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Customer Retention & Leads
Understanding the numbers
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Greetings!
I recently made up a list with 10 tasks to double the amount of business I have now. Doubling a single star regency platinum direct jobber level takes you right to four stars.
After that first regional sales meeting in Duluth where they covered retention stats in the DJ meeting I discovered just how to do that and some interesting facts to send out in this newsletter.
 We will get to that in a moment but the other topics here are the power of this Constant Contact newsletter system, an ideal dealer business, generating leads and retail sales with simple websites you can build yourself, and last - AMSOIL Blogs.
I'll start with that last comment as it's the shortest. Do you watch the AMSOIL events blog or the AMSOIL page on Facebook?
This is where the public through thousands of established links are being alerted to what you should be alerted on - like this one that came through today: "SEMA announces Best New Powersports Product 2011: AMSOIL Quickshot SE."Are you using or telling your customers about Quickshot? AT AMSOIL U where it was covered I simply tool the sales tips and started suggesting it to all my powersports customers and it's moving not to mention it has already caused some repeat business on behalf to it's strength! Hows that?
Join that facebook page and get the blog update casts set up to your email.
Last - if you signed up for the Fall Sales meetings after my suggestion in the last newsletter please send me an email with your shirt size so I can bulk order the sweatshirts or if you wanted the mechanics shirt.
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Where do the customers go?
 I attended three of the regional sales meetings - the first one in Duluth, then Denver then drove to Wichita in the car in the above photo to meet several new dealers, get out of the office and rack up the miles on my bypass filter system in the test car - the 83 AMC Eagle. By the way, the car ran flawlessly for a total of 1750 miles.
At the DJ meeting we were given copies of the dealer retention reports which are now available in your dealer zone. First we got to see the combined averages of all dealers and DJs then a sheet of our own performance was used for comparison.
Check out your own report titled Dealer Retention in the Premium Zone. The top table shows the percent of accounts have been active or have made purchases for that year. The lower table shows retention spread for one to five years in churn or losses.
The average dealer drops about 25% of the accounts the first year, but only about 14% the 2nd, and the 3rd, 4th and 5th is in the single digits. This is the average dealer which generally doesn't do much to service dealers or is there just to "watch". You can see the importance of getting to know your dealers or keeping them on top of stats, info and sales tips.
Just a simple newsletter or emails and phone calls can turn that all around. They showed us the reasons people didn't stick to their dealerships and communication was the main factor. (Hopefully Tim Golden sends me that list)
For Preferred customers, Retail customers, Commercial accounts and Retail accounts, the results also clearly show just by increasing or adding some basic communications with these customers retention or churn will be solved.Keep a notepad handy for newsletter topics.
"50% of all Preferred Customers have never bought engine oil"
That was the stat! 50% of PCs are joining and buying Filters, Gear Oil, Aggrand, Altrum, and fuel additives. Do you know how to look this up? You can identify these customers, see the reports and send information on the oils. Why not use the new OE (next newsletter) as a stepping stone to AMSOIL motor oils. Most of our motorcycle oil customers do not use AMSOIL in their cars and many passenger car oil customers do not use AMSOIL in their bikes or small engines. We can talk about why that is and what to do but it all starts with identifying the issue and taking action.
I have 688 CRs (Catalog Retail Customers). These are customers who bought through my website. For example I get a lot of new customers searching for 5W30 Diesel and they find my site and order through the link to the AMSOIL store.
My stats show that 47% of these 688 accounts have ordered in the last year. In one year 35% become inactive. in two years only 10% and 10% again in three. I have started a robust effort to thank these customers with thank you cards, newsletters, emails and offers to upgrade them to preferred customers.
Here's the secrete!! In the preimum zone there is a report called, "Label Report Page (Label Packages)" Well I never bothered to click on this as I wasn't interested in labels. Turns out it also generates a spreadsheet of account numbers, date of last order and dollar total of combined orders for the past year. In turn you can look up the order history in the personally sponsored customer order report so you know exactly what they bought over the years and can take proper action. When you have hundreds of these a newsletter is the only way to reach your customers effectively but if you only had a few you may want to consult these customers individually or target them to upgrade to preferred customer.
You also want to examine your preferred customer reports to identify sales totals, product variety, or inactivity. In some cases you may save them $ by explaining shipping benefits or perhaps you have a dealer close. Preferred customers are the best customer to become a dealer so perhaps have a separate newsletter to upgrade your PC's to dealers.
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Constant Contact Newsletters
This newsletter program
Constant Contact is the program which makes these emails easy. It's a low cost system with a high quality product. You are charged by the number of email contacts you store on the system. $20 or so for the average list of 300 contacts per month.
They are offering a referral rebate - if you are interested I can send you a prompt which you use to check out the program and they take $30 off your first charges. Let me know if you are interested and I can send the coupon.
Anyway, this is part of my initiative to double my points to get to 4-stars - I'm using constant contact to reach personally to all CRs, older CRs, I had stored on my system from years ao, preferred customers, dealers from the past, commercial accounts, retail accounts and accounts which haven't ordered in a couple years. I'll be thanking them for past orders, making suggestions for better pricing, new product announcements, tech stories on products with nice photos and telling them about dealerships. You will be the forst t know if it has worked - just look for me in the Action News. We hope to see you surpass our rank soon!!
One other feature I should mention is the Auto-Responder.
Here's what it is: You are getting new leads. Leads from shows, website, Amsoil, referrals, etc. These customers haven't bought yet but have expressed interest in AMSOIL. So you can make 2 to 10 short info newsletters which will automatically be sent out in sequence to these new customers. (for maximum of 1-year)
The key is to be informative but timeless. Product info, testimonials, links to bulletins and tech sheets, pricing all that makes for good impressions. You can easily make one then you just use that template and color each one up with different material. I can email mine of you need a sample. I can also email some of my other newsletters if you would like to see what I send out to PCs and older customers.
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 | That's not Kevin - It's a customer...
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Website ideas and help from Kevin Morrison in Florida
Kevin is a dealer I first met on the Miata forum and later he joined as a dealer in 2005. His business has remained quite steady as he started with a website of his own and with only 5 or 6 dealers he was doing a newsletter regularly. The effect has been positive.
I have ben suggesting to dealers for some time to go after niche areas with AMSOIL websites directed toward one or a small number of targets featuring one or two products. Antifreeze, bio-degradable antifreeze and EAAU cold air intake filters come to mind. Trying to find the easiest method Kevin recently sent me this update. Enjoy!!
Ches,
Just wanted to let you know - I took your suggestion of a few weeks
ago and put together a more targeted site for the universal air
filters.
www.intakeairfilters.info
I get quite a few catalog sales from my allfilters.net site so I know
it works. I'm going to do some more. I also have the domain
intakeairfilters.us and I'll get more as I build the sites. I started
doing this a couple years ago but got sidetracked after a couple
sites. But the few that I built then do bring in sales and I don't
spend any money advertising them.
One thing I've gotten turned onto is Microsoft's Office Live Websites. You can go to www.officelive.com and sign up for a free account and you can build a website and host it there for free. I'm going to use it to put up a bunch of sites with focus on different EaAU applications. It might be a good suggestion for you to pass along to other dealers who don't have websites yet. You don't have to know any html at all to put up a fairly custom site as Microsoft provides an online tool to design and build the site. I get my domains from godaddy for as little as $2-$3 a year, so my ongoing costs are LOW.
I'm going to pass this along to all of my dealers.
That's it for now. I'll let you know how it goes.
Kevin Morrison
Now there's some advice!! Start making more retail sales and generate leads for permanent customers to expand your business!
Now - As this newsletter was lacking the photos I like to end this newsletter with a clip I found on Youtube of Chuck Evans. You can tell this clip was professionally produced. Chuck is in Indiana. He is known at AMSOIL presently for the dealer with the most active files in the "My Garage" system. Something like 120 of his customers are now logged into AMSOIL's My Garage. Any lead from AMSOIL will have an account #. You need an account to get into the My Garage.
Click on the image to open the video!!
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| | Chuck Evans AMSOIL Sales Center |
That's all for now. A 2nd Newsletter on the new AMSOIL OE is next! Pass these newsletters along and use them to earn dealers from PCs!
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