Brain-dead Simple Auto Repair Marketing Tracking System
The best auto repair marketing tracking system is the one that gets used
. I have seen lots of high-tech computer based tracking systems and I am sure they are all good. The one major problem, as with any computer system, is the people. To be effective you have got to get your employees to take the time to input data. Often times they must question customers about how they heard about you etc. Very few employees do a consistently good job of this.If you have got a computerized auto repair marketing tracking system and it is working by all means keep using it. If it is not broken, do not fix it.However, if you struggle to determine if your auto repair marketing is working then I have a brain-dead simple auto repair marketing tracking strategy for you. Here is how it works.
Let us say you send out a flier with a free oil change coupon on it. All you have to do is save the coupons as they come in. Once the promotion is over, you simply total up the number of coupons and the amount of money you made. It is that easy to track your auto repair marketing.
I know a shop owner who has what I call his auto repair marketing wall. It is a big blank wall behind his desk; he takes all the redeemed coupons and staples them up there, along with a piece of calculator tape that records the cost and return of each campaign. He can walk into the office, look at the wall and immediately see which campaigns worked and which ones did not.
This type of auto repair marketing tracking is also important for another reason. It forces you to pay attention to the dollars made, not necessarily the number of people who responded. In most cases, the dollars are much more important than the overall response rate. Your auto repair tracking system does not have to be high tech; it just has to work.
One final thought, if the final number on any auto repair marketing campaign is positive or close to positive, it was a successful campaign and you should do it again, and again. Too many times I hear shop owners say, "That last auto repair marketing piece was no good, all we did was break even." When I hear this I feel frustrated because clearly this shop owner does not understand auto repair marketing. I just want to scream, "You broke even!" That means that you got to do your auto repair marketing for FREE! And unless you run an absolutely horrible shop many if not most of those people are going to come back again with little or no marketing effort required. All of the sudden you are way beyond break even.
Whew! Back to the main point; it does not matter how you track your auto repair marketing, just find a system that works for you and make sure everyone on your team uses it every day.
by: Dave Dickson