Would you rather wave to potential customers as they whiz past your quick lube or greet them as they pull into the business?
According to Justin Rae, the CEO and founder of data-driven, multi-channel marketing campaign creator Cinch, based in Draper, Utah, too many quick lube shops are choosing to wave.
The Backstory
Rae has an affinity for two things: data—of course—and small businesses. When he learned about Google’s data-driven algorithms in a college course on consumer behavior, he was riveted. So much so that he started his own marketing agency to manage customers’ present and future data, clean it, and launch automated marketing campaigns based on it consisting of email, two-way texting, direct mail, and more.
Rae’s goal was to use data to help local businesses—quick lubes prominent among them—market themselves more successfully to their audiences. For quick lubes, Rae is not shy about saying his methods can make a dramatic difference.
“Our knowledge in identifying quick lube shops' needs and (strategies to generate) ROI is beyond anything else out there,” he says. “And I’ve been doing this since 2012—looking at consumer behavior in the quick lube space and using automotive data.”
The Challenge
When it comes to marketing a quick lube’s services, Rae notes that management often seems to have little concern about accurate data that can help them.
“You never want to look at getting an increase in ‘new’ versus ‘repeat’ customers,” he says as one example. “Because if one is up, the other one is down.”
Instead, what a quick lube business can truly benefit from is looking at overall percentage of growth. “So, No. 1, we look at how much of your business is coming back today, and how much could be,” Rae says.
To grow a shop, the Cinch CEO says quick lube management must understand its cadence of business, as well, which is quite regular within the industry. Using that cadence to help generate business success means looking at numbers and percentages, yes, but also gazing beyond the numbers to imagine the people sitting in those cars.
“A minivan in Utah, for instance, is probably going back and forth to soccer practice and to school. In Montana, a truck is out driving to oil rigs. So, the joy of the industry is that you can build a repetitive business and be really forecastable,” Rae finds.
“Not a lot of businesses can do this and forecast and understand the business cadence—or how people are driving.”
While quick lube owners must have accurate information on the demographics of the population around their locations and the market position of their stores, something they can truly benefit from is simply knowing how many miles a day their customers drive.
Or, as Rae puts it, “What’s the average miles between oil changes in that location?”
Being able to pinpoint and read data to get these answers can make the difference between a quick lube shop seeing lukewarm business results or dominating at the head of the quick lube pack.
The Takeaway
According to Rae, his tools at Cinch help shop owners determine things like the average number of miles between peoples’ oil changes in their locale. In addition, the time lapse between oil change service and even how often people are driving in their cars is important information shop owners can glean.
“We can enrich data to show age, income level, educational level, and how many other cars there are in that household,” Rae says.
Is all of this actually beneficial to know? Yes, according to Rae.
“If a household has a Ferrari, they’ll probably take it to the dealership. But if they have a Honda Accord and a Civic, but they’re only bringing the Accord to you, we can figure out how to get the Civic in, too,” he says.
Then the numbers guy circles back to the people factor once again.
He says that Cinch’s tools can break a shop’s custom database into groups and identify certain attributes of a group that shop owners and management can use in dealing with customers. For example, soccer moms have kids and tend to drive a certain number of miles.
“And they like to keep the car running because they don’t want to be late to the soccer game. Knowing this helps you know how to talk to them,” Rae notes.
“Then, if your customers are geeks with double incomes and no kids, you can also identify this with enriched data,” he says, which is helpful to understand.
While geographic area will have a large impact on a quick lube shop and who comes through its doors how often, age, as it turns out today, seems to affect marketing strategy less and less.
If you asked 10 years ago how 60-year-olds wanted a lube shop to contact them, for instance, they’d say mail and to please text them less.
“But today, it’s more about the combination,” Rae has learned. And yet, marketers should be aware that some aspects of marketing today can seem to run counterintuitive to what you’d expect.
“I’m in my early 40s,” Rae gives as an example. “And the irony is that the best way to reach me is direct mail. I’m the CEO of a company, and I get hundreds of emails a day, and if you email me, the message won’t come through. But I still walk out to the mail, pick it up, look, and decide what to keep and what to throw away. There’s a moment of undivided attention with that mail.”
Cinch can also help quick lubes focus on their customers’ pricing sensitivity. If patrons are synthetic oil change customers, for instance, this might be an issue. And you don’t want to send them coupons for conventional oil changes when they use synthetic in their cars.
“If a synthetic oil change customer comes in with that coupon and doesn’t realize it only applies to conventional oil, they’ll get miffed if they have to pay more,” Rae cautions.
The Aftermath
Today, data science and AI combined are helping Cinch make sure that quick lube businesses continue to grow. Yet, Rae says that doesn’t mean that shop owners can stop trying to get to know their customers in real time.
“If your business has good operations and there are good experiences that customers are having in your shop, make sure you’re collecting contact information from each of them,” Rae suggests. “That’s a good foundation.”
Then, a good building block to put upon that foundation is to figure out how much it costs you to get additional business. “Figure out your baseline and see how to make your customer feel like you know who they are and what they want,” the Cinch CEO says.
“As AI gets bigger and better (and its predictive qualities become even more fine tuned), shop owners who are savvy with their data will really start to win. We’re trying to make it easier for people to win and compete against the big guys,” Rae adds.
