How to grow your auto repair business

Are you looking for ways on how to grow your auto repair business? This could help change your thinking.

You see, when it comes to marketing and how to grow your auto repair business, most garage owners live in hope that they will hit the jackpot with a few well-placed adverts, or better still, some free or random social media.

If only it was that easy, there would be many more rich businesses out there and less struggling to breakeven.

The thing to get to grips with is there is no ‘one thing’ that will provide you with the returns you would really like. To market a successful, prosperous business, you need to be doing ‘many’ things.

By tidying up a few loose ends, putting a few mini-strategies in place and making incremental changes, results will start to happen.

If you’re serious about how to grow your auto repair business, there is one method of marketing that I always recommend taking care of first, and it is one of the most effective ways of maintaining a flow of customers.

This method is simply LOOKING AFTER YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS. This simply means taking the time to nurture the customers you already have to make sure they return and buy from you again.

This aspect of business is an issue for some garages – I have personally witnessed a garage owner saying that ‘once a customer has visited our garage, surely it’s a done-deal, they will return, therefore why concentrate any effort marketing to them?’.

You see, marketing is not just about attracting new customers, it’s also about getting more value from your existing customers, which is in fact easier and cheaper than attracting a new customer.

Could you turn £175 into £4000+ ?

This may look like a ‘spammy’ heading, but bear with me and you will realise how this isn’t quite as unrealistic as you think.

When a customer walks in to your garage what do you see, a £175 sale, or £2000+ worth of business?

Because if you look at the long-term value of a customer, that’s what you could be missing out on if you lose that customer.

And there’s more…

Many people actually become garage customers through recommendation. So, your £2000+ customer could in fact be worth double that amount, and that’s if they only refer one new customer to you – imagine if they referred five new customers to you (not unusual in large families)!

If you need a reason why it’s important to look after your customers, then turning £175 into £4000+ should be reason enough.

Another way of looking at it is to think in terms of how much are you willing to throw away or ignore in potential income.’

But of course, there are no guarantees this will happen with every customer and you’d be right to be cynical.

But if you don’t do anything, if you don’t at least ‘work the process’ of looking after your customers, your future opportunities will be limited and you could be missing out, not just on increasing the value of individual customers, but on the value of many additional referrals – you need to at least push to achieve the maximum return from a customer.

Don’t rely on chance, keep your customers coming back.

A simple method for keeping your customers engaged and staying ‘top of mind’ is the monthly email newsletter.

Email newsletters do work. You may have subscribed or receive information from other businesses that you use or are interested in yourself; and it’s no different for your business. You can do the same thing and use the very same marketing techniques.
One of our customers saw a 60% increase in air-con work through a steady promotion via their newsletter.

Download the newsletter factsheet to find out more. Or give me a call to discuss it further.