Home » Forums » Marketing For Auto Repair Shops » What is your business spending to acquire a single customer?

Home Forums Marketing For Auto Repair Shops What is your business spending to acquire a single customer?

  • What is your business spending to acquire a single customer?

    Posted by Rob Infantino on March 8, 2018 at 12:35 pm

    Does your automotive service center have a marketing budget to acquire new customers? What channels are you advertising in? And have you determined what your customer acquisition costs are?

    Channels could include facebook advertising, display ads, search engine, direct mail, value-packs, radio, local papers, email list rentals, other?

    What is your customer acquisition costs per channel? 

    Example: Direct mail ($0.74/mail piece) x 4,000 mailers sent. Total cost = $2,960. Total of 20 new customers closed.

    Customer acquisition costs for direct mail = $148 ($2960/20).

    Site Administrator replied 5 years, 10 months ago 7 Members · 8 Replies
  • 8 Replies
  • Chris

    Member
    March 20, 2018 at 4:00 pm

    All of my clients have a budget based on total sales. (3%)All advertising is done through their website and adwords. Almost none of my clients use their entire budget.

    This is a 3 month period. 1347.00 for website. 418.37 for adwords= 1765.37. Generated 249 leads and 99 new customers. For a conversion rate of 39% Total cost of leads generated=7.08 cost of New Customer= 17.83

    Summarize:

    Total Cost =1765.37

    Revenue Generated= 30500.87

    New Customer Cost=17.83

    ARO for those customers=308.08

  • Randy Lucyk

    Member
    April 4, 2018 at 8:32 am

    For our store, the cost of a new customer that visits us at least twice in the first 12 months is between $25 and $75, depending on the effectiveness of the campaign that brought them in originally. For large multi store brands, the cost of getting a new customer to visit once, is more in the $75-$125 range, or so i have been told.

    I have settled on $50 as the cost of acquiring a new customer for just one visit, guaranteed. If a new customers visits our store for at least an oil change, we have committed to sending an organization they support( an organization that is signed up on our My Town Cares community support program) $50 for sending us a new customer.

    I am tired of sending money to printers and the post office in an attempt to gain new customers. Not a single dime of that money offers any direct benefit to our local community. The cost of our postcards drops are more like $2500 per drop and we do 3-4 drops a year. I seems like the definition of insanity, after all theses years of doing drops.

    We are piloting this program starting this week with a local youth organization. I hope to transfer much of our traditional advertising costs to this program over the next few years.

    Outline attached.

     

  • Curtis Andrew Massoll

    Member
    April 7, 2018 at 10:44 am

    From my previous measurements it was about $70 per new customer if I took all Marketing and Advertising expense and divided by all new customers. Obviously this is a rough measurement, but I have stuck with that number for budgeting purposes and have great new customer counts in our shops.

    -Andy

  • Alan Ollie

    Member
    April 10, 2018 at 6:03 am

    [attachment file=”36725″]
    “Never trade reputation for money” IE: Warren Buffet
    We spend Apx $2200 a month on web advertising, and we get apx 54 new customers (21%new customers ) a month with an avg ticket of 423, so the cost per customer is about $33 that is way down from a high of $75 per customer two years ago. Once we earned an excellent reputation on Yelp, Repairpal, and Google, we cut way back on PPC.  We found no significant difference. We continuously build our local online presence. And Google rewards us for it. The analytics prove it. Now, all we need to do is find two more A Techs to get the work done or get five more loaner cars. 

  • Rob Infantino

    Member
    April 10, 2018 at 9:02 am

    vdepot – would you clarify your comment in parenthesis (21% new customers)? Are you generating 54 “new” customers a month or 11 new customers a month (21% of 54).

    $33 to acquire a “new” customer via a web channel is reasonable if your average ticket is $423.

     

  • Alan Ollie

    Member
    April 11, 2018 at 1:33 pm

    rinfantino wrote:vdepot – would you clarify your comment in parenthesis (21% new customers)? Are you generating 54 “new” customers a month or 11 new customers a month (21% of 54). $33 to acquire a “new” customer via a web channel is reasonable if your average ticket is $423.”

     

    We get apx 54 new customers a month that is about 21% of our 253 unique invoices a month. The avg ticket is $525 overall.  The new customers  are about $423 avg ticket.

  • ericscarcare

    Member
    May 9, 2018 at 11:36 pm

    Our shop has been around for 20 years and has never done any advertising.  I have taken over the store over two months ago and am working towards implementing a marketing program with a budget of approx. $2000 per month.  I need feedback from shop owners as to what is the best service to use for online advertising.

    Sal

    Eric’s Car Care – Houston, TX

     

  • Site Administrator

    Administrator
    May 10, 2018 at 4:53 am

    Sal, the answer to that is going to differ greatly from shop to shop. We’ve narrowed things for shop owners with these two directories which are specifically geared toward auto repair shops. Hope this helps. https://www.automotivemanagementnetwork.com/tools/shop-owner-resource-directory/#Marketing-&-Advertising-Providers and https://www.automotivemanagementnetwork.com/tools/shop-owner-resource-directory/#Website-Designers

Log in to reply.