SocialLeaf Marketing

By Jonathan Barber

Email marketing can be incredibly powerful

Let’s say your customer goes a year without a car repair, there’s a decent chance that he forgets about you. He ends up searching “car repair” in Google and going with another car repair shop. If you’re sending him monthly content, even if he doesn’t read that content he’ll likely think of you when he needs work done on his car. This is the power of email marketing. Email marketing can ensure that you’re the first shop on your customer’s mind when he needs a repair. Email marketing can also let your customers know about additional services that they may not have known about. For example, if you’re a general repair shop, but also do painting, you can let your customers know about this additional service. We tell all of our customers, if you’re not using your email list you’re missing out on money every month, it’s that simple.

 

How to build your email list

There are a couple ways to go about this, the easiest way would be simply asking for your customer email on your paperwork. We’ve found more than half of the people who fill out their paperwork will include their email. Be sure to include a note next to that field on the form that says ‘don’t worry, we won’t spam you’. We’ve also had success with business card raffles, but overall, the best way to build an email list is in person when you’re dealing with customers by including it on your forms.

“Simply having your name seen by your customers in their inbox once a month can have a positive impact on your revenue.”

Email content

I’ve worked with some shops that send out specials once a month, and some that send out interesting educational content that gets read more closely. As I briefly went over, email content is important, but not that important. The reason why you might ask? Simply having your name seen by your customers in their inbox once a month can have a positive impact on your revenue. We’ve found success with emailing educational content to our customers that’s fun to consume and including special offers to entice customers into your shop for a quick tune up etc. An example of an article would be “How do I find the correct tire pressure for my car?” What you’re doing is providing an article that is helpful and also gets your customer to think about you. The term for this kind of email marketing is content marketing.

 

Email personalization

Email personalization, people generally ignore generic emails, the more targeted your email is the higher engagement rate you’ll be able to get. You’ll want to start by using an email campaign SaaS like Mailchimp. Mailchimp allows you to store 2,000 contacts for free and send an unlimited amount of emails. You can import your emails from a spreadsheet or hire someone to manually input them. With Mailchimp you can segregate email lists, an example of this would be to segregate customers that own cars with more than 100,000 miles. You can then send them specific content for high mileage vehicles

 

If you’re interested in learning more book a 1 on 1 strategy session.