. I recommend by starting by looking for companies that have expertise with your specific industry and have the google reviews to match.

I just don’t think it will work for my business.

You may be right about this concern. Direct mail may not work well for your businesses, or it may work, but you may be able to

get a much better ROI using another form of marketing. This can only be determined by consulting with a real direct mail expert.

For example, let’s assume you owned an auto body repair shop. I would not recommend direct mail as the best use of your marketing dollars and the most viable way for your business to acquire new customers.

The reason being is that the need for auto body repair cannot be determined by someone’s demographic or where they live and there is no direct mail list you can buy that breaks down vehicle owners that may need auto body repairs. A vehicles owners need for an auto body repair will typically be determined by a recent event or immediate need they have to repair  their vehicle.
A better use of an auto body repair shops marketing dollars would be better deployed to channels like local SEO, optimizing your google business profile, executing PPC. These channels will ensure you are optimized so that when a prospect has a need arise and they head to google to find a local body shop that yours is at the top of the list.

In summation, direct mail is extremely effective when executed strategically for the right type of business.

To learn more about how Best4mailing can help your business strategically acquire and retain more customers the right way. Contact us today.

The post Does Direct Mail Work? appeared first on Best4mailing.

Furthermore, would consumers trust your auto repair shop, if you did not have a traditional website and instead used social platforms like Facebook and  Instagram to connect with consumers online?

Next, to gain more insight on whether consumers would trust your business, if you did not have a traditional website and instead used social platforms like Facebook and Instagram to connect with them online,

We asked the same 2,000 vehicle owners the following: 

Would you trust a business that DOES NOT have a website, but DOES have social media pages (ex. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) ?

The results are almost split down the middle with a slightly higher percentage 53% of consumers reporting they would Trust a business that does NOT have a website but does have social media pages.

However, with nearly half 47% reporting they would not trust your business, it is clear having a website is critical. I cannot think of any business owner that would decide not to have a website, knowing that 46% or almost one of out every two potential customers would not trust your business otherwise. In addition to the Trust factor, there are many other even more compelling reasons to have a professional looking website with the right content, with the biggest being simply found on search engines like google.

The post How Important is Your Auto Repair Shops Website to Attracting New Customers? appeared first on Best4mailing.

Hello auto repair shop owners and managers. My name is Josh Davis, Chief Revenue officer here at Mail shark.

If you are thinking about using direct mail or currently using direct mail to acquire and retain more customers for your auto repair shop, there is one very important report that is critical to the success of your direct mail campaigns, called a penetration report.

Penetration reports are the most important report you will use with direct mail marketing, because they leverage your shops customer data to help strategically select the best areas to target new customers. Sending your direct mail marketing to the wrong areas is the quickest way to kill your response rate and waste your precious marketing dollars.

However, over the years we continuously experience a lot of confusion from shop owners understanding the difference between penetration reports they have received from other direct mail companies in comparison to penetration reports run by Best4mailing. There is one  specific difference that IS CRITICAL in understanding how to properly evaluate penetration report day.

With that said, my goal with this article is to bring transparency to the following: 

1. Provide a clear understanding as to the importance of utilizing penetration reports and how to use them properly.
2. Provide you with a detailed explanation to the one key difference in the way Best4mailing runs our penetration reports, compared to how other companies run their reports. It is very important you understand the difference as I have seen first-hand how causes confusion.

What Do Penetration Reports Do?

Now that you understand what a carrier route is, a penetration report takes your current active customers and appends them back to the exact carrier routes that each of your customers live in.

Appending each customer back to the exact carrier route, gives us the ability to:

1. Determine the distance that most customers are willing to travel to your shop. Once this perimeter is established, we can ensure to never target prospects beyond these points.
2. Determine how many houses within each route that you have customers. This is where the “penetration comes from” as we take take the number of addresses in the route and divide it by how many houses you to determine the % of penetration into each route to gauge how well you have done acquiring customers in each route relative to other routes.

For example: 

If there are 500 houses in a carrier route and you have 1 customer each in 50 of the houses, then you have a 10% (50 houses with customers/500 houses = 10%) penetration in that route.

With both these pieces of information, as state above we can begin to strategically help select the best carrier routes to target new customers in. Whether that be continuing to target routes you have the highest penetration of customers or targeting other routes with similar distance and or demographic makeup, to see if we can increase penetration in those routes.

As a bonus of this process, since we already have our client’s current customer database needed to run the penetration report, we can use that same customer data to suppress their shops current customers from their mailing, so they aren’t sending a new customer acquisition mailer to customers that are already actively coming to their shop, if they of course want them removed.

Now to The Key Difference In Reporting You MUST UNDERSTAND!

Now that you hopefully have a clear understanding of what a penetration report is and why they are so critical, it’s important to understand the key difference in how many companies run their penetration reports as compared to how we do things here at Best4mailing.

To illustrate this difference, let’s look at the example below:

The example below is how MOST direct mail companies analyze and calculate their penetration reports….

Let’s assume there was a carrier route with 10 houses just for this example. Of course, this would never happen as carrier routes have hundreds of addresses in them, but to illustrate the main point bear with me on this fictitious route has 10 houses in it.

Now let’s assume an auto repair shop has one customer each in 5 different houses.

Based on a penetration report, this would mean that you have a 50% penetration in this carrier route.

This leaves 5 homes that you do not have a customer in that are potential targets.

This is where all the confusion stems from and it stems from companies computing their penetration reports using the total number of customers a shop has in each route as compared to using the number of houses, they have a customer in.

If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is. To bring clarify you must understand that a carrier route counts the number of houses inside each route e.g. There are 10 houses in our example route, it does NOT count the number of people living in each house, which there is no way to ever know this number.

Again, a carrier route counts the number of houses inside each route NOT the number of people living in each house.

Therefore, you cannot look at and compare the total number of customers you have in a route to the number of houses in that route. When this is done, it skews the % penetration as illustrated in our example with a 100% penetration yet only 5 of the 10 houses have customers living there.

The correct way to run a penetration report is to take your customer list and remove any customers that live at the same address to only leave one customer per household. This will allow us to compare number of houses in each route to number of houses you have a customer in giving us an accurate household penetration. Accurate penetration report with multiple customers living at the same address removed providing an accurate picture of penetration which is 50% meaning there are still 50% of the houses in this route that you have not acquired a customer in and penetrated.

In summation, how you want to analyze your shops customer data is entirely up to you. Feel to run the numbers and metrics how you best see fit that is entirely up to you. My goal was to merely bring transparency to the numbers.

Expert Tip:

One of the biggest issues with penetration reports is bad customer data out of your CRM. A penetration report can only analyze valid and standardized USPS addresses. Unfortunately, most shops have bad customer data that is either missing an address entirely or has an incorrect address that cannot be validated.

Bad records like this skew your penetration report data as they are not able to be included in your penetration report.

Ask you direct mail partner to provide you with a list of bad records so that you can have your service advisor or other team members work to correct this data. Not only will it help create a more accurate penetration report it will help with any customer retention direct mail service reminder cards you may be sending.

Contact one of our auto repair direct mail marketing experts to unlock the power of your data. for your complimentary penetration report analysis.

Josh Davis

The post Auto Repair Shop Penetration Reports appeared first on Best4mailing.

By far, the most utilized and most redeemed auto repair coupon, is the oil change coupon. This brings up the question we get asked most frequently from auto repair shop owners/manager,

“Should I do a price point oil change offer or a $ off oil change offer?” 

Before we hop into the addressing this question, I would like to address three key points that I’d bet you’ve either thought of in the past, are thinking now or at some point in time will think, which is:

1. I don’t want to be the cheap oil change shop!
2. I don’t want to be the coupon shop!
3. I don’t’ want the bottom feeders!

2. I don’t want to be the coupon shop. 

 We know and we get it, as we hear this all the time. No shop wants to be a coupon shop. However, a strong coupon for an oil change is often the catalyst for new customers to give your shop a try. As we all know in addition to customer retention, customer acquisition is key to growing your shop.  

 Furthermore, we know based on our auto repair consumer research found in “Cracking The Code” that the consumer demand for auto repair coupons is huge.  To be very specific, we asked 8,260 vehicle owners who have had their vehicle serviced at least once in the past 12 moths, the following question. 

“If you received a coupon/special in the mail from a reputable auto repair shop offering a discount on products or services you need,
would you use them?”

A resounding 79% said yes…. 

With that being said, we know you may be thinking “yeah that’s great but I don’t want to train my customers to use coupons,” AKA I don’t want the bottom feeders.

The solution to this question is found in the response below.

 Now that we addressed the three points above, let’s discuss the oil change coupon/special question.  

“Should I do a price point oil change offer
or a $ off oil change offer?” 

There is much debate over this question. We have our own opinion, which we will cover shortly, however, to get some specific consumer insight into this question, we conducted a national consumer research survey.  

 To get the cleanest data possible, we screened survey respondents with two very specific questions listed below, as well as the reasoning we asked these questions.  

Q1: What type of oil does your vehicle use?

**If respondents said they did not, they were automatically removed from the survey. 

 The Logic: If consumers didn’t know what type of oil their car took, we would not be able to present them with the appropriate sample offer between a conventional or syntenic oil change based on different price points that would somewhat be closer to what an actual real offer would like look like. 

 Q2: Do you know exactly how much you paid for your last oil change?  

**If respondents did remember, they were removed from the survey.  

 The Logic: If consumers knew exactly how much they last paid for an oil change, then their feedback would be biased based on the price points on our fictious oil change example.  

Respondents that made it passed our first two screening questions above, were presented the following survey question.  

If you received these coupons in the mail for a conventional oil change – you can only choose one.
Which would you pick? 

**As a side note we selected the oil change price points based on what many of our clients have done. We realize that there is a regional competent to this and that this example is not 100% perfect.  

Once the above questions were answered, we asked survey respondents one Last question!  

Q3: Can you explain why you chose this offer? Please be as specific as possible! 

UNFORTUNATELY, After all this work, we were not able to get accurate results and here is why. 

After careful review of over 2,000 responses, too many respondents had a point of reference of what an oil change costs and/or what they paid for their last oil change. There clearly skews the results in terms of the offer they chose. Below are just a few examples responses to give you a better understanding.  

• That seems cheaper than what I usually pay. I usually pay closer to 60 so $10 off would not be as good of a deal 

• Because a typical oil change is almost 50 bucks so that was the better option 

However,  

• Conventional oil changes here are running over $40 so $29.99 would save more money than $10 off would. 

• Because I pay almost $60 for my oil change 

• Because I think that’s less than what my car costs for an oil change regularly. 

• 39.99 is what I paid for a conventional oil change. My SUV now uses synthetic oil which sometimes costs at least $ 50 or more.

Now, you are probably thinking, why they heck did you waste my time reading this, if there is no clear answer. The reason being, is that although we were not able to get a 100% clear result, we were able to gain some tremendous insight based on reading the 2,000 responses.  

In summation, there is no right or wrong answer, do what you feel is best for your auto repair shop.  

If you need help selecting the best coupons/offers for your auto repair shop contact us today. One of our auto repair direct mail marketing experts will help you craft a strategic coupon/offer campaign that will have broad appeal and maximize your response rates.  

The post The Oil Change Offer appeared first on Best4mailing.

As a direct mail marketing professional, I know having a strong offer on our client’s direct mail marketing in the form of a coupon or special is a major catalyst to entice new customers to try their establishment for the first time as well as getting current customers to come back and become loyal repeat customers. 

However, when speaking to many of our clients, it can be difficult for them to understand that offering a small discount is well worth it when comparing the discount amount to their customers lifetime value. Your customers lifetime value is the amount of money a customer is expected to spend at your business during the entire time they remain a customer. You can easily google “customer lifetime value” and read endless articles on the topic. 

Furthermore, there is still a misconception as to who uses coupons. For example, we often here from our clients in areas with higher incomes, that wealthier people aren’t looking for coupons or that their clients wouldn’t be interested in a coupon. 

 Of course, we know this is not the case based on previous data and many studies that have been done in the past. However, we wanted to refresh the topic with current relevant data and find out how many wealthy consumers use coupons compared to those with lower incomes. Furthermore, we wanted to see if and how these numbers changed based on the product/service being offered. E.g., Are more consumers using coupons for pizza than for auto repair service, HVAC services, etc. etc.  

Therefore, we decided to take four industries (in no specific order) Auto Repair, Pizza/Restaurants, General Dentistry & Home Services (HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical) and conduct our own research to get the answers and provide updated current data to the old question. 

Below we will cover our key findings by industry. If you would like to dive deeper into our survey methodology, how we conducted our survey, parameters to be included in our survey as well as more details regarding these and many other key findings, we have provided a link at the bottom of this article to each specific consumer research and insights report entitled “Cracking The Code.” Cracking The Code is our full industry specific consumer research and insight report that answered these questions to consumers in addition to many others.  

Home Services (HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical) 

We asked 5,818 homeowners: 

 If you received a coupon/special in the mail from a reputable home services provider offering a discount on services and/or product you need, would you use it? 

Results based on income:

Dental: 

We asked 5,842 consumers: 

If you received a coupon/special offer in the mail for dental services that you need, how likely are you to redeem that offer?

Results based on income:

As you can see based on each industry we analyzed, the consumer interest in coupons is high regardless of income and in many cases, those with higher incomes have reported they would use coupons more than those with lower incomes.  

The only outlier to this happens to be in the restaurant/pizzeria industry. Although over 50% reported using coupons for their favorite restaurants, this is the only industry analyzed where respondents with higher incomes reported less usage of coupons/specials than those with lower incomes. 

So quite simply it appears that some of the wealthier demographics are more interested in using coupons where the savings are greater. All in all, the answer to our original question is a resounding YES consumers use coupons and YES consumers with higher incomes use coupons. The challenge for you now is to develop a strategic coupon campaign that will appeal to the market you are targeting.  

Below you will find links to each industry specific consumer insight report that not only contains the details of our coupons research above but is chalk full of other key insights that will help you better understand the consumers you are targeting as prospective new customers.  

 Josh Davis, CRO 

The post Who Uses Coupons? appeared first on Best4mailing.

As an example, from our latest research & insight report “Cracking The Code” , 87% of drivers surveyed reported that it was important to them that their vehicle be sanitized after being repaired, with 51% reporting it as very important and 36% reporting it as somewhat important.

Download Cracking the Code Automotive To Learn More About Your Shop’s Customers

& Access Best4mailing’s Latest Consumer Research And Insights Report.

The post Do Your Repair Shop’s Customers Want Their Vehicles Sanitized After Service? appeared first on Best4mailing.

We Asked 8,274 Drivers :

How Much They Could Afford For An Unexpected Auto Repair.

Download Cracking the Code Automotive To Learn More About Your Shop’s Customers

& Access Best4mailing’s Latest Consumer Research And Insights Report.

The post Can Your Shop’s Customers Afford Unexpected Auto Repairs? appeared first on Best4mailing.

Most of your shop’s revenue is likely generated from your current customers. Staying in front of these customers throughout the year is paramount to retaining customers and maintaining revenue. However, finding the right balance of customer communications can be difficult. You want to avoid bombarding your happy customers so frequently that you become an annoyance, but you also don’t want to waste time and marketing dollars on efforts that will not pay dividends. So, what is the right frequency? In our latest consumer research & insight report “Cracking The Code”, we asked drivers how often they want to hear from their auto repair shop throughout the year.

How Often Would You Like To Receive Communication About Special Offers, News, Updates, Etc. From Your Auto Repair Shop Throughout The Year?

Based on our findings, only 28% (about one in every five) want to hear from you as often as once per month. Choosing a monthly strategy may lead to more frequent communication than is acceptable to most customers. A more acceptable frequency might be every two to three months, with a bare minimum recommendation of at least twice per year. It may take some trial and error to find what works best for your shop but remember that you can always make adjustments until you find the sweet spot. The key is getting started now.

Download Cracking the Code Automotive To Learn More About Your Shop’s Customers

& Access Best4mailing’s Latest Consumer Research And Insights Report.

The post When Do Auto Customers Want to Hear From You appeared first on Best4mailing.

Independently owned shops are still the number one choice for most U.S. drivers. Based on findings from our latest consumer research & insight report “Cracking The Code”, slightly more than one in every three drivers surveyed (38%) have had their vehicles last serviced by an independently owned repair shop.

Where Have You Last Had Maintenance Or Repairs Completed On Any Of Your Vehicles?

Digging a bit deeper into the age, income and gender demographics of survey respondents who report taking their vehicles to independent auto repair shops, doesn’t show any glaring outliers nationally.

However, working with auto repair shops over the years, we do typically see income as an outlier regionally. In addition, we see proximity to shop location as a much clearer outlier for customers selecting their auto repair shop of choice. There is always a specific distance, where shops see a significant drop off from being able to acquire many customers.

As with many service-related businesses, customers are simply looking for a location that is conveniently located to them. Therefore, it was no surprise when asked we asked 8,274 drivers.

When selecting the auto repair shops you have taken your vehicle to in the past, what influenced you the most?

Select the top three choices: That the top third most important factor (42%) of those surveyed selected “Location” as what influenced them most in selecting their auto repair shop.

Download Cracking the Code Automotive To Learn More About Your Shop’s Customers

& Access Best4mailing’s Latest Consumer Research And Insights Report.

The post Where Are Most Vehicles Being Serviced appeared first on Best4mailing.