The current marketing climate is one where brands are competing through multiple channels for consumer spend, ad-blocking software is at an all-time high and retaining customers has never been more important. One of Melbourne’s most established car dealerships, Brighton Honda were not satisfied with attempting to re-engage lost or lapsed customers through traditional media.

Facing competition from other car servicing providers and with parts of their CRM system inactive or disengaged, Brighton Honda’s Service Manager, George Banitsiosis turned to Melbourne-based tech start-up, Tribe Mobile.

Tribe is state-of-the-art mobile SaaS platform, hosted on the Amazon AWS cloud that has the capacity to not only reactivate customers, improving retention and loyalty but engage the consumer through ‘gamification’. Using incentivised promotions on a customer’s smartphone, Tribe has the capacity to capture a customer’s attention in a world full of noise with astounding results.

Supported by real-time analytics and behavioural insights which track end-to-end user experience, Tribe provided Brighton Honda with real understanding of their customers and a live and comprehensive break down of every users’ engagement and experience with a Tribe Smart Promotion.

From The Old to The New

Like many automotive dealers, Brighton Honda was regularly engaging in e-marketing, news media advertising and postal communications. Something had to change. Once the Tribe team established the target audience – a challenging test group of 811 customers from the dealership’s database who had been inactive for between 13-24 months – it was decided a Tribe Smart Promotion which utilised a digital scratch card promotion with a range of prizes for customers was the best fit. Each recipient would be a winner, with prizes ranging from a free service and wheel alignment through to a discount just for playing.

Engagement

The results exceeded expectations, and in turn, generated a near six-figure return in service bookings inside 48 hours from customers who had either been lost or completely inactive for an extended period. Of the 811 messages sent, 130 Tribe messages were opened (16%) and an incredible 110 of the 130 messages were completed, resulting in immediate service bookings. This translated to a staggering 80% conversion on messages that were opened. Brighton’s previous newspaper campaign had only yielded 15 bookings in 45 days with zero analytics or insight, drastically exceeding George Banitsiosis’ expectations.

Banitsiosis says, “We loved these results! We’ve done campaigns in the past using more traditional and highly labour intensive means to try to reach lapsed customers. The difference in the results speaks for itself.” He continues, “Not only was I able to I get access to detailed real-time analytics via a dashboard that populates with complete metrics of the campaign, unlike traditional marketing methods, the platform also demonstrated who I hadn’t reached.”

The Breakdown

Brighton Honda executed two comparative campaigns:

Promoting services via print brought 8.3% of this customer group over a six-week period. However, there was no way to tell whether these customers into Honda or whether they were organic traffic.

Tribe easily exceeded this with 13.8% in two days. This difference represents around $30,000 in additional revenue from one campaign in less than 5% of the time it took for the traditional promotion.

A four-week advertising campaign in the local paper cost $3,000 and brought in 15 customers over 45 days – many of whom may have been coming in anyway. The Tribe promotion brought in over seven times more business in two days.

The Future

In a consumer marketing environment that has never been more competitive for established brands, it may well be a case of only the innovators surviving. Customer retention is often overlooked by companies due to the constant desire for acquisition overshadowing the ‘low hanging fruit’ in the form of existing customers. Evidence suggests that not only is the pursuit of new customers fraught with risk, businesses may only have a 5% chance of acquiring and selling to a new customer versus a 60% likelihood of selling to an existing customer.*

Retention marketing is cost-effective and proven way to grow business and it appears that Tribe Mobile is leading the race.

References:
*Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys
Brand Keys 2017 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index