How to Boost Profits with Data Driven Marketing: Webcast with Cinch CEO

Full Webcast Transcript Below 

Hannah: Hello. Good morning, everyone. And welcome to today's NOLN webcast. Our topic is How to Boost Your Quick Lube Profits with Data Driven Marketing sponsored by Cinch.  

I'm Hannah Bubser with Endeavor’s Vehicle Repair Group. I'm also the associate editor of National Oil and Lube News. 

To start off, let me just explain how you can participate in today's presentation. First, if you have any technical difficulties during the session, just type your issue into the “Ask a Question” box and a member of our team will assist you. You can also click on the question mark help button in the upper right corner of the screen.  

Additionally, we are welcoming questions during today's event. We'll answer as many as possible during the Q&A session that follows the main presentation. But please feel free to send in those questions at any time. To do so, just type your questions into the “Ask a Question” box and click on the “Send” button.  

Be aware as well that today's session is being recorded and will be available on NOLN's website within the next week. You'll be notified via email when the archive is available.  

Now, let's meet today's speaker. Justin Ray is the proud founder and CEO of Cinch: a multi-channel customer communication platform that helps quick lubes increase customer retention and revenue. He has been a data driven marketer since 2004 with a goal to close the data gap between big and small businesses.  

Now, Justin, I'm going to turn things over to you. The floor is yours. 

➡️ Learn more about Justin Rae and Cinch 

Justin: Thanks, Hannah. I'm excited to be here and be able to share some information on how to drive better profits through data driven marketing. I'm going to jump in here and get started. Just as an overview, I'm going to talk about this with three different topics.  

I'm going to first start off talking about data and what data is there. And then I'm going to talk about the channels that you're going to have for marketing and how those all come together in the third aspect of using the data combined with the marketing channels.  

We'll get started here with the first thing you got to do when you're going to do data driven marketing is you got to think about your data. What data do you have? What data should you have? And how are you using your data today?  

➡️ Effective Marketing Requires Reliable Data 

Most locations, shops, and quick lubes are using their data very generally in their point of sale. And if they're not already doing marketing, their point of sale is collecting that data.  

Typically, you're collecting things like your customers’ year, make, and model of the vehicle. You're collecting maybe a name. And as we'll see in the next slide, I'll jump to is address capture. 

Most of this is some of the numbers from our average customer data collection through Cinch. You can see the address capture is one of the biggest things that gets captured. Phone is captured after that, and then email is captured at the lowest rate.  

As we start moving into this conversation, dive into a little bit more, email capture is going to be one of those things that needs to come up. We need to start collecting more email addresses as an industry and be able to use that a lot more effectively.  

I'll talk through that just a little bit more here in just a minute. What are some ways that we can go through and collect some more information? Number one: the easiest way to do this is to actually ask our customers. When they come in, just ask them for their email address, ask them for that phone number. Make sure you're collecting all the information you can.  

➡️ Reach the Right Customer at the Right Time 

The next thing you can do is offer incentives to your employees and maybe even incentives with your customers. An idea with employees, if you're using Cinch and on our platform, we have the ability to run reports that help you understand how well your stores are collecting email addresses. And if those are good email addresses.  

In some cases, some of our customers will then use the good email addresses that are collected and bonus their employees or the CSAs based on how well they're collecting new and good email addresses.  

Some other ways are just incentivizing your customers. Maybe giving an additional percent off or a coupon based on providing and getting good information. The way you can do that is on your website. Just have a little form that says: Fill out this and give us your email or phone number and we will text, or we will email you your coupon.  

They clearly have to give you good enough contact information to be able to deliver that to them. And you'll be able to ensure that you're collecting good information.  

The third aspect here, is making sure that you know your customers. The main information we've already talked about before, but just to reiterate, is making sure you're collecting the name, the email—name is first and last name—making sure you're able to bifurcate that and understand which is the first and what's the last name. Collecting the email address, their phone number, and their full mailing address—but at the least getting their zip code really helps you. 

In addition to knowing your customers is kind of this basic information is understanding what services were provided and what services were not provided. 

A lot of point of sales these days will be able to help you understand the declined services. The more data that we collect is the more information you're going to be able to use to communicate with the customer and personalized communication as you go forward.  

As I mentioned already, vehicle information tends to be a one that's by default collected: the year, make, model. But something that makes sure that if you aren't collecting right now is mileage. Understanding what miles your customer is coming in at and making sure this is correct.  

There are times when we'll see coming through data people that have driven millions of miles out of a vehicle. And in theory that that shouldn't be able to happen. But getting good collection on the mileage and making sure that it's accurate is going to be really key to predicting when people should be due for certain services—specifically an oil change and trying to get them back in for that. 

➡️ Put Your Customer Data to Work 

The last portion of data that we'll talk about here and to be aware of is customer feedback data. Everybody's probably aware of online reviews at this point. But if you're not, we'll talk a little bit about that in the presentation today.  

Online reviews are going to be one of those ways where you're getting information back from your customers and should be a place where you're going to be able to get a better understanding of what their experience was like.  

Similarly with surveys, you have the ability to ask your customers in a more private setting what their experience was and get that information back. These are really the basic aspects of data that every single location should be collecting and making sure that they have in building the relationship with their customers through a data driven approach. 

➡️ Manage Your Online Reputation Automatically 

We will dive into omnichannel marketing. For those that aren't familiar with what omnichannel marketing is, omnichannel marketing is multiple channels: your email, text message, direct mail, and online ads. Those are multiple channels that you're going to be able to use. 

The key to doing good omnichannel marketing is making sure you have accurate and clean data in a normalized structure. What that means is that the data is always going to be in the place when you're going to go look for it. When you want to look for mileage, it's always going to be here, and you're going to be collecting it in the same format. 

As we get started into the marketing channels or marketing abilities, the first thing I want to talk through is prospecting. In prospecting, this is acquiring new customers, there are three different aspects to data driven marketing that we'll identify here. 

The first one I mentioned being able to know and understand your customers a couple slides back. You're going to want to be able to have that information to create the ideal customer profile or the ICP.  

What this really does is if you're using enriched data, it gives you the ability to understand their age, income, education level, home ownership. But if we're not using enriched data. We might just be looking at the year on their vehicle, what ZIP code are they living in. Just that general information that you're already collecting. 

➡️ The Marketing Tools You Need to Grow 

These ideal customers are going to be your best customers. Within Cinch, we have the ability to help you better understand who are your best customers, and who are your worst 

customers, and your average customers. What we're trying to do in finding new customers is we want to find people that look like our best customers. In doing that, we're going to be able to hopefully find more revenue from the customers that are generating the best aspect of our revenue right now. 

Another point to that is going to be understanding what are the products or services that our best customers are purchasing, and being able to identify how we can market those services to those customers. 

That leads us into our second column here, which is what channels to use. Once we understand our best customers, what they look like, and what products and services they're using, we want to be able to market to them. 

We have a few channels that are available to us when it comes to prospect marketing. I’m assuming most people are aware here, if you're savvy enough to be on this webinar, you're probably savvy enough to know you should be using digital ads to be able to reach out to your customers at this point.  

Those ads are really going to be Facebook, Google, audio ads, etcetera. Whether that's display ads, whether that's paid search, or your Google My Business. Whatever it might be. Those are going to be the digital places that you're going to be reaching out to the customers. 

When you're using your ICP, and you understand the marketing services that you should be reaching out to them on, you can actually customize campaigns that are going to be going out to customers like those. On each of these digital ad platforms you can find lookalike campaigns. 

Within Cinch, we have the ability to basically pass in some of that data and say: Hey, here's your top customers, we're going to pass those into an audience. Then we want to make a lookalike audience that looks like these customers from the data that Facebook and Google and whatever other digital ads you're going to be using already have. 

That's the Number One and probably the most valuable when it comes to your prospect marketing and trying to find new customers.  

Two that I'm not going to spend too much time on here, especially Cinch doesn't have a lot of ability to help, is organic social and local marketing. You understand who your best customers are, you understand who they are with organic social, you're just trying to find the places that they are online and try to engage with them in those places more organically.  

You're not paying for this. You're just going out and you're responding. You're getting involved in some of those online communities. Local marketing is very similar. It's being involved locally: maybe at a high school, maybe (high school is just the first one that came to mind) but being involved locally in some of those places where your customers are going to be. 

The fourth one here is mailers and being able to really target mailers to the customers that again look like your best customers is a key value to getting the most ROI out of your direct mail. 

The last column on here is the channels not to use. So just highlighting you are not going to be able to prospect to customers via email or text message. There have been people in the past who have gone out, they'll purchase an email list or purchase a text message list. While that is technically capable it's not something that is recommended or creates a lot of value for you. It also has some potential legal implications. It's not recommended that you try to email people that are not customers or have not given you their email or phone number. 

If somebody's given you an email or phone number through a lead ad form on a paid digital ad, then you can start reaching out to them that way. But purchasing lists this way is not recommended.  

Basically, all roads lead to Google when it comes to your prospect marketing. The last stop that most of your new customers are going to look at is going to be Google Maps or Google reviews trying to identify if they're really going to come in and come to your location. 

These reviews are going to have a lot of potential impact on your new customer acquisition. We can dive into that in a little bit. Toward the end I'll talk about reviews a little bit more. It is very important to respond to those reviews as well. 

Once we've got a customer in the door, we've acquired this new customer. We spent the time, the money, the energy. We've got the data together to be able to do that. We now need to look at retaining customers. 

This is often some place that people overlook when they think about their business and what they can do. They've got these customers in, but new car count is really something that people often want to have. 

But I want to highlight here a couple of the things that are really important when it comes to customer retention. This is one of the best places and the easiest places where you can increase the profits with your quick lube.  

➡️ Turn One-Time Buyers into Lifelong Fans 

It costs seven times less to get that customer back in the door than it costs to get them in the first time. They also tend to spend more, considerably more. This is typically because they've built a relationship with you.  

They've had at least one experience that was a positive experience and they have come back. At this point maybe they're willing to buy that cabin air filter, or the air filter, do a serpentine belt, or do some spark plugs, or maybe brakes depending on what your location might offer. They're going to become more comfortable working with you and your team. 

Increasing your retention by five percent can have a drastic impact anywhere from 25 to even 90 percent depending on where your retention is today. So again, focusing on retention with customers becomes very valuable.  

Let's talk a little bit about customer retention just like we did with prospect marketing. There are two new channels. Those two channels we talked about not using when you're prospecting become channels that you now can use, which is email and text messaging. Especially if you have received opt-ins or permission from customers to market here. 

You're also going to continue to use your direct mail but also your digital ads as campaigns here. When you're doing customer retention marketing it's really important not to just send a blast out and send it to everybody hoping they're going to come back.  

But using tools like Cinch will give you the ability to really talk about their vehicle, the status of their vehicle, the declined services maybe they had last time, educating them about the services that are really important for their car.  

These are things that are going to be really important to adding value when you send a communication out to your customer. When you add that value to your communication, your customers are more likely to respond and engage back with that marketing and even return back into the store. 

Let's talk about email for just a minute. This is still one of the most valuable channels that you're going to have. As I mentioned before, we only have a 55 percent email collection rate as an average with customers in Cinch.  

But this email address isn't just a tool for you to send an email out to the customers. It's a key to ad platforms. If you have email addresses and you're collecting those email addresses. That's going to be able to help you run digital ads to your current customers.  

And it's even going to help you run those lookalike campaigns to people that look like your best customers inside of your database right now.  

Collecting an email address, even if somebody unsubscribes, is going to still allow you that digital footprint access. 

Additionally, inside Cinch one of the things that will be able to do to help you is help you have really good email domain reputation. But you need to have your own domain address. If you don't have an address and you're still using Gmail or Hotmail or something like that for your email, go out, find a domain that works for your company. Purchase that. And you can start using that for sending your emails.  

Text messaging: this has essentially got a 100 percent open rate. I think everybody here is very aware of how they respond and how they use text messaging. But it does have strict legal compliance, so make sure that if you're going to use text messaging that you understand the opt-in, opt-out, and the legal compliance rules that you need to follow and be on top of. Those are things that we can definitely help you with here at Cinch. 

There are also new reputation requirements that have come out that the carriers have imposed to try to help fight spam and get those out there. Make sure you understand some of those and you're again working with a tool that understands those reputation management requirements. 

We've already talked about data, getting that the good data that we need, and we've talked about several of the channels that we can use for marketing. Now let's talk about how we take that data, and we combine it with the marketing campaigns.  

I'm going to show a little example. It is just a way to think through maybe how you can apply your marketing when you have the data. On the left-hand side of this, the value segment is what we call it at Cinch, but the top 20 percent of your customers 21 to 40 percent, your average customers in the middle, and then down there at the bottom your lower value customers. 

If those customers are on track and they're due for the regular reminder, then we can just go ahead and especially in the top 20 percent we typically don't need to be very aggressive in our marketing. These are our most loyal customers; they're typically going to come back.  

But if those customers miss their oil change due date, they're not coming back in for that that oil change, then we want to get a little more aggressive. As you can see, our goal with our top 20 percent of customers is to defend them. We want to ensure that they don't end up going to our competitor for an oil change. 

At this point if they haven't come back in, we want to be most aggressive in our marketing campaigns with them and make sure that we're reaching out to them, and that they don't forget about us, and that they're coming back into our location. 

If we kind of move down into that mid (these are going to be our average customers so the bottom of the green box) these are going to be the customers that we want to be more aggressive with right off the bat. When they're due for that oil change, we want to try to make them into more loyal customers. 

How do we move them up the scale, and create a better relationship with them, and get them into the top 40 percent of our customers? 

If these customers aren't coming back in and they miss their first oil change cycle with you, then we want to be aggressive with them. Our goal is still to convert them, but at that point we don't necessarily need to spend as much as we might be trying to defend or get back in the top 20 percent of our customers.  

Then we get down into the red portion of this graphic where our goal is to control the cost. Even at the bottom end of our customers, we're willing to lose these customers.  

By having the data and having your different channels in a tool where you can automate these different processes, gives you the ability to think about and automate how you're reaching out to your customers based on the value that they've created for you at the shop or the potential value that they have. 

I'll move forward here into a little case study that we've had on some of our multi-channel marketing using this data set. I'll skip this one that dives into the details of how we went through the study. 

Right off the bat, this is reaching out to customers versus not reaching out to customers. This chart is basically showing us that there's at least a 42 percent increase in the customers that have received a communication versus the customers have not with three different companies that we did this case study with. 

As we move forward and we look at the return rate based on the contact method, this is where we're able to see how single-channel versus multi-channel has a greater impact.  

The customers that were uncontacted came back at a 17 percent rate, customers that received a mailer came back at 22 percent, customers that received an email they came back at 24 percent. 

But look at that jump that happens when you have customers that received a postcard or mail piece and email. They came back at a higher rate than they did individually. 

Being able to use multiple channels increases the ability for you to have more touchpoints with your customers and potentially bring them back at a higher rate. 

One quick caveat to this too is making sure that you have an email open not just being delivered. We do recognize that people will see an email subject line in there. They might see your company name. But if they're opening and engaging with those emails, they come back at an even higher rate. 

Jumping into the average spend that comes back from customers that are being contacted versus those who are not. You can see there's not a huge lift in this, but there's also not a huge lift—it takes a small amount of increase. If you have customers that are spending six dollars more on average all year, that can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Especially depending on how many locations you might have and how many customers you have your average daily car count. 

Wrapping up, once you've run all these campaigns you have these customers coming in. Multi-channel attribution is a key thing when you're running multiple channels. One of the things that I like to really emphasize here is ensuring that you're not multi-counting customers.  

When you have somebody that's coming in, they got an email, they get a text message, and a postcard. We're not counting that transaction three times when we're running our ROI calculations. Ensuring that you're not overcounting your revenue is a very key part of running multi-channel attribution.  

Typically, this can be done if somebody has three touchpoints, we're going to split that up 33 percent or one-third of the revenue that came from that transaction can be attributed back to each of those channels. 

Wrapping up the last thing I'll talk about, before I just share a little bit more about what Cinch does, is how customer feedback can really help you in your marketing and your communication.

Number One is reviews. Ultimately, you're asking your customers to go leave a review. They've had a good experience and go leave that review on Google on Facebook on Yelp.  

They're going to help other customers recognize that you're a trusted place, you do great service, and an opportunity for them to encourage other people to come in and use your services. 

Additionally, with surveys, this gives you the ability to understand what the customer experienced and encourage them to come back in or find places that you can improve your operations inside of your store today.  

This also gives you the ability to recognize how you can change future marketing. Maybe the things that they give you feedback on that they experienced or that were really great that differentiated you from someplace else that they've gone, gives you the ability to highlight that in your future communication. 

The last thing I want to do is just highlight some of the things in how Cinch works and brings together all of these processes that we've talked about. 

The first thing that we're going to do at Cinch is connect to your point-of-sale data and any other data. Maybe it's your website, you have a request for quotes, or you're scheduling some appointments, or whatever it might be, we're going to pull that data into Cinch. 

We clean that data up. We've already talked about at the beginning of the presentation how important it is to clean the data up. We clean it, we match all the customer data up. We then have the ability to enrich that data. Then we also run the customer value calculations.  

What this gives us is what we call the single rich customer view where all of the data about your customer is in one place. You have a single source of truth here that you can go to to have a better understanding of your customers or see what their experiences have been. 

We then run this into our data science layer where we run predictive models like predicting when they're due for their service, when they're due for oil changes. 

The data science layer gives us the ability to better understand the behaviors of the customer and how we should reach out to them. Then on our communication layer, this is where through Cinch you can send email, text message, direct mail postcards. 

We help you manage who's in your digital ad audiences as well as we can connect to voice over IP. We can work with web chat and landing pages. 

All of that data that's generated from those communication channels are pushed back into our data science layer where it helps us create better predictive models for future communication with your customers. We are able to store that back in our CDP on the data side. 

➡️ Schedule a Cinch Demo  

So that's our presentation for today. I will turn it over to questions at this point. 

Hannah: Great, thank you so much for that presentation, Justin. Like you said, we are going to move into the Q&A session next. If you'd like to submit a question at this point in time be sure to type it into the “Ask a Question” box and hit the “Send” button.  

But for now, let's move into the first question I have for you here. 

Q & A

Which tips or strategies from today will give me the fastest results? 

Justin: Great question, I think that the fastest results that you can start to get would be two-fold.

One, I would say doing online reviews making sure that you are asking all of your customers after a transaction for an online review. That's going to give you an extra touch point with the customer after.  

And you're going to get a little bit of feedback about their experience. But it's going to help you with new customer acquisition. 

I would also say just, in general, doing an oil change reminder. Just start getting that out there and when a customer’s due for that oil change ensuring that you're communicating to them the timing of that and maybe what other services might be due. 

What are common pitfalls or problems that you typically see when shops first start doing data driven marketing? 

At the beginning of that presentation talking about collecting the data and ensuring that you're collecting good data is a really key thing. It ensures that you have the right incentives in place for your team to try to collect the right data.  

The foundation of it all comes back to having good data and ensuring that you have that in the right place that you can use. 

Should I be worried about customer data privacy? 

You definitely should in today's day and age. This is something that is very important and I can tell you that at Cinch we do a lot of things to ensure that we have data privacy. There are a lot of permissions. Our data platform is secure from that standpoint. 

Ensuring that you're not just sending out that information—again reasons why you shouldn't go out and purchase data. But data security is something that you should definitely be aware of. 

How do you see AI having an impact on quick lube marketing? 

This is actually a really exciting question. The onset of ChatGPT has brought a lot of excitement to AI and what can be done. There are a lot of interesting things that can be coming down the road in the AI world when it applies to data driven marketing for quick lubes. 

Some of those are just going to be better personalization with the customers. A lot of the things that we're working on Cinch are in this realm. Being able to be more spot-on with the timing, with personalizing the communication, that's going to be able to help you create and design better templates inside a Cinch or templates for email. 

There's a lot of potential for understanding how to better write the copy for this email. What's going to be a better subject line that's going to go out to these customers. And when's the right time to send an email out to this customer.  

Those are all going to be things that are going to make the marketing processes that are happening today much more effective.  

Are there any other quick lube marketing trends that you see coming in 2024? 

I think that using a lot more video content is something that is going to be more valuable. When you're using that in conjunction with AI, the idea of being able to provide a video that somebody can quickly watch through, become educated on what's going on, what you're trying to sell them on.  

You're trying to help them understand how to better take care of their car. Using that content, I know it's been around for a little while, but combined with AI and understanding who needs to get the right message is going to be pretty valuable. 

Hannah: Thank you, Justin. That is going to put us at the end of our time together today. For questions that we didn't have time to answer, we will get back to you via email. But for now, that's going to conclude today's presentation. 

On behalf of NOLN, I'd like to thank Cinch for sponsoring today's event; Justin, of course, for your presentation today; and to everyone for joining. I hope you all have a great rest of your day.