Easy Ways to Get Repeat Customers at Your Repair Shop

It needs a whole lot of effort and strategy to acquire customers. As a repair store owner, you must love to see customers crossing your doors and asking for repairs. We understand that feeling, and that is why we are here to share some tried and tested tips that help convert first-time shoppers into repeat customers.

So, let’s get started:

Be Personal: Drop them a thank you note

Customers love it when you show your gratitude towards them. You want your customers to come back to you for more business? Try sending them a sweet thank you message after they leave your repair shop.

In that message, tell them how much you appreciate them as your customer. Offer them a discount on their next oil change or car wash, or give them a promo code to say that you’ll wait for them to come back. 

Be Attractive: Pull them with the ‘new offers’ magnet.

Another pointer for turning one-time customers into repeat ones is to make sure your shop name does not skip their minds. To do that, you need to stay in touch with them.

How do you ask? Well, it’s simple. Just draft a message and send it to all your customers via email and SMS. Do this every time you introduce a new offer. You can introduce seasonal discounts on specific services in your store.

Pro tip: Don’t just send out a generic promotional message to all the customers. Try to add a personalized touch to it by adding their first names, so they can really feel how much you are missing them.

Be Present: Host contests and giveaways on social media.

Engaging with customers on social media is a direct way of driving more sales from them. So, don’t forget to ask your customers to follow your business on social media. And when they do, it’s your job to charm them with your posts, stories, and other content, so they visit you again in-store.

In this context, contests and giveaways can work wonders for you. Not only will customers interact with you on social media, but they will also see that you care for them as people and not just customers.

Be Proactive: Reward them with loyalty points.

While the above customer retention ideas are cool, they are more like shooting in the dark. You can’t guarantee that your one-time clients will come back to your store. That’s not the case with loyalty points.

When you reward your customers with some loyalty points that they can use as virtual money to pay for future repairs, you basically take their ‘yes’ for visiting your repair garage again. They can use these loyalty points other than repairs, like getting car accessories or a regular car maintenance session.

So, you win the interest of your first-time customer to be your second-time customer right there and then. Use your automotive workshop management software for this purpose, and keep a record of all the points against every customer. And if you keep refilling their account with more loyalty points each time they come back and spend the old ones, you’ve got yourself a customer retention phenomenon. Job well done!

Be Different: Give them your shop gift cards.

Gift cards work just like loyalty points. Customers can use them to pay you for their future purchases with your store. Gift cards are normally sold to get new customers from the existing customer base. But they can also be used to entice your new customers to visit again in the future.

So, the gift cards will sit in the customers’ wallets and remind them of your repair garage. And the next time they need a product or service similar to yours, guess where they will go? To YOU.

How to do all these things and more?

Now, you must be wondering how you will manage to implement all these things. And you’re right to do so. Running a repair business is a hassle in itself, and now we’re asking you to go the extra mile for your customers? Not very cool of us, right? But here’s the thing. A repair shop management system is the key to implement all these customer retention ideas.

• Send personalized ‘thank you for shopping with us’ messages to all customers with just a few clicks.
• Run automated email and SMS marketing campaigns with the system to let your customers know about your new discounts, promotions, services, deals, and offers.
• Start a loyalty program to reward your customers for their repairs, accept their loyalty payments, track their loyalty points, all with the same auto repair workshop software.
• Create and sell your gift cards to your customers, as well as accept and record gift card payments in the auto repair shop software.

See how a single piece of software will uplift your customer services and customer retention game to a whole new level. So, we recommend that you take a look around to see and choose the best software for auto repair shops.

Conclusion

The customer retention process goes in the long run. It’s not just about charming your first-time customers, so they visit you for the second time. You need to go full circle to impress your customers to make them come back again and again and again.

Send your customers sweet thank you messages, entice them with emails and SMS notifications about your new offers and deals, win their hearts with social media contests and giveaways, reward them for their purchases with loyalty points, and treat them to some free gift cards. Whether you try all these ideas to impress your customers or some or even one, you will have positive results just as long as you practice them regularly. It is all about efforts and consistency.

In the end, whichever automotive repair shop management system you choose and whatever customer retention ideas you implement with it, we just hope that you have a blast making your customers feel special and valued. Good Luck!