Peterson Soft Cloth Wash, Staunton, VA

Carwash / Quick Lube Chain

Redemption Rates Double After Mailers Are "Timed" Using DRB Systems Computer

Challenge: To have mailers reach customers at the time they’re ready for an oil change.

Solution: Replace your monthly mailers with more tightly focused weekly mailers using your computer from DRB Systems.

Timing isn’t necessarily everything, but it does make a big difference in direct mail advertising. Just ask Roger Peterson, the owner of six Peterson Soft Cloth Washes in northern Virginia.

Like many carwash operators, Peterson has diversified into the oil change business, adding a quick lube to one of his locations. To promote his new profit center, Peterson began mailing reminder card coupons to lube shop customers on a monthly basis.

The mailers were effective, pulling in an 8% response rate, but Peterson felt they could do better. “It quickly became apparent to us that we were missing some customers with our reminder cards because our timing was off,” he said. “People are always receiving mailers from different lube shops. To be effective, your card has to be the one that arrives at the home right around the time the customer is due for an oil change.”

Most customers are pretty consistent about getting an oil change, said Peterson, bringing their vehicle into a lube shop every two to three months. The more in sync a lube shop mailer is with the customer’s oil change schedule, the better its chances of being redeemed.

To improve the chances of his cards reaching lube shop customers at the “right time,” Peterson revised his marketing strategy. Instead of sending out reminder cards once a month, he now mails them on a weekly basis to a more narrowly defined group of customers.

Every Wednesday, Peterson’s marketing assistant uses the Loyalty Promotion feature in his DRB Systems computer to identify customers who haven’t been to his lube in 60 to 66 days. The computer then automatically generates reminder cards to send to the names on this list. On the following Wednesday, the process is repeated, and reminder cards are mailed to a new group of customers who haven’t been to the wash in 60 to 66 days.

Now that his mailers are more frequent, Peterson’s reminder cards are more likely to hit their target -- arriving in the mailbox around the same time that the customer is ready for an oil change. By contrast, when Peterson’s mailers went out every month, some customers didn’t receive a reminder card until 90 days after their last lube shop visit. Unfortunately, by then many of them had already gotten an oil change using a competitor’s card.

By improving the timing of his mailers, Peterson has increased the redemption rate on his reminder cards from 8% to over 18%.What makes this increase even more impressive is that it occurred at a time when a national lube shop chain opened a location near Peterson’s wash.

Accomplishing this would have been impossible, says Peterson, without his computer system. “The system is very efficient at filtering names from our database, so we can identify customers in that 60-to-66-day group. It’s also very good at generating mailings, and this has been a great asset for us. Because the system works so well, we’re able to do mailings every week, instead of every month, without tying up a lot of office time.”

Bottom line: By using his computer to “time” mailers, Peterson ensured that his offers reached customers when they were ready for an oil change, greatly increasing the chances that his coupons would be redeemed.