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.

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.

For example, in a 2017 survey from the AAA the findings show that one-third of drivers in the US could not afford a repair bill that was unexpected. 33.33% is a pretty significant number of vehicle owners that have tight budgets.

With that in mind, if you offer any type of financing options for repairs, it’s important that your marketing message contains content that informs your prospects that you have options and that you will help them get financing for their repairs or maintenance and get them back on the road fast.

Depending upon how much content and space you have available on your marketing, there are a few different ways to promote your financing.

Below are a few ideas to promote financing options on your direct mail marketing.

1. Create a burst or some other type of call out that promotes your financing option.

2. If you are listing other benefits, your shop offers you can include financing info here.

   • Financing Options Available
   • Quick & Easy Financing Available
   • NO Credit Check Financing
3. Utilize your financing company’s info, logo, etc. to create a larger impact.

Below is an example of a new project that just came by my desk demonstrating one of the many ways to promote your shops financing. The example shows one side of a Jumbo 8.5×10.5 postcard.

Included a bullet point calling out “Quick & Easy Financing Options” under the Why Choose Auto Clinic? section. Since this is a critical message, we are trying to drive home to the consumer we placed it first in our bulleted list based on the Primacy/Recency Effect. In other words, people tend to recall information provided at the beginning of a list (Primacy) and end (Recency) better than information presented in the middle of the list.

We then reinforced this with another message addressing their customers potential problem “Unexpected Repair” and our Solution “Fix it Today! $0 Down” along with incorporating the EASYPAY FINANCE branding.

Finally, knowing that 33% of drivers may be struggling financially is also a compelling reason to have a strategic coupon offering. Giving prospects the ability to save on repairs in conjunction with providing them financing options can help position you as the best option for their repairs.

The post Auto Repair Shops – It’s Critical To Market Your Finance Options appeared first on Best4mailing.

In addition, customers will travel further for a quality, transparent and trustworthy auto repair shop so you don’t want to limit your trade area based on an arbitrary starting point. With that in mind, the most strategic way to define your shops ideal trade area, is to run a penetration map and report. With a penetration map, we take your database of current customers and visually plot them on a map. Next, we draw a radius around your location in order identify how far your current customers are willing to travel to visit your shop.

From here, we can append the number of customers you have down to the postal mail carrier route level to define your potential trade area. This will give you a very transparent picture with regards to which postal carrier routes are yielding the most customers.

Here is an example of a penetration map and report:

If you are a general auto repair shop you can now use this new data along with key demographics such as median income, % of vehicles per household, age, etc. to strategically choose the areas and carrier routes that should theoretically yield the best return.

If you are a Euro, Asian, Diesel, Specialty Repair Shop, etc. that is only targeting specific makes & models, etc. although you won’t be targeting every address in a specific carrier route, you can still use carrier routes to help choose the areas you would like to target the specific makes & models that your service.

Using the carrier route strategy allows you to more strategically identify the areas that you want to target as opposed to having to mail an entire radius for example. Mailing a radius may not be a good strategy as there may be specific areas within that radius that you want to avoid.

This could be due to traffic patterns making it difficult to access your location from certain areas, too much competition from other shops, or quite simply there may be some very low-income areas, etc. that you want to stay away from. In these instances, its best to select the carrier routes that you want to target and then from their purchase the list of only the makes, models, etc. in those specific carrier routes.

Pro Tip: For General Auto Repair Shops Executing Carrier Route Mailings: Choosing the areas is only half of the equation. It’s equally as critical that you understand the types of addresses within the areas you have selected. There are all sorts of things that could diminish your return if not discussed and potentially removed. Addresses such as PO Boxes, Businesses, Drop Address Apartments, Seasonal Addresses, Trailers, College Addresses, etc.

Give us a call today to learn more about how Best4mailing helps auto repair shops grow their car count.

The post Defining Your Auto Repair Shop’s Target Market appeared first on Best4mailing.

New Customer Acquisition Campaigns

For new customer acquisition direct mail campaigns, I always recommend a limited time offer strategy. The only caveat to this is if you’re promoting a short-term offer based on a tire rebate promotion or something similar with a specific deadline.

In any other case, I always recommend a limited time offer strategy. Your prospects won’t necessarily have a broken car within the timeframe of your coupon’s predefined expiration date. There’s no crystal ball that tells you when a prospect’s car will need repairs or services. Using a limited time offer strategy ensures that when they do need you, they’ll have a good reason to use your shop as opposed to your competitor’s. Think about it. What would you do with an ad you pulled out of your drawer or off your refrigerator with an expired coupon? You’d most likely throw it away.

Pro Tip: If you do choose to use an expiration date for a new customer acquisition campaign, I recommend using an expiration date that’s at least six months past the date your last mailer is in homes.

Service Reminders & Customer Database Marketing Campaigns

If you’re sending out service reminders (or something similar), an expiration date strategy is more appropriate. If you know exactly when your customers are due for a service, using an expiration date will help create a sense of urgency for them to get the work done.

If you’d like help figuring out which strategy is best for your direct mail campaign, give us a call today. We can help you develop a strategic coupon or specials campaign that will appeal to the widest audience.

Give us a call today to learn more about how Best4mailing helps auto repair shops grow their car count. 610-621-2994

The post Should You Use Expiration Dates on Your Auto Repair Shop’s Coupons? appeared first on Best4mailing.

EDDM^® Retail is a DIY program created to make it easier for business owners to physically take direct mail pieces to the post office and mail them out to individual carrier routes. A carrier route is a further breakdown of a ZIP Code. To learn more about EDDM^®, check out our informative article.

EDDM^® Retail Is Not a Good Option for European, Asian, and Specialty Shops

EDDM^® Retail mail is sent out by carrier route, which means you’re targeting every address in a specific geographic area. Therefore, EDDM^® Retail is not a viable option for European, Asian, or specialty shops. These shops should be doing a targeted mailing only targeting the specific makes and models they service. However, EDDM^® Retail is a viable option for general auto repair shops.

You Cannot Remove Your Current Customers with an EDDM^® Retail Mailing

EDDM^® mailers don’t have physical addresses on them (because you don’t have a mailing list), so your data hygiene capabilities are extremely limited. Essentially, you can’t remove specific addresses from an EDDM^® mailer. You can only remove certain address types (such as PO Boxes and businesses), which are not relevant in this case.

Pro Tip: EDDM^® isn’t the best option for shops that want to use direct mail for new customer acquisition but don’t want to send the same piece to their current customers. Shops that want to remove their current customers are better off doing a full-service mailing where we purchase a list of physical addresses to use on your mailers. In doing so, we can remove your current customers from your mailing.

EDDM^® Cannot Be Used as a Database Mailer to Target Current or Previous Customers

If you’re looking to send a mailer to your current customer database (current or lapsed), EDDM^® Retail is not a viable option.

Do You Have Time?

It’s important to keep in mind that there’s additional legwork required to meet EDDM^® Retail mailing requirements. For example, you have to fill out paperwork and bundle your mail in a particular order. Many companies (like Best4mailing) offer this service at an additional cost. Regardless of whether you work with a direct mail company or do it on your own, you have to do these things.

You’ll also have to physically stand in line at the post office to deliver your EDDM^® mailers. Depending on the areas you want to target, you may have to visit multiple post offices. You’ll have to determine how much time you have and what your time is worth. All too often, clients order EDDM^® mailers and then get too busy to mail them out. If you feel this may happen to you, EDDM^® Retail is not your best option. Instead, you should opt for a full-service mailing where your direct mail partner can handle and deliver the mail for you.

Check out our article on time-saving tips for EDDM^® that will save you valuable time and get your EDDM^® campaigns out faster.

The post Using USPS EDDM Retail to Market Your Auto Repair Shop appeared first on Best4mailing.

As a quick note, the concept behind the cheap oil change offer is that it is a loss leader and utilized to entice new customers. The key is getting new customers through the door, which the cheap oil change can be extremely effective at doing. Once you get them in your shop and you do a great job for them, you can build a great rapport with them and win them over as a loyal customer.

All that said, you will always know your business better than any marketing company. Therefore, we certainly can’t argue with the fact that you would not like to use this strategy if in fact you have already executed a cheap oil change coupon campaign and it did bring in the wrong clientele.

However, having an oil change coupon as part of your shop’s direct mail marketing strategy is critical. Here are a few reasons why.

An oil change is something that every non-electric vehicle owner will need at some point in time. Consequently, I would venture to say that most vehicle owners are familiar with what an oil change is more so than any other maintenance service. Compare that to a timing belt replacement coupon or a serpentine belt replacement, each of which the average consumer may not be familiar. When you have a coupon that is familiar and relevant to everyone that you are targeting, you have a much higher chance of increasing redemption rates.

Therefore, for those shop owners that are afraid of attracting the wrong clientele or devaluing their brand with a low-price point oil change, the simple fix is to increase your oil change price point to a number that you are comfortable with and that is still a value from a consumer perspective. An alternate option would be to offer a specific $ off discount that you are comfortable with — for example, $10 off any conventional oil change & 15 off any full synthetic.

My next recommendation, if you are a general auto repair shop, which is a non-negotiable one, in my opinion, is to structure your oil change coupon to offer both a conventional and full synthetic oil change offer. All too often, shop owners only offer a conventional oil change coupon. A conventional oil change coupon is fine. However, it will never appeal or be applicable to owners of vehicles that require full synthetic oil. There is no reason to limit your offer to only appeal to a specific set of vehicles. It’s crucial you cast a wider net and appeal to as many vehicle owners as possible. The simple and quick solution is to offer both options.

Pro Tip: If you are concerned about coupons bringing in the wrong clientele, think again. Even the wealthiest consumers use coupons.

Here is a snippet from our blog post, Why You Should Be Sending Direct Mail Coupons:

Wealthy People

It might seem surprising, but wealthy people love saving money with coupons. In fact, households with annual incomes of $100,000 or more are twice as likely to use coupons than households earning less than $35,000 a year.

Wealthy customers may be able to afford your most expensive products and services, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want a good deal. The majority of them are cautious about spending money and rarely make frivolous, unnecessary purchases. Rather than viewing your business as cheap, they’ll appreciate your coupons and the opportunity to save money, …

If you would like help creating a diversified and strategic coupon offering that has the widest appeal give us a call today. We would be more than happy to help.

The post The Oil Change Coupon appeared first on Best4mailing.

If your auto repair shop offers online appointment scheduling, you most certainly want to include content that conveys that message on your direct mail marketing. It can help position you as the local repair shop that makes doing business easy by giving customers another convenient way to schedule their repair or maintenance services.

As a standard, I suggest my clients add the following verbiage or a variation of, positioned above their phone number and website.

“Call Today or Conveniently Schedule Online”
610-621-2994
TheMailShark.com

In addition, I recommend utilizing a QR code, that when scanned takes your customers directly to your online appointment scheduling web page. Customers that are apt to schedule their appointments online will no doubt appreciate the convenience, making it even easier for them to book their appointment from their smart phones or tablet by simply scanning your QR code as opposed to having to type out a long URL such as:

advancedautorepairream.com/appointments

Here is an example:

Now, I know what many of you may be thinking, “Do people still use QR Codes?” I’m not using my psychic abilities; I’ve simply been asked countless times by auto repair shop owners. Many shop owners seem to think QR codes are a thing of the past, however, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The QR code market is on a steep rise. According to Juniper Research, by 2022, 5.3 billion QR code coupons will be redeemed by smartphones and 1 billion smartphones will access QR codes.

In my opinion there is no reason you should not be using this technology. Utilizing a QR code can’t have any negative affect on your business and there is only upside potential to add more convenience and make your shop easier to schedule an appointment with.

A few final thoughts:

It’s important to note, after creating countless QR codes for auto repair shops, I have noticed that when clicking on the online appointment scheduling link on many shop websites, it does not take you to a different URL when accessing the online appointment page. Instead, it keeps you on the same page you are on with an online appointment scheduling pop up. If this is the case on your shop’s website, you will not be able to link a QR code direct to your specific online appointment scheduling page. You can still utilize it to drive your prospects to your website and then from there they will have to navigate to this page as compared to them scanning the QR code and landing directly on your online scheduling page.

If your shop doesn’t offer online appointment scheduling, you can still utilize QR Codes for many different things. Below is a short list to give you some ideas of what QR codes can easily link your customers to.

• Any Website URL
• Google Maps Location
• Facebook
• YouTube Video
• Contact Details
• Image File
• Etc.

Finally, we have some PRO Tips to help you get the most out of the use of your QR code.

Pro Tip #1: Basic QR codes should be FREE from your direct mail partner and many QR code services give you the ability to create a special QR codes that allow you to track the number of times your QR code is scanned. You can then test the use of your QR code and have transparency as to whether your QR code is being scanned by consumers.

Pro Tip #2: Never Use a QR Code without labeling it with what its purpose is. You will most likely get zero scans or far less using a QR code without a label.

Pro Tip #3: I don’t recommend using more than one QR code on your direct mail marketing piece. Use the link you feel customers will find the most convenience in and stick with a that one.

Pro Tip #4: You can also create custom QR code images to further enhance the appeal of your QR code. This is typically with paid QR code services. Here’s an example of how Best4mailing created a custom QR code to make it seamless for our prospective auto repair shop clients to get a quote and samples.

Give us a call today to learn more about how Best4mailing helps auto repair shops grow their car count. 610-621-2994

The post Promote Your Shops Online Appointment Scheduling with The Help of QR Codes appeared first on Best4mailing.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with what call tracking is and how it works, it involves putting a unique phone number on your direct mail that isn’t used anywhere else. When someone calls the number, it forwards immediately and seamlessly to your main phone line. This gives you the ability to track and record all phone calls from this special number, in turn giving you some transparency into how your direct mail marketing is performing.

Pro Tip: There are of course many other nuances, capabilities, and uses for call tracking that you can learn about from companies like CallRail or Conversa, just to name a few.

That said, it’s critical you understand call tracking is NOT the be-all end-all when it comes to determining how well your direct mail marketing is working. If this were the case, you’d have to assume that 100% of every new repair order you get comes directly from your mailer. However, we all know this will never be the case. Here are a few reasons why.

Your Online Presence

Before they consider using you repair shop, many prospects will go online to check out your website. If a customer lands on your website – assuming you aren’t using a PURL (Personalized URL), which is almost never the case with most auto repair shops – they do their research and then call your shop from the phone number on your website. In this situation, you immediately lose insight on how they heard about you.

Pro Tip: Customers are also reading your online reviews, whether on social media or review sites. Sites like Demandforce, SureCritic, Carfax, Repair Pal, Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. all have your shop’s contact details, including your phone number. Any call from customers who used these sites removes transparency on how they heard about you.

Walk-Ins

Our auto repair shop clients consistently tell us customers will just stop by their shop with their direct mail piece in hand. I’m not just talking about quick lube shops that are based on walk-in traffic. I’m talking about general and specialty auto repair shops. It’s great when customers have your mailer with them, because you can attribute these customers to your direct mail marketing. However, this won’t be reflected in your call tracking, which is another reason call tracking isn’t the be-all end-all when determining ROI.

Online Appointment Scheduling

More and more auto repair shops are offering online appointment scheduling. We like to position these shops as being easy to work with, and part of that is promoting their online appointment scheduling. We include verbiage on our direct mail pieces to inform customers they can conveniently schedule online, and most times we accompany this with a QR code that brings them directly to the appointment scheduling page.

This is similar to my first point regarding your online presence and website. However, I also want to point out this specific example because in these cases, we’re actively pushing people to go online to schedule their repair or maintenance service, thus losing transparency from call tracking.

All that said, call tracking is an effective tool that gives you a lot of transparency into your direct mail marketing ROI. However, you should also be running matchback reports that compare new repair orders during (and in the trailing months following your campaign) to your direct mail list. This helps you identify customers who were missed on call tracking or by your service advisor. You can then use your call tracking data in conjunction with your matchback reporting to get a clearer picture of your direct mail ROI.

If you’re using EDDM^® Retail or EDDM^® BMEU, you won’t be able to execute matchback reporting because there’s no mailing list to compare your repair orders with.

Pro Tip: Be diligent about saving and analyzing the coupons, offers, and specials customers redeem. It’s critical to know what people are responding to in order to strengthen and improve redemptions and ROI on your future direct mail marketing campaigns.

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