Webinar: Catalyst - Your New Marketing Automation Platform

August 28, 2024

Catalyst, our innovative marketing automation platform, is designed to enhance your marketing efforts through seamless integration with our Patheon® point-of-sale system, enabling you to effortlessly create precise and impactful campaigns.  

Transcript

Kayla Ivey - Hi, everybody. Welcome. I'll just give a quick intro while we wait for everyone to get settled, trickle in. Thanks for joining us. We're going to be talking about our brand new marketing automation platform Catalyst today, and I'll give you a little bit of an intro here in a second as to what Catalyst is, if you haven't heard about it yet. But it's our marketing automation platform tool that is synced directly with our Patheon point of sale. And so we're going to get into a whole demo, some of our key features of how this platform is going to help uplevel your marketing, make it so you can send really tailored and targeted text and email messages to your customers. So let's see. I think we got almost everybody in, a good amount of people in, so let's go ahead and kick it off. Okay, so just really quick before we actually get into our content, if you need to communicate with us at all through the webinar, there's a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, and you'll notice chat is disabled. So just anything you need, put in that Q&A box, type in questions as we go, as you think of them, and then we'll save some time at the end to go through those. And then as always, we will send out answers to all of the questions if we don't happen to get to yours. So be on the lookout for an email with the webinar recording as well as all of the Q&A. And then if for some reason you can't see that button, you can try to hit view options, exit full screen, and sometimes that helps bring that into view. All right, we'll kick it off with our intros, who you're here talking to today. So I'm Kayla Ivey, I am a product marketing manager at DRB, and so I work on the Catalyst side, obviously. And then my background is actually in marketing. So I started in working with Suds and worked with a lot of different car wash owners and operators across the country on all types of growth strategies. So go-to-market campaigns, membership campaigns, all of those various types of growth avenues. And then through that was also able to work in a number of different marketing tools. So that's essentially the kind of element that I'm bringing to the table today is that marketer's point of view, and how this platform really is helpful from kind of that marketing perspective.

Matthew Smith - Thanks Kayla. Yes, my name is Matthew Smith. I'm the product owner for our Catalyst product. I work with the development team to ensure the delivery of all the features that we're going to demo today. I've been with DRB for a little over 22 years at this point, serving a lot of different roles across all different departments within the company. So a lot of experience in the car wash industry, a lot of time in the field meeting customers as well as doing a little bit more work behind the scenes, like the stuff we're demoing today.

Kayla - Awesome, thanks Matt. Okay, so I'm just going to give everybody a couple of introductions, if you will, to the Catalyst platform, why we built it, what are some of the really awesome features that are, you know, different than other marketing tools you might be using or might have used in the past. And then I'll hand over to Matt in just a couple minutes, and we'll spend the majority of our session today letting him actually walk you through the platform. So if you have heard of Catalyst, this might be a great time to actually, you know, see the platform firsthand, be able to, he'll walk you through some of like the key features, how it works and you can see it really from that user point of view. Just backing up a little bit, so why did we build this product? So there's a lot of marketing tools out there, as everyone's well aware. So what we were aiming to do really is there's so much valuable data being collected inside of your point of sale. And so we really saw that as an opportunity to leverage that data in a way that's very automatic for you. How can all of your data that's being collected in your point of sale power your marketing, power, your, you know, customer communications, making sure we're helping you in every way possible on an automated basis, drive revenue, reduce churn, you know, engage with your customers in a more meaningful way. So that's really one of the key benefits of Catalyst is it's all in one place. Patheon and Catalyst are synced automatically, meaning all of your data is going to be at the ready in your marketing platform ready to utilize. Which kind of takes me to my next point here, which is segmentation. So one of the key elements that we had in mind when building Catalyst is segmentation had to be very, very robust. We have to be able to allow you to leverage all of that data that's being collected in the point of sale, as I mentioned. So things like license plate recognition or RFID, however you track your membership base, all of that activity can be utilized in your segmentation inside of Catalyst. And then in addition to that, think things like purchases, wash behaviors, what kinds of things people are buying, how frequently they're visiting, all of that data as well is going to be able to be utilized inside of your marketing automation tool to actually drill down on the groups of customers that you want to target with various campaigns, and just make sure that you're super intentional about who you're sending various messages to. So the next really key element of the platform for us when you know thinking about building Catalyst is we wanted it to have a very sophisticated and intentional flow builder or flow capability, which you may know of as like a drip automation capability. So we have a very intuitive and easy to use flow builder that Matt will walk you through an example of here in a second. But this was key for us because not only do we want you to be able to, you know, build those customer segments as I mentioned that are really fine tuned and specific, but once those segments go into a flow into kind of that starting point at the top of that automation, we want to get even more drilled down and intentional kind of as we go along through the campaign. So whether this is, you know, a seven day campaign, whether it's over the course of six months or a year, customers journey through and we can be more and more specific as to who gets what message kind of at the right point in every individual's journey. So examples that Matt will show in a minute, time delays. So obviously you can delay, you know, a certain wait time, like this one says seven days. It could be a number of months. It could be a specific date, what have you. And then there's also what you'll notice right below that, that's an if else logic. So this is where probably one of my favorite parts of the platform, you can actually drill down what message you send next in the series or in the sequence based on whether someone's opened an email, read a message, whether they've clicked, taken some sort of action like barcode redemption or actually making a purchase, buying a membership. So there's so many possibilities from kind of that marketing perspective on how drilled down and specific you can get, not only with the group of customers that's going in, but as they journey through making sure it feels really intentional for them at that moment in time. And then last thing that was key to us in this platform being unique and being, you know, something really powerful is incorporating machine learning. So this is unique to our platform because we're actually not only giving you those segmentation capabilities, so allowing you to leverage all of that data in the point of sale and, you know, create very specific customer segments. But we're actually incorporating machine learning driven segments in the tool as well. So the first one that's going to be available is a churn prevention, what we're calling a smart segment, and that just means it's driven by machine learning. So instead of creating it on your own, what's going to happen is there's basically an algorithm running in the background that's going to proactively identify customers that belong in a certain segment based on how they're behaving and how their behavior right now differs from maybe what their normal behavior is. So in this example, think churn prevention for a second. So we've got John on the left. He, it says, on average washes once a week. So the system is essentially noticing automatically, hey, he hasn't visited in the last 34 days. He normally washes once a week. So this is abnormal behavior for him. It's going to automatically pull him into what we call like an at risk segment. So smart segment means you don't have to do anything, they're driven by these algorithms that are essentially smarter than what you could do on more of like a broad basis that applies to everyone. This allows you to drill down. And then of course you've got Jane on the other hand who it's noticing, hey, she hasn't washed in 34 days, but she only washes about every eight weeks, so this is normal for her. We're going to kind of leave her as is. So as an operator, the way you could use this is the ones going into the at-risk segment, you kind of get to decide, you know, what strategy you want to take and feel free to test different approaches. Maybe it's a more aggressive approach of trying to send them some sort of offer to retain the ones that are really at risk. Maybe it's more of a nudge and just reminding them of the value. That's where you get to kind of decide what works best for you. But the beauty of this is it's all working in the background and proactively identifying based on that individual's behavior, which is really, really awesome. So with that, I'm going to stop my share and we will have Matt actually pull up the platform, walk you through some of these key features that we just went through. And then go ahead and put, as we're kind of going through, continue to put your questions in the Q&A and we'll save some time at the end. So just put them in there as you guys think of them. There we go. It's loaded.

Matt - It's loaded now?

Kayla - Yep.

Matt - All right. Excellent, okay, so we got, we have the Catalyst platform opened up here. Sorry, we missed the login screen because I apparently breezed through that when my screen wasn't showing yet. So sorry about that. For this demo, we're actually going to walk through creating a campaign. So campaigns are really kind of the lifeblood, the real bread to how we get these marketing messages out to our customers. We're going to walk through creating a campaign that has a flow that sends multiple messages and identifies customers specifically with the segment generation that we're going to do that will allow us to focus in on customers that this message will be useful to. So we're going to start by adding a campaign here with the flow. And at first we're going to get to this, we're going to come to the screen. Did my screen go black again?

Kayla - It did.

Matt - It did. All right, let's.

Kayla- There you go.

Matt - All right, we're back again. Sorry about that. So, the very first thing we're going to do is we're going to set up just the general information about our campaign that includes name. We're going to select a goal for it. So for this campaign, we're going to build something that is designed to convert retail customers to memberships. We're going to select our campaign goal as a capture rate 'cause we're trying to capture more memberships, and we're going to select start date of September 1st. I can also select an end date here, or I can choose the option to not expire, which basically allows our campaign to continue on until we manually stop it. The next step that we have is our segment creation. We do have the option to select an existing segment. So we're going to have a dropdown list with all segments that have been created. Kayla was mentioning our machine learning segments. Those are going to be available on this list. So you can choose that segment that shows your customers that are likely to churn out. That's going to be right there on that dropdown list. Additionally, if we select an additional one, we can make a copy of it if we want to change something with it. I apologize, I feel like stuff's popping up on my screen here. Sorry about that. So we can make a copy of this segment here if I want to use it, but I might want to make a light little change to it, or I can add a new segment here, and we'll show you that process real quick. So I want to create a segment that is for retail customers who have contact information. Do a description. Let's just duplicate that. And then we can go down here and we can start selecting the rules. And this is how we dial in on the customers that we specifically want to target. So the very first thing I want to do is I want to look for customers that have an email and a phone number. Now, one thing you'll notice is that when I do this down here, it does an update and it tells me there are 35,264 customers who have met the criteria that I've selected so far. So let's drill it in a little bit more because obviously if I'm talking about customers that I want to get to join a membership, I want to exclude from that marketing anybody who already has a membership. So now we're looking at, we're looking at customers we have contact information for, and we do not have a plan for them. So now we can see I have dialed in, I'm now looking at 115 customers, so I can now save that segment, and I can move on to our next step. So next step is our flow. So much like on our segment creation, on our flow step, we do have an option to select existing flows that we've already set up. For the sake of our demo today, we're going to go ahead and build one new just so you can see how quickly and easily flows can be created, and get an idea for what some of the functionality is. All right, so we're starting here with a new flow. We'll call this Retail Conversion flow. Now, every flow is going to start with a start button. Now, in the case of our flows, what a start means is a customer has become a member of the segment that I selected. So just by being a customer that has no plan and has a phone number and an email address, I've now got to the start section here, and all the rest of the flow basically flows down from there. So I'm going to click here to add a step. So I'm going to start this flow off by waiting a few days. So I can do a time delay to wait for a specific day or I can wait a specific time period. So for this case I'm going to wait seven days, and it's really just because I don't want to bombard the customer with a message the very first time they come in. So I'm going to wait seven days, and then I might send them an email. So in this particular case, again, this is kind of familiar territory, I can select an existing email message that I've already configured, or I can create a new one, which is what we're going to do today. This will bring us into our email message creation tool. As you can see, this is a drag and drop tool builder. So I can basically just select what I want to do and actually my window size, I'm a little bit hampered. I tried to make my window smaller so that you guys can see everything, but it doesn't necessarily show everything in the best light. So we'll expand it out a little bit here, and you can see now I have the option to drag and drop messages, or I'm sorry, images into our message. So if I want to add a logo, for example, I can insert a logo here and shrink it down a little bit. Then I can add another row. Drag and drop it in there, and maybe I want to put a title there. So I'm putting a title in, I'm just saying hello. And now we have these concept called merge tags where I can now take customer information and insert it into this message. So in this case, I want a first name so that we are addressing the customer based on the information that we have for them. And then we can continue adding rows and adding, you know, more content that we can customize on really on the fly. It's designed to be very simple to add information, very simple to do images. We can change backgrounds. The idea here really is to try to make the concept of building emails simple and approachable. So we'll go ahead and I'm just going to cancel out of this message that I've created, just because I'm going to select one that we already did. We do have the ability, now that I've selected that to do send a test. So if you've selected or created a message, and you want to just make sure that that message is going to look good and work well for you, you can use this to send it to any email address you want, just to do one time test of that message. All right, so what's next? We've sent our email, what are we going to do next? So let's give that email a little bit of time to get through. Give them a chance to read it. Oh, we selected the wrong thing here, bear with me, let's get rid of that. So we're going to do another time delay. We're going to wait five days this time. Now, at the end of those five days, I want to check to see, hey, has the status of that message that I sent them changed? In this case, I'm going to check to see, did they open the email? So now I've got a decision tree here that we can go different directions with this if they did or did not open that email. If they didn't open the email, I can choose to say, hey, I'm just going to send them that same message again. So now I'm sending the same message again. You know, better luck second time, I guess. In the event that they did open it, well, now I want to check something else. So that email was designed to get them to join a plan. So now that I've sent them a message and I know that they have read the message, now I want to check to see if their plan status has changed. So if they have joined a plan and they are now active in that plan, I can say, okay, good, everything's good. We can end this flow. Mission accomplished and we've achieved our goal. Or in the case that they haven't, maybe I want to try a different approach. So I'm going to send them a text message. Same rules apply, I can create a new message or I can add a new message. And as you can see for SMS messages, we have this editor that we use very similar, it's designed to be very user friendly. We'll just call this one Retail Conversion again. And we can type in a message. We do have the same options here for inserting customer information into that message. We do have a link shortener, so if I want to put a link in there, I can make it a shorter one, and we'll go ahead and do that. This link here is one that came directly from Patheon. This is a link directly to purchase a specific plan. I think in this case, it's the Unlimited Best Plan. Well, the link shortener was timing out apparently. There we go. So there, we've got our shortened link. You'll notice over here in the preview we do have a reply stop to unsubscribe. That is something we automatically insert to our SMS messages to make sure that they're consistently staying compliant with messaging rules. So now that I've got this done, I save this message and I've completed a flow. Once we have completed all those steps in the flow, we're now sending an email, we're checking to see if it's read. If it hasn't been read, we're going to try again. If it has been read, we're going to check their plan status. If they're still not joined a plan, we're going to try a different method with an SMS. So I've got that completed. I'm going to go ahead and save that flow. And we proceed to the summary page. This page just basically gives us a quick overview of what we just did. It allows us to scroll through the messages that we have configured for this campaign, and we click Save and we're ready to go. So this campaign is now going to show on our list. It's going to show as a future campaign because when we set it up, we set that date to start off in the future. It will go to active automatically when that day comes around. And as customers come in and visit the car wash and they get their first visits in, they get their customer information collected, it'll actually start to automatically put them into that segment and start sending that message. One thing I just wanted to mention, you'll notice on the left here we do have Segment, Flows, Messages. We have separate menu options for these. So if you wanted to get in and build a message but you don't know what you want to do with it yet, you can come in here and do it. That'll just make it easier to do when you get to the campaign creation page. You can just select that message that you've already configured. All right, so at this point, I believe we're going to open it up for questions.

Kayla - Yeah, one quick note while you're on this screen. If you want to open up like one of these emails for an example like Retail Conversion or Member Anniversary, any of those, and click Edit, just one of the cool things from, again, kind of that marketer perspective is you can completely DIY. So you could go fully blank email template, as Matt showed, and really drag and drop and create your whole email from scratch. That's a great option if you have design resources in-house, you have assets that you want to utilize. If you don't, we also have templates available so you can actually work off of, like this is an example where, you know, it's fairly generic. You can type in and make it, you know, more custom to whatever your brand is, or your promotion is, putting in your own logo, swapping out colors, things like that. So we're trying to make it, you know, user friendly no matter if you want to completely customize from scratch or if you want to kind of utilize templates to get you started.

Matt - Okay, good call out. Thank you.

Kayla - Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, let's take a few minutes to go through some questions, and apologies, we didn't mention this at the beginning, but we're going to try to get you guys out of here at roughly 30 minutes. So, we'll just spend five or so minutes on questions and then we'll follow up because we're not going to be able to get to quite all of them I don't think. So we will follow up with the rest of them. Okay, let's see what we got here. Okay, let's do this one, Matt. "Do automations run on an ongoing basis? So will customers be entering and running through them at differing times?"

Matt - Yeah, so the way that our automations work, they're all kicked off by our segment. So as customers join a segment, we'll actually kick off that, we'll kick off that automation for that specific customer basically as soon as they flow into our system based on their visit history. So yeah, we will continue to send new messages out throughout that entire span of that campaign, as long as customers become eligible for it because of that segment search.

Kayla - Awesome, thank you. We can both kind of answer this one, I think. But how are, there's a couple questions about how to get email and phone number for retail customers. So can we maybe hit on like a couple of the ways that you could get contact information into Catalyst?

Matt - Yeah, absolutely. So obviously we're collecting all of that contact information from Patheon. It's automatically providing it to us. So we have the ability to collect it through our point of sale, through a sale process where somebody types it in at a point of sale terminal. But what we're bringing out and what we're adding is we're going to have the ability to collect SMS texting messages, along with the terms and conditions approval right on the screen of a kiosk, that's coming very soon in an update to Patheon. And additionally, we're adding the ability to generate landing pages through the Catalyst platform. So that's a feature that's not, we don't have it today. It's very, very soon on our timeline where we'll be able to actually provide you with pages where you can click on a link, customers can enter in their information, and we can capture it all that way.

Kayla - Perfect. And then, I don't know if you mentioned this or not, but the SMS keyword and/or QR code is another way you could, like from the promotional side, like marketing campaign side, you could have things like that on signage or digital promos, and then that could be pushed into Catalyst as well.

Matt - Yeah, that's correct. One of the key things we're doing with our pilot site is we're providing a QR code where users at the car wash can scan that QR code and send an opt-in message to the text message phone number, and that allows them to be opted in and start receiving text messages as well.

Kayla - Perfect. Okay, let's hit on like two more. I know we're coming up on time. Thank you guys for sticking with us here. Let's, do you provide a list of recommended segments slash campaigns? So yes, in addition to the email template examples that we showed, we also have actually all of those segments that Matt had up, I believe are available for you to utilize. So you never really have to start from scratch when you're just kicking things off with Catalyst. We try to give you a really great starting point, so you have kind of recommended segments to start with, email templates that you can utilize for those segments. And then from there, if you choose to like completely do your own thing and not use any of that, that's totally fine too. So kind of depending on how much involvement you want to have. Let's see, let's do one more. "Can I use the data I've already collected in another marketing platform in Catalyst?"

Matt - Yeah, so one of the options that we have is to do imports of contact information from other marketing platforms. So when you first get converted over, we basically, we take that contact list, we import them in, and then we can just continue right on generating messages to those consumers.

Kayla - Awesome. Thanks Matt. Thanks for going through the platform. Obviously that was a quick rundown of kind of the key features and key functionalities of the platform, but we'd be more than happy to walk you through anything more in depth. If you think of any more questions, you should be able to email us from the info in the webinar link. If not, we're going to be following up with recording answers to the other questions that we didn't get to, as we'll summarize the ones that we did get to as well, just so you have that for reference. And then we'll give you a link if you do want to chat more at all, have any more questions or want to have a deeper dive into how it might work for your specific situation, we'd be more than happy to do that. So thanks again for joining us today and we'll let you get on with your day. Thank you.

- Thanks everybody.

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