marketing automation | smallbizdream blog

5 Ways CRM Can Help Your Auto Body Repair Shop

Standing out in a competitive world of auto repair industry is becoming more challenging. Shops are pretty much the same with their services offered, and they all share a common problem with regards to cycle times, turnarounds, and customer satisfaction. But there is a way to beat the competition and fix these problems using the right tools.

Growing Your Customer Base

Customer acquisition can take some time unless you actively market your business. Traditional means of getting exposure through ads and promos are still being used in the digital age, although they’re not always as affordable and effective as having your customers spread the word about your auto body repair business, i.e. through customer referrals or word of mouth. CRMs enable business owners to grow their customer base by reaching out to their target market more efficiently. Consider the following examples for auto body repair shops:

Acquiring information of potential customers on-site. Shop owners can collect customer details such as contact information from walk-in prospects and customers asking for quotes on their repair service and follow up on them based on their preferred method. Shop owners can also leverage by offering a referral program and give points redeemable for discounts, free items, and services to existing customers who can bring along new customers on-site. Small Business Dream’s Card Scan function takes a step further by having a data entry service to do all the typing work for them.
Acquiring information of potential customers online. Tech-savvy shop owners can acquire customer information through their websites, blogs, Twitter account or Facebook page and import them to the CRMs’ contact list. One advantage of having an online presence is it allows shop owners to collect customer data basically on autopilot. Small Business Dream can be used alongside existing auto body repair website, blog, Twitter, or Facebook Page, or it can create one for them as a micro-site or as part of a sales funnel. This automated feature not only increases your chances of acquiring new customers, but also saves your business time and money.

Managing Your Customer Data

Customer information has a lot of potential for growing your income. Unfortunately, many shop owners don’t have a system of collecting and storing them, or they have no idea what to do with the information they have. As a result, they miss a lot of opportunities for making conversions and repeat customers. CRM keeps all the customers’ data in one spot and shop owners can easily organize them however they want. This allows them to do the following:

Segmenting contact list. Business owners should be able to categorize and manage their contacts if they are to stay relevant and top of mind with them. Majority of email marketing campaigns fail because they are too generic or end up in the recipients’ spam folders. Small Business Dream CRM enables auto body repair shops to hone in to a specific type of audience based on category, whether they are new clients, regular customers, or you can categorize them based on their cars’ make, model, mileage, ownership status, and so on. With Small Business Dream you can also send automated or semi-automated emails to let customers know what stage their car process is at. For example, an email can go out that you’ve got a quote for the work from insurance. The next email can be you’ve started work and so on. This is an easy way to keep your customers engaged and will ensure a higher level of customer service which will in turn get more referrals and more sales.

Prioritizing qualified leads and customers. Shop owners pay careful attention to cycle times and turnaround times in order to stay on schedule. Small Business Dream CRM allows them to prioritize who comes up first on their Action List and when they wish to have them back on that section. This feature will come in handy when you want to give your customers a heads up in case you experience some delays with your auto parts supplier, auto insurance company, or if you want to update them about the status of the repair. You can also set the date when you want to follow up on them based on your turnaround date so you can quickly notify them of a successful repair, and a thank you note for choosing your shop.

Maintaining Customer Relationship

Brand loyalty can be a game changer in the auto body repair industry; you need a tool to keep your business top-of-mind to your customers and be able to do them with minimal effort. CRM helps maintain customers’ interest by automating certain tasks for you. Touch base with your customers if they need a tune-up. Offer tire changing services for the winter and summer season. Small Business Dream lets you accomplish all these tasks with just a few clicks after searching for a specific category of clients and potential customers on the Email Group section you wish to communicate with.

Creating an Email or Content Marketing Strategy

As a shop owner, you can share your expertise and experiences gained in the auto repair industry to educate your prospects and customers about proper care and maintenance. Small Business Dream’s autoresponders, enables you to build an email series for your subscribers about the importance of rotating their tires once every 5000 miles to evenly distribute wear and maintain traction, or preserving their cars’ lustre and shine by using automotive cleaners instead of liquid soaps and detergents. This CRM feature can also lead to a sale or a new customer when used with the sales funnel and following up on them through the Action List.

Listening to Customer Feedback

Business owners learn a lot by listening to their customers and can make you stand out in an industry that isn’t known for its customer service. Small Business Dream’s Survey Funnel allows shop owners to find gaps in their services and act accordingly. By automatically sending out a survey to all its customers it allows you to receive valuable feedback. How many of your customers prefer shorter turnaround times and those who prefer to have a thorough check-up, damage assessment and repair? Survey forms can be fine-tuned at any point in time to stay relevant and collect more information from your customers as needed.

The Small Business Dream Survey Funnel is extremely easy to use and doesn’t require any special web skills. All you need to do is write the questions you want your customer to answer and then create an answer field. You can use multiple choice or a checklist – whatever fits your needs.

Whatever your customer service needs, Small Business Dream is an amazing tool to collect, contact, and manage all your customers and leads.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Simple Ways to Integrate Permission Marketing Into Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is at the core of almost every online business today, and should also be a key strategy in more traditional businesses as well.

As a cost-effective way to reach out potential customers, this strategy has proved time and again that anyone – with sufficient knowledge, tools, and skill sets – can have a fair chance to compete with other businesses worldwide.

However, even the most innovative online strategy has a downside. For years, marketing automation has become the subject of misuse among online marketers who pitched automation as a way of turning businesses into online ‘cash machines’ without ever spending time and effort with potential customers. It made marketing automation synonymous to spamming.

Faced with more stringent rules regarding customer engagement and increased customer awareness, online marketers are back to the drawing board on how they could use automation to deliver the same results back in its heyday, or even better.

Why a Change of Strategy is Necessary

When marketing automation was at its peak, many believed that as long as you were able to make tons of content and send a relentless barrage of emails to practically any person on earth that has an email address, sooner or later people would respond to your call and generate income for your business.

The idea comes from the analogy of shooting as many arrows as you can, hoping that one or two will eventually land on their target out of mere chance (known as the ‘spray and pray’ method). Although some businesses use this method effectively, it usually comes at a price.

For one thing, marketers who rely heavily on conventional marketing automation are putting their businesses at risk by sending unsolicited emails to people whose contact information were sourced from a third-party data supplier.

This method obviously won’t work, since most emails have already built defenses against spamming. CAN-SPAM Act will also make these marketers think twice about ever using this method again.

Aside from bordering unlawful marketing practices, it tends to yield diminishing returns over time as contacts starts falling off and fewer people become available to them. It usually guarantees a one-time success with little or no regard for ongoing customer relationship and repeat purchases.

Staying relevant with the customers is almost impossible to attain with conventional marketing automation. Usually, what happens is that companies will send every content that they have on a particular niche to people in their massive list of contacts, hoping to strike a chord with just one or two articles sent to them in rapid succession. It’s essentially a ‘hit-or-miss’ strategy.

As customer engagement comes close to non-existent, they would eventually lose their ship, and no amount of automation can save it from sinking to the bottom.

The question now is whether marketing automation can still be a viable option to speed up the process and boost sales despite its shortcomings in customer engagement.

A Step towards Permission Marketing

Permission marketing was coined by marketing expert Seth Godin to denote marketing strategies that rely on customer feedback, i.e., permission, to initiate ongoing customer relationship and interaction which allows them to receive updates and follow-ups on demand.

Unlike traditional outbound marketing, which he appropriately calls ‘interruption marketing’, permission marketing spares people the trouble of going through the ordeal of being constantly bombarded with marketing pitches. It gives them more freedom and control over the situation and encourages them to either share more about their interests and other key information about themselves, or turn into buying customers.

Others tend to view permission marketing as the antithesis of marketing automation because it’s more involved and requires frequent human interaction. The fact is, permission marketing needs a starting point, and that involves automation.

Sign-up forms via landing pages, which may also include opt-in to newsletters or social media posts, are just a few classic examples on how to initiate permission marketing.

Still others believe that permission marketing is a little too slow compared to marketing automation aside from the fact that it gives too much freedom to potential customers to take action whenever they want to. They aim for quick, albeit short-lived gains, instead of nurturing previous and current customers for long-term, sustainable income.

In the final analysis, those who relied on one-time customer engagements end up losing more money looking for new prospects while those who took their time watering and growing their customer base could increase revenue exponentially through updates, follow-ups, customer referrals, crossing-selling, up-selling, and repeat purchases.

The Smart Way to Automate

Marketing automation platforms can only do so well when it comes to tasks which could be reasonably accomplished through automation. Some aspects of marketing are best performed through human interaction which cannot be copied or supplanted by automated means.

Read: Digital and Physical Customer Engagement, and Why You Need Both

Keep these in mind when using marketing automation to attract and maintain customers for your business:

Open up multiple channels to collect customer information.

Inbound marketing has proven its effectiveness over outbound marketing by emphasizing customer awareness.

Opening up multiple channels of customer engagement maximizes your chances of getting in touch with them. This includes setting up a blog, website, landing page, and social media account, to name a few.

Your marketing automation platform can be seamlessly integrated to all these channels to collect, store, and analyze customer information for you after signing up to your mailing list or subscribe for a free newsletter. Marketing automation shines best at this stage of customer engagement.

Dissect your sales pipeline to see which approach works best in every stage. In case you haven’t noticed this part has been alluded to in the previous item.

The first stage, which involves data collection and storage, is best accomplished with marketing automation.

Following up, which is the next stage, involves a combination of both permission marketing and marketing automation.

When trying to learn more about your leads, you can revert back to automation to, once again, collect relevant information about them and analyze whether or not they could be qualified as potential customers. The marketing team would then assign the lead scores, start with the sales process, and close the deal.

Use email segmentation and the buyer persona to guide your marketing effort. These marketing strategies allow you to narrow down your target audience and zero them in with pinpoint accuracy. It takes time and effort creating relevant content based on different segments and customer behavior.

The easiest way to fail in any kind of marketing strategy is to use the same cut-and-dried content across all contacts and send them out at a robotic pace, one email after another.

You need to customize your content according to the different segments in your email list and provide an option for a follow-up or additional information about the topic.

When deciding for the most appropriate product or service for a certain group of customers, you can refer to your buyer persona as your guide.

Choose a marketing automation platform that works for you. A good marketing automation platform often comes at a price.

However, most companies offer different versions of their product ranging from the most basic ones at no cost, to premium offerings with a complete suite of tools at about a hundred to two hundred dollars per month.

Marketing automation can still be as powerful as any marketing strategy if you can put other elements into the mix such as permission marketing to interact with your potential customers and collect your data about your target market.

Sales & Marketing Automation and CRM: Their Differences and Similarities

What is the difference between Sales and Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? And which one is more useful for your business? I’m sure it’s making your head spin.

In the beginning there was much more of a distinction between the two. It was generally believed that CRM was more about customer service and possibly upselling or reselling new and existing customers, while Sales and Marketing Automation were about the sales cycle and how to prospect and initially sell to new customers or clients.

CRMs were hard to learn and quite expensive, most small business owners didn’t bother looking at them.

Sales Automation and Marketing Automation tools were often better priced but seemed to lack power or could only handle ONE or TWO of the necessary functions requiring you to purchase multiple tools and figure out how to transfer info between them to make them work together.

Here’s a rundown showing the differences between the two so you have a better idea what they are, what function they serve, and how you can incorporate them into your business.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Profile
Searchable notes and account data on each customer
Sales History that amalgamates up to departments and the entire company
Tracking of all customer communications
Customer service tools
Customer support tools
Customer retention tools
Sales campaign tracking and data utilization

Sales Automation and/or Marketing Automation

Contact Management
Calendars
To-do Lists
Email Automation
Sales lead assignment and categorization
Sales Funnel
Surveys
Customer Records
Salesperson tracking and goal and target feedback

Although they seem similar, their purpose is quite different. Sometimes it’s hard to tell apart which of the two you are currently using. They could be used interchangeably but there’s also an overlap, or they could be used as complementary tools.

How about Today?

The great news is, there are many tools today that blur the differences even more which can be used as a substitute especially for a small business (under $3,000,000/year in sales). For example, you can get software such as Click funnels for $100 a month to handle just the online funnels aspect for you.

No longer do you have to pay thousands of dollars to have these tools. They can actually be quite affordable. In fact, there are some companies that integrate both the sales automation with customer management like Salesforce, Hub spot, or Marketo. But for a vast number of small businesses and small shops they are still too pricey. For example Hubspot starts at $200 a month for the very basic package.

Small Business Dream combines the power of Hubspot, Marketo, and Salesforce for just $99 a month and can be customized to fit the needs of every small business owner. With their suite of tools you’ll get:

• Contact Management
• Automatic email follow-up
• Calendar integration
• Survey Engine
• Social Media semi-automation tools
• Twitter functionalities
• Sales Funnel
• Business Card Scanning and Transcription service
• Mobile app
• Web App

Visit us at www.smallbizdream.com to learn more about our suite of tools

How A Salon Used Customer Management Relations to Boost Sales

Once upon a time in a city far far away, there was a little hair salon that decided to do the unthinkable. The hair salon owner decided to try and actually follow up with their hair salon clients to check in, not only on customer satisfaction with the hair stylist, but also to increase their sales frequency and profit.

Here is the surprisingly simple way the hair salon owner did it. First, the salon owner made sure to give every customer a client number and a simple loyalty card for the Hair Salon. This started as a stamp type loyalty card, very simple, and it had a place to write by hand, the clients name, and their ID number on the card.

Once the customer visited the hair studio 10 times, they were entitled to one of many free services, which included a hair color, hair protein treatment, a hair wash dry and set, a bottle of shampoo, or a colour root touch up.

In order to prepare the customer card, the little hair salon owner had customers fill in a simple survey pertinent to a hair salon, including the customer’s phone number, email address and hair styling preferences, and known allergies. They also offered all new hair salon clients the chance to opt-in to their weekly hair styling newsletter, and if they did, they would be placed in a draw for a monthly free $50

Hair Salon owner increases sales 63% in 47 days with this simple secret The hair salon owner decided to try and actually follow up with their hair salon clients to check in, not only on customer satisfaction with the hair stylist, but also to increase their sales frequency and profit.

The hair salon owner was very progressive and set up some simple sales and marketing automation software using Small Business Dream in order to follow up with the customers over the next few months.

As customers have enough cards to carry around, the hair salon owner decided to keep the loyalty cards at the front desk for the customer so they never needed to remember it, they simply needed to give their name.

Every time a customer came in to the hair salon, the receptionist or a stylist found their card and confirmed their number.

After the client was done with their hair cut or hair color or hair service they came for, the hair stylist pulled up their information in the marketing and sales automation software, filled in what hair services the customer had done in the notes field, as well as any other pertinent details that would allow them to better service this customer the next time they came in to the hair salon, AND reset their automated email follow up campaign (email autoresponder). The email campaign was a big key to the increase in sales in the hair salon. It was structured in the following way.

The Day AFTER the hair appointment, the hair salon sent an email from the hair salon owner checking in on the previous days service and asking for feedback if anything was wrong and how the hair stylist performed. This surprised the salon as the owner got both GOOD and BAD feedback about the hair stylists they employed. This allowed them to rectify errors and retain good customers even in the event of a mishap.

Two weeks after the hair appointment, they sent an email letting the customer know they could pop in for a professional wash, dry, and hair set for just $30, a way to get that just been to the hair salon look, at a fraction of the cost for a special occasion. Four weeks after the appointment, they sent an email asking if it might be about time to come and get a haircut again.

They were stunned by how many responses this email got, and VERY positive ones, actually thanking the hair salon owner for the reminder stating that the customer often forgets to book, and this email reminded them to get it done and it was simple, as they just replied by email, to book the time that they wanted. This system made it EASY for the customer to book a hair styling appointment.

Now the cool part of this for the hair salon was, this took the average rebooking time from 7 to 8 weeks, to averaging 6 weeks, which meant a MASSIVE increase in annual sales. Here’s the math (yuck) on how this increased sales frequency generated by the sales and marketing automation software affected the hair salons sales and profitability (Yes!);

Let’s say your average hair salon sale is $65 and your customers come in every 8 weeks. This means your hair salon customers comes to see you about 52/8 = 6.5 times per year. So your average annual sales from your hair salon’s clients are 6.5 x $65 = $422.50. If you got them back an average of 1 time each 6 weeks instead, it would be 52/6 = 8.67 times. Your average annual sales form a client then would be 8.67 x $65 = $563.33.

That is $140.83 additional hair salon revenue PER client. This is a WHOPPING 33% increase in Annual Sales!!!! What if you only had 500 hair salon clients? $70,415 extra sales annually What if you had 1000? $140,830!!

At 6 weeks, an email went out re-suggesting it was time to rebook a hair cut as they were likely getting pretty shaggy.

Then at 8 weeks, an APOLOGY email went out, YEP, that’s right, they apologized for not doing a good enough job to have the client come back to the hair salon and they offered at 10% discount with the apology email if the customer rebooked within 3 days.

At 12 weeks, an extension of the apology re-offering the 10% off went out, and tossing in a free bottle of shampoo, or free protein treatment if they booked again in the next 3 days. This wasn’t as random as it sounds, they knew that their average time of rebook was 7 weeks, so at 8 weeks it was likely frustrated customer, or a super cheap one that would wait 10 or 12 weeks to come back. By offering the 10% the made the unhappy client feel cared for, and often coaxed the cheaper customer to come again to chase the discount. This again drove annual sales up dramatically by increasing customer frequency.

Once the hair salon had collected its customer database including email address, it also started to implement a Web Special page on its hair salon website that it email blasted out each 2 weeks as part of their bi-weekly newsletter.

The web specials page contained super hair salon amazing deals, sometimes as much as 50% off, but only for specific hair stylists and time slots. They used it to fill their empty seats, this decreased dramatically their sales vacancy and once again increased their hair salon profits.

If the hair salon ever got in a real bind with hair stylists having empty seats, they did an instant blast to everybody offering a great hair salon service deal on a super short time frame to fill that spot. It may have been a haircut, or a hair color, or even a hair straightening, it just depended on what the hair salon could handle in the time available.

The results were out of this world. Hair Stylist’s empty seat time vanished. Stylists made more money in tips. The hair salon owner made more money as a hair salon. Other hair stylists started to want to work there as they heard how always busy the hair salon was.

Another benefit the hair salon found as it implemented its simple CRM sales and marketing automation software to track and follow up with its customers was the ability to track Customer Preferences to increase customer satisfaction.

One of the final things the hair salon owner put in place was a reminder phone call, text (SMS), Facebook message, KiK message, or any other method of communication the customer had indicated they preferred for all appointments coming up the next day. The sales and marketing automation software made this easy for the hair stylists to do, so they weren’t as likely to try to skip it!

This simple action decreased no-shows to the hair salon significantly, and made the customer feel extremely cared for.

In Today’s online world, the likes of Yelp and others are making it more and more important to have at least a simple web presence for review and referral sites to link to. By having your own hair salon website, all the ranking sites for Hair Salons will send traffic to YOUR site where you control the narrative, vs. scraping information they can find publicly available about your hair salon.

As a result of this and the web-specials concept the hair salon put together a simple website (Small Business Dream also allows you to build a simple website for this purpose) and even started to use their new found cash flow to do super targeted advertising on Facebook, twitter and Google AdWords.

This traffic simply was directed to the hair salon’s website which had the ability to sign up to the newsletter for the possibility of winning that $50 salon gift certificate. This drove engagements, and the ability for the email follow up series to be employed to convert this look and see traffic to an actual customer.

The final thing the hair salon owner DID was implement a referral program. They simply offered that anybody who had their friend signup to the hair salon newsletter would earn one draw per person they referred into the draw for a $100 gift certificate at the hair salon. (drawn monthly) This turned happy clients into referring ADVOCATES or FANS! It grew their list dramatically, which converted to new hair salon customers over time.

It is simply amazing how simple it can be to increase a Hair Salons sales with some simple techniques and CRM Sales and Marketing Automation Software that costs as little as $99/month.

Small Business Dream is exactly that sales and marketing automation software for hair salons and for $99/month, it can handle all the marketing automation mentioned in this article.

1. The ability to make a Simple website and web specials page

2. The ability to have data collected and used for an email blast like that for web specials or weekly newsletter.

3. The ability to collect data on prospects generated by Facebook and Google, and follow up with them automatically over time with a timed series of emails to convert them to a client.

4. The ability to make a calling list of all appointments the next day easily and take notes as you make the calls.

The best part is, we have a template of the hair salon system, so you simply need to make minor tweaks to the content and you should be up and running in a very short time reaping the rewards of good sales automation for your hair salon.