When it comes to spreading the word about your business, few things pack as much power as a personal referral. Coming from someone who’s “in the know” and has been there, done that, a referral from one friend to another is more believable than even the best advertising campaign, because a friend has no ulterior motive besides acting in another friend’s best interest.
Better yet, most of the time a referral is completely free.
One of the top methods for small-business marketing, according to one survey, the recommendations of others account for the selection of as much as 45 percent of service-oriented businesses. Best of all, perhaps, is that customers who give you referrals become more loyal to you and your business, says marketing guru David Frey, author of the “Instant Referral Systems” program.
Frey’s Web site tells the legend of Detroit’s Joe Girard, a prolific salesperson in the Guinness Book of World Records for selling more automobiles in 12 consecutive years than anyone else in the world. All of his business came from referrals, which he capitalized on using a method that can translate into almost any industry and certainly into increased sales at your shop.
Girard developed a system of staying in touch with customers and potential clients by sending everyone he came into contact with a unique greeting card every month. They weren’t high-pressure sales letters, but rather friendly notes to remind people that he was thinking about them. Eventually, Girard was sending out more than 13,000 cards per month, with the help of a handful of assistants, celebrating anything from Halloween to Groundhog Day.
Sounds labor-intensive, and normally it would be—but since the days of Joe Girard, technology has made it a simple and painless task that can be done every month without ever giving it a second thought.
CONSISTENCY IS KEY
Many small-business owners believe that simply giving fantastic customer service will bring them lots of referrals, but this isn’t always the case. “If you are not deliberate and proactive in creating referrals, the chances of you receiving as many referrals as you want are slim,” states Frey.
Wondering what kind of message would be appropriate to send your collision or mechanical repair customers each month?
First and foremost, show heartfelt appreciation for their business—it’s a message that will trump self-promotion almost every time. Other simple messages may include service reminders, new product or equipment announcements and key staff changes; the more-obvious options may include birthday, New Year’s or Thanksgiving Day greetings.
One way to make sure your greeting cards are read is to use photos and humor. “People love cards that are fun and witty,” maintains Frey. “Take advantage of new greeting card technology that allows you to upload personal photos into your cards.”
He recalls the time he went shopping for a new refrigerator and spent some time talking with a salesman about a particular model, but left without making a purchase. A few days later, he got a card in the mail with a picture of his salesman, standing in front of the same fridge, with a sign saying “We’re holding this one for you!” The card also stated that Frey would receive a certain discount if he came back within a specified time frame. The strategy worked: Impressed by the innovative message, Frey returned to the store and bought himself a new appliance.
That impression, he says, can be made across industries no matter what the product. For example, a growing number of body shops across the country are using AutoWatch and other online services that let customers see daily photos and track the repair progress on their vehicles. If you’re already taking pictures of your customers’ vehicles, try putting one on a greeting card, or even a before-and-after ensemble, and wish them safe travels or remind them that you can reproduce the happy results for any of their friends and family members.
“Just like a great marriage requires a lot of consistent communication, so does a great body shop/customer relationship,” says Frey. A good follow-up or stay-in-touch system will include a sequence of multiple cards to be sent on a predetermined timeframe to a customer. And whether you have a few dozen customers or a few thousand you’d like to contact once a month (or any interval you choose), an automated, Internet-based system lets you “set it up and forget it.”
“All things being equal, people will do business with those body shops that they like and trust,” says Frey. “There are few better ways to leverage your time and resources than with a greeting card marketing program.”
It can be a difficult or even awkward task to ask your customers and your friends to give you a referral, and sometimes the general, “If you happen to know anybody …” is too vague and easily forgotten. But consistent contact, over time, keeps your name out there, and when a “Thanks for Your Business” card one month is followed by a “Happy Fourth of July” the next, a unique or humorous referral card is likely to be well-received and acted upon.
“Greeting cards are the perfect tool for your body shop marketing efforts because they are unusually effective at delivering your message,” says Frey. “First, greeting cards always get opened. Second, they always get read, and third, if done right, they can leave a powerful impression.”
And with the right message, they can leave a powerful urge to spread the word about your collision repair shop.
Frey advocates a system that reaches customers under a 12-month follow-up referral card program, which contains six unique referral card designs. From every customer or potential customer he meets, Frey tries to get an address and perhaps a birth date or an anniversary. For body shops, you can use the date you delivered someone’s perfectly repaired card as their “anniversary” with your shop. Over the next 12 months, then, Frey’s customers receive a mix of thank-you, referral and holiday cards. For less than $1 per card, the personalized messages appear to be handwritten (thanks to computer software) and are generated automatically, without any effort by the sender aside from entering a name and address into the system.
The site, sendreferralcards.com, includes testimony from several small-business owners who claim their referral rates increased by as much as 39 percent once they began using an automated card-generating system.
“I’d been trying to find a low cost way to stay in front of my past clients and get new clients,” says satisfied customer Steven Scheeler, CEO of Desert Breeze Glass in Mesa, Ariz., “It’s pretty neat when customers like Sam, one of our past clients, stopped by to thank us for a greeting card. In return he referred two of his friends who had damaged windshields. … I highly recommend it to any small business owner or independent professional.”