Unlocking Success: An Inside Look at Promotions That Work

October 23, 2023

Whether you want to boost sales, engage existing members, or build awareness for a new wash, this webinar will showcase proven marketing strategies that deliver results.

 

Transcript

Ethan Morton, Marketing Manager: Let's get started here. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. We are going to be sharing with you a couple different promotions that have been really successful for us this past year. So if you're a carwash operator who's familiar with marketing tactics or you work with SUDS, then you can kind of get some insight on what has been really successful in most of the markets that we work with. And then if you're not incredibly familiar with marketing or you haven't worked with SUDS in the past and you're just looking for general tips and tricks and what you can do to kind of elevate your car wash, then hopefully you guys can take away a couple nuggets of wisdom that'll help you guys with your marketing promotions in the future. All right, couple things to go over before we get rolling in terms of how to communicate with us during the webinar.

So you'll notice down at the bottom of your screen on Zoom that the Q, not Q&A, but Chat button is disabled. Instead, what you guys will want to do is pop all of your questions or comments into the Q&A icon, which is just two over from the Chat button. If you don't see that, then what you'll want to do is click View Options on Zoom and then exit full screen. And what this will do is it'll separate the windows, that way you can see the webinar, put your questions and comments in the Q&A box. And then if you do have any technical difficulties, that's a good spot for you to say, "hey, something's not working," and we have panelists on our side that can kind of help you guys work out those technical kinks. We will have time for Q&A towards the end of the webinar and we'll try to get through as many questions as possible. The good news is if we don't get to your question or if you hopped on late or need to leave early, we will be recording this. And then we'll also send out that recording alongside like a little sheet that has all the questions we got, plus our answers as well. That way you can kind of review them together.

Sweet, well, without further ado, let's start just by introducing our panelists today. You guys are probably wondering who we are, why we're speaking to you today, and kind of what our credentials are to even be suggesting what's working right now. I'll go ahead and kick it off. My name is Ethan Morton. I'm a Marketing Manager here at SUDS. I've been with the company a little over two years and really my main focus is just working with our clients to help them enhance their bottom line through the power of strategic marketing. So my primary focus is really just enhancing their brand visibility, driving traffic volume and ultimately just putting more money in the pocket at the end of the day.

Shawn Ho, Senior Marketing Manager: Awesome, and my name's Shawn Ho. I've been with SUDS a little over four years. I'm a Senior Marketing Manager and Team Lead of the accounts department. I've managed, man, over a diverse range of clients from single side operators all the way up to the enterprise level with well over 50 locations. Each one of them, man, they come with their unique challenges, but solving those challenges, getting more revenue, generating more revenue for our clients is, it's always the fun part. And like Ethan said, I mean, honestly, the main goal is just that, generating revenue for you guys or for our clients.

Hailey Kytle, Project Manager: Hi, everyone, my name is Hailey. I've been a Project Manager at SUDS for two years, and I work exclusively with new investors. So car wash owners that are opening a new site either for the very first time or launching a new location into the market. I manage the project all the way from the branding phase through signage, website, and then lastly a go-to-market. And with that, let's dive into a bit more of what SUDS does. So SUDS is a marketing design and data analytics agency that works exclusively in the car wash industry. We're a part of the DRB family and we can help you answer questions like what you see here on the screen. So my business has plateaued, what can I do? How can I increase the member capture at the point of sale? Are my prices optimized? And then today, we're going to be sharing three of the most successful promos we've executed here at SUDS over the last year. And Ethan is going to kick us off with that.

Ethan: Awesome, thank you, Hailey. Well, everybody, as I mentioned, my name's Ethan, Marketing Manager here at SUDS, and like I said, one of my number one things is just helping my clients expand their brands through marketing promotions and really just increasing their revenue at the end of the day. So, today, I'm going to share with you guys a successful marketing promotion that really answered the problem for my client of have we fully saturated our market and is there an opportunity to saturate more of it and capture more members or have we, you know, fully matured? So in the case of this promotion, I was working with a client in the northwest region of the US. They had three sites in total and they had really just stagnated at this 15,000 net member count. You'll see over the last like 18 months, they really just kind of teeter-totter between 14 and 16,000. And we were all kind of just scratching our heads because we're like, okay, I know that we've been open a little bit, we're a little more mature, but is this really, like, the limit to what our wash can handle? Do we need to open more sites, do we need to acquire? Are we good with what we have? Like, what are our options?

Another indicator for this is that the traditional membership offers that we were utilizing, like a 9.99 or a 50% off discounted first month membership, were not as effective as they were in the past. So we were seeing lower capture rates, higher churn, and customers just were not retaining the offers that we were giving them and it just wasn't as sticky in the market anymore. So this led us to figure out, okay, what can we do now to see if this is really the limit to, you know, these site's capabilities? So when we sat down to figure this out, we knew that we were going to have to take a multi-pronged kind of approach to this. Obviously throwing some sort of, you know, new offer at this market wasn't going to be enough for it to stick. And so we broke this down into kind of three solutions. First, we knew that we were going to need to utilize data and specifically seasonality data to inform when we were going to run the promotion.

Now this accounts for, when is the most likely time for customers to purchase a membership, but also when is the most likely time for them to turn so that we're not positioning this during a time where they're going to purchase it and turn right off like we saw with the other offers.

The next is we wanted to reengage their audience and focus on contact collection prior to the launch. So we had built up this database of email clients and wanted to continue to do so that we were entirely sure that we were reaching the market without having to rely solely on social ads to do so. The last and arguably the most important is that we needed to introduce a brand new offer. So like I said, 9.99, all those traditional first-month discounted offers were not really effective anymore. And so we needed something that was going to be enticing to the market and also get customers to come on site and really try something out to begin with. So let's break this down.

The first thing that I mentioned was utilizing seasonality data and really just anything we do here at SUDS has a data-driven aspect to it. So something that we do for all of our marketing promotions and what was, you know, wildly successful and important for this one is we needed to understand seasonality's influence on car wash volume. So we know that one of the biggest variables that impacts your success at a car wash is weather and it's a variable that constantly changes. So we kind of take a macro to micro level approach to this to figure out where that volume's going to be its highest and lowest.

You'll see a graph on the left here, it says "6B-Cold." This is the climate zone that this client is in. And this encompasses multiple states. It's common to be a really cold and humid area where winters are really high and summer's a little bit more pleasant. We know based off of our data across all sorts of car wash clients that the car wash volume is its highest in the summer months. So May through August. We know May, usually customers are cleaning off bugs, dirt, grime, doing really a spring cleaning before they get into their summer activities. And then once we hit August in the fall, that's when they're cleaning up and kind of prepping for the winter. Well, we needed to look at this on multiple levels. Climate zone was not going to be the end all be all. So we also looked at what was their state seasonality.

And I don't have it pictured here, but it's very similar to the 6B-Cold region where we have a very busy summer. But then also we wanted to look at the client's historic KPIs. So what story was being told through their data specific to their site and their community? And what we found is, yes, it was true. You know, they had higher car wash volume in the summer, but more specifically, during June and July. So combining those data sets together, that's how we decided, you know what, this is going to be the best time to do so. And even better, we know that all of these clients are likely to recharge during the fall months when they're still going to be washing their car or needing those services. So now that we figured out when to place that promotion, we still need to work on the element of engaging their customers effectively through lead contact collection. Now there's a couple different ways you can do lead generation promotions, but one way that's been really successful for us recently is what we call a spin-to-win.

So this runs for 30 days and the way that it works is a customer will see a QR code or they'll see a social ad or an email blast that's sent to them and it'll direct them to this landing page where they see a wheel full of prizes. These prizes can be free washes, they could be free detail services, it could be a free month of washes. In some cases, we even offer for them to enter to win a free year of washes. So there's really high stakes to get them involved with your brand. The wheel spins once they input their information and it emails them a coupon. Now this is important for a couple reasons. First, you're going to reach customers in your market that maybe aren't familiar with your brand already and now have a chance to check you out.

Two, you're going to reach audience members that have already interacted with you but haven't come on site to try out your services. This is a chance for them to get that free trial and really test out and mitigate any sort of hesitations they have about your wash. The last thing that this does is it adds to your lead generation database. So like I said, you don't have to rely solely on social ads, when we do the membership promotion, to reach your market. And so when we launched this, we had really good results. We were able to reach 4,000 total participants in the area, which, as a result, caused an 11% increase in their retail traffic compared to the previous year, and of those contacts, 58% were brand new.

So, like I said, 58% of those were brand new customers in that market that we'd never interacted with before, now had a chance to try out our wash, but also we could remarket to in the future, and specifically for the 3 for 30. On the flip side, there's 42% of those contacts that, yes, were in our database but maybe had some sort of hesitation and this is a chance for them to come on site and we could help nurture or mitigate any of those hesitations that they had as is. Now that we figured out when to run the promotion for the 3 for 30, we've built our lead contact database, now it was time to introduce the new offer itself. Like I said, traditional first month discounted promotions were really ineffective at this point. Everything we were capturing, we were churning out immediately and even then customers weren't super interested. So we wanted to take this concept of building on that wash habit through the spin-to-win and prolong that a little bit.

So what we do instead of charging a discount the first month is we do it for the first three months, where the customer will pay $10 for the first three months and then recharge the full amount on the fourth. And what this does is it forces the customers to sort of build this habit over time where they're more likely to retain their membership. We know car wash users who interact with your brand and come on the wash the least are most likely to churn out. And so this helps kind of mitigate that factor. Now the final thing that this did is because that we combine this with the seasonality data, we knew that strategically we could place this so that customers would recharge during a fall month when they were most likely to still be washing. Now before I show you how this promotion did, there's a couple more steps that we implemented to make sure that this was going to be successful. The first one is we targeted those spin-to-win contacts I talked about previously through an email blast, and in fact multiple.

So we were able to keep that conversation going with those customers who came on site and tried the free wash or maybe got the offer and didn't do it yet, and now hit them again with more communication so we're top of mind. We were also able to reach out to the rest of their contact database with the same offer. Like I said, we didn't have to rely on social ads at this point. We had really a third of the market and email addresses that we could reach out to for free. Now the good news is that our client had the budget for social ads, so we were able to add that on top. So because of this, we were able to utilize Meta ads and their algorithm to target customers that were most likely to convert to membership so that we could drive even more traffic on site.

Now the last thing, and arguably this is the most important for really any promotion that you're running where you're selling something to your customers, is we incentivize the CSAs on site or the sales team to sell those memberships. So this looked like a really robust bonus structure, really good sales training, full support so that they felt comfortable selling it, they had motivation to do so and they had all the support that they needed as well. And the result of this is we tripled our expectations and what we thought we were going to get out of this. When we set out to do so, we thought, hey, let's get 1,000 members per site. This is, you know, what we usually were getting with the 9.99 when it was in its prime, and in total we'll get 3000 members. Well, the truth is, in 60 days, we tripled that and got 9,000 members. So if you remember, the whole problem was, you know, are we stagnated and fully matured and, you know, can we even get any more of the market? And the fact of the matter was, there was a ton of the market left to convert to membership and we were able to increase their net member count by 60%. So forget the 15,000, now we're up to 25,000. And it's a matter of figuring out, okay, cool, now is this the limit that we've reached?

Now any good car wash operator is going to wonder, what is churn like after you capture this many members? And that's a smart thing to think because it's going to happen inevitably. I want to show this to you guys in the first 120 days. And this is important because after those 120 days, those customers have recharged at their full rate. And so we really get a good picture of what that churn is going to look like. When we try something out like this at SUDS, we do what we call a cohort analysis. And what this does is it tracks those memberships over time and figures out their member tenures, so we know when they fall off. And, you know, of those initial purchases, how long did it take for them to fall off versus how many were retained?

Well, in the first 120 days, we saw that 65% of June purchases stayed on. This is consistent across a majority of our 3 for 30. So we expected this and it held true to that. July purchases, a little bit higher, they haven't fully recharged yet, they're at 87%. We expect them to go down to that 65% and kind of hold fort there. And so across the board, we sat at about 75% of that original 9,000 had retained membership in the first four months of purchasing it.

Now I mentioned that my whole goal as a marketing manager is to drive revenue for my clients. So it's not just running these really cool, fun promotions that have all of these bells and whistles, it's really just putting more money in their pocket compared to the year before. So what this looked like is, in the first 30 days, we were able to drive an extra 100,000. Well, next 60 days, that doubles to 200,000. Now the promotion's over, we're not selling any more memberships, we've reached that 9,000. Now we're relying solely on that recharge revenue to continue coming in. We hit the 90 day mark and that doesn't go up much, right, 'cause they're still within the first three months of that discount. Well, once they start recharging all of those June purchases at the 120-day mark, now we've almost doubled our revenue to 400,000 and it continues to grow and compound from there. So I've thrown a lot of things at you guys.

This is a pretty intense promotion with a lot of components, but really there's four key parts that you can take away from this and apply to any promotion to make it successful. The first one is utilize data. And if you can get your hands on seasonality data to figure out when is the best time to run your promotion and account for capture and churn so that you can make the strategic offer applicable.

Next is contact collection and email marketing matter. Yes, there's texting, yes, there's TikTok, yes, there's all of these things out there, but there's still an easy, quick, and cheap way to reach your customers and markets in a way that you can continue to do so over time, and that's slowly through building your CRM and lead database. Next is keep your offers fresh. The 9.99 still works for a ton of clients in their markets and some, it doesn't work as well. And I'm sure for this client, the 3 for 30 won't be as effective a year or two years from now. but the important matter is, is that we're listening to customers, what they need, understanding all the variables that impact that, and making new offers that are enticing to them and fit their needs. And the last thing, and this is probably the most important for any promotion, like I mentioned before, is that sales and marketing work in tandem together. Think of them as a perfect marriage that's married for eternity, they can't separate from one another.

So marketing can bring all of those wonderful leads on site and get your brand out there, but your sales team is really what carries that to closing. So by incentivizing them with a good bonus structure and by giving them the sales training and support that they need, you're setting them up for success so that you can make the difference between, you know, barely meeting your goal of 3000 or not meeting at all and tripling it, like we saw with this client. So I hope that you guys were able to get a couple bits of wisdom just from, you know, this promotion itself. I'm going to pass it over to Shawn and he's going to talk to you guys a little bit about price changes and how to get the most out of them.

Shawn: Perfect, thank you Ethan. All right, so most of my campaigns, promotions, marketing strategies are aimed at exactly what we touched on earlier and exactly what Ethan kept saying, revenue generation. And of the 100s of different campaigns and promotions that I've been involved with, none have ever even came close to levels of success in terms of revenue. So this price change that was coupled with a membership enrollment promotion was by far the best. So to kick things off, why a price change? Man, this is one of the, I'd say one of the most important questions wash owners, yourselves, operators should consider often. It's crucial to recognize.

There's several indicators that offer insight of when a price change is necessary. I feel like they can be categorized into two groups. So there's internal and then there's external. Internal indicators would be things like customer feedback, the time of the last price change. That one's pretty big. We have clients, I talk to clients all the time or owners that they haven't changed prices within the last 10 years, 8 years. I mean, it's crazy. So that's something you definitely want to think about. And then I think most important is going to be your wash data. So more specifically, like, what are your wash package distributions? And we kind of frame that as, where are your customers voting with their wallets? So that one's huge because that's telling you everything you need to know. And then external factors would be the state of the economy. I mean, I'm sure everyone knows, for example, right now, I mean, everything, all prices are going up. Everyone's raising prices no matter what industry you're in, I'm sure chemicals, you know, whatever have you, as an operator, you're feeling it right now. Another one would be competition.

So whether it's a brand new competitor to your area or it's a competitor that's been there, you want to know what they're up to. You don't want to overreact. So if there is a competitor that's been around that's raising their prices, you don't want to just, oh, well, maybe we should raise our prices, but you definitely got to know what they're up to. Keep an eye on your competition. For this particular campaign, the client had a hunch that it was time for a price change. So, one, the economic landscape, they were feeling it, it was over eight years since their last price change. And so they knew they were probably leaving money on the table and also, I mean, due to inflation, probably losing some money, you know, from the previous year. But all that on the table, they knew that they had, they knew they wanted to change the prices, but there was some uncertainty there, like, how much to alter the prices, what packages to actually change? And with them, they have over 100,000 members. So taking a random shot in the dark in terms of, hey, let's, like, any guesswork, they can't do that. So that's kind of where SUDS, where we came into the picture.

They turned to us, they know we have something that's called PrecisionPricing® and it was exactly what they were looking for. So essentially they wanted our data team to analyze their wash data and come up with an optimization pricing strategy. And in a nutshell, they wanted to know what subtle changes that they can make to their pricing model that wouldn't disrupt their current customer base while still boosting revenue. The implementation and process with this is quite simple on our end. Initial steps, we take a look, we get access to your login or access to your point of sale and then we do a thorough analysis of your data and then we can immediately see what your package distributions are.

And in many cases, the right approach for price adjustments and optimization is evident right away when we examine your numbers. So, for instance, if we observe a substantial number of members in, like, the top package, but then relatively few on the bottom, it's a clear sign that price increases can be implemented with minimal disruption. As you can see in this graphic though, like to the right, the majority of their members are concentrated in the lower package, with very few in the top. So this distribution shows that their members aren't actually willing to purchase the top package. And in this case, raising prices, especially on those top and bottom packages, is definitely not the play. You can see, so there's way too much risk by disrupting 52% of members who are currently only paying 19.99.

So obviously, if we did a straightforward price change, that is not the way to go. Now with that said, there's a bunch, I don't know a bunch, but there's alternative strategies for increasing ticket averages and generating more revenue without actually raising all the prices or raising prices straight across the board. So the question then becomes, while keeping the top and bottom packages.To influence customer behavior. Customer behavior or behavior economics, however you want to put it, it's very important for what we do with price changes and price optimizations. We use both, behavior economics plus your data, to come up with the best pricing solution or best optimization strategy. And then with that, one key aspect of the success of this price change was pairing it with a membership enrollment promotion. So when we implemented the price change, we also introduced a 9.99 first month for any package. Now this part of the promotion, it's huge because it plays a crucial, like, it's vital to getting people to enroll in the top package.

So your members will now sign up at the top package and we know, 99 times out of 100 members that sign up, it doesn't matter if it's top, middle, or bottom, they're most likely going to stay there and they won't change. Now, they'll churn out, but as far as, or there will be some churn on any membership promotion, but as far as, like, changing from the top package to the middle due to price, that just doesn't happen. So for results and impact, on the retail side, our analysis showed we should actually remove, so they had five packages on retail. So we removed that, got it down to four and then made slight adjustments to the two middle tier packages. And just by manipulating those two, the ticket averages went from $15.54 to 17.37, which is an overall jump of $1.83 per car. And then if you look on the membership side, we kept the bottom package the same, but then we decreased the top package by $5, which kind of seems, well, the client thought it was counterintuitive, but again, by manipulating some of the middle package price points and decreasing that top package, we came out with an increased member ticket average of $4.68.

The total forecast in revenue from both retail and recharge was more than $11 million. It was insane. And one thing I always bring up when I'm talking to clients is we've done, we've literally done 100s of price changes, price optimizations, and not once have we been wrong. Like, the forecast might be off slightly, but in terms of increased revenue, in terms of revenue, we've always increased revenue and it's never went backwards. So that's something I know our data team's really proud of. I mean, we're all really proud of that. So if you're looking to do a price change, I think these three things are paramount. So these will definitely factor to a successful price change. So you need to pair the price change with a promotion, make the price change a celebration and focus on introducing something new. So I know a new chemical, like graphene right now, is kind of the new wave, but if you can focus on, say, you had to increase your top package, if you can focus the celebration around, hey, we're introducing graphene, you shift the focus away from that price change and then into something exciting and then your members, it just hits with your members different.

Number two, you want to notify your members. This is crucial, like, you got to keep your members informed that the impending price change is coming. And you can do that through signage, emails, handouts, whatever you can, but give them a heads up and give them at least 30 days or at least one recharge cycle. If you can do two, that's awesome, but for sure do one because that blow back you can get from customers, while it won't be a lot, you will get some, and if you don't give them a heads up, that can turn ugly.

But number three would be preparing your staff. So you need to arm your attendants with the knowledge, the tools that they're going to need to address the various questions and concerns, 'cause those members are going to have a few questions and again, as an operator you probably think, oh, we're doing a price change, we're going to hear a lot, we're going to get a lot of kickback. Especially right now with the economy and everyone changing prices, you really won't get that many questions or concerns or, you know, outbursts, whatever have you, but you still need to have your attendants armed. Obviously there's a lot more to it, but if you can implement those three things, your price change will be a lot more successful and smooth. And with that, I'll go ahead and kick it over to Hailey so she can talk about the grand openings. And will let you get after it, Hailey.

Hailey: Awesome, thanks, Shawn. So, as Shawn said, I'm going to wrap us up today by sharing our third successful promotion, which was a go-to-market campaign. As I mentioned earlier, when I introduced myself, here at SUDS, I help car wash owners open their first site or just a new site by launching a go-to-market. And today I'm going to talk about one standout go-to-market that was very successful.

Okay, so let's talk first about what a go-to-market even is. So every business that sells products and services does what's called a go-to-market campaign. And go-to-market is the term used, and in the car wash industry specifically, there are a few purposes for this. So first of all, this is your chance to introduce your new site into the market and the community that you'll be serving. And when I say market, I'm talking about the car wash industry.

And then number two, this is a chance to begin engaging with customers to come and try out the car wash and ultimately sign up for memberships. And then number three, this is an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage in the market. So you're now an option for people to choose when they're wanting to go and get their car washed. So for this particular go-to-market, this client was located in the upper Midwest region of the US. This was their very first site and they were a new brand. They launched in the fall of 2022, so just about a year ago. And this was a 90-day campaign.

And the reason we did this campaign was to introduce this car wash into the market and begin generating a lot of noise and excitement in the community. So we wanted to start generating that brand awareness and let people know that this car wash was now open. Our goals were to drive trial of the wash, give people an opportunity to try it out for the first time and leave that first good impression. And then the campaign's specific goals for this client were to collect 4 to 6,000 contacts, which can be used for future remarketing, as well as sign up 1000 unlimited members to begin that return on investment for the owner.

Okay, so how did we go about hitting these goals? So we started with creating awareness that the site was open by utilizing banners, digital ads, and print mailers. We created interest in the wash by offering a free car wash and customers had to provide their contact information to get a free wash coupon. Free washes are great for the customer, but we all know there's nothing free about a free car wash. So what we did with all of those contacts that we were collecting from the free washes was then email them about the first month membership promo. And in this case, it was a 9.99 first month membership. And then CSAs also utilized a sales script for customers to consider purchasing a membership, because that conversion is happening at the pay station. And then we had CSAs hand out rack cards that had that 9.99 first month membership promo on it so people could take that. If they hadn't yet decided to get a membership, they could take that home and and still think about it. And then from there we wanted to sign up as many members as we could by maximizing conversion at the pay station. And then ultimately we want to retain those members to generate that monthly revenue for the owner.

Okay, so, like Ethan mentioned with his promotion, to ensure the greatest success for campaign, we want to launch at peak car volumes within the year. So this graph is showing the average car volumes each month over the past few years for this region. And as you can see, November through February is peak time and that's, therefore, when we launched this go-to-market.

Okay, so let's dig into the actual results. This is what everyone's excited and eager to know about, how did this do? So this campaign did super well, which we were really happy about. So, as I mentioned, the goal for member count was 1,000 and they hit a little over 1,500. And again, this was just in 90 days of opening, which is fantastic. The contact collection goal was 4 to 6,000 and this client hit over 9,500, which as long as I've been at SUDS, this is the most contacts I've seen collected in a go-to-market, which was just a huge win for this client to be able to take these contacts and remarket to them in the future. So, you know, having those contacts is how you're going to communicate with members and non-members down the road.

And then just a couple other things that I wanted to point out was the average capture rate. So during a promotion we like to see the capture rate be between 10 to 12%. And for those that don't know what a capture rate is, it's the percent of cars coming through the wash that then convert to a member. And this client had an average capture rate of just about 11%. So very steady throughout the whole campaign. And this shows that the CSAs did their job well by selling memberships at the pay station. And then the last one to call out here is the churn rate. So during a promotion, we want to try and keep churn below 20%. As the promotion is carrying on through those 90 days, the churn sometimes will start to increase because, you know, you're going to have those people that no matter what, they're just going to sign up for the promo and then end the membership after the promo's over, but here we can see that their average churn rate was a little over 6%, which I think really shows how successful this campaign was, because it's showing that people saw the value in this membership and really how great the car wash was, and so they decided to keep that membership.

So this, like I said, really just points to the success of the grand opening. And another piece within this campaign that did really well that I want to highlight is the free wash Facebook ad. So this ad ran for 30 days and it collected 40% of the total emails. So this is a huge win for the car wash because as I've mentioned, these are contacts that we can then market to about in the future. And for this campaign specifically, all of these contacts that we collected from this free wash ad, we then emailed them about the membership promo. So that's kind of the reason behind running this ad. And then just a couple KPIs to throw out regarding an ad is, one being the cost per click.

So when we run this ad, we want the cost per click to be at or below 50 cents and this ad stayed at 24 cents. So it performed really well and it was a great use of the client's ad spend. And then the second thing I wanted to briefly mention is the click-through rate. So our goal for the click-through rate for this type of ad is 2 to 3%, and the click-through rate for this one was 7%. So this shows us that customers were really interacting with the ad. And then I just wanted to wrap us up with this go-to-market specifically with just a few other reasons why it was such a big success.

So the first one being strong branding. So this is seen throughout everything, from your logo to your signage, your website, and all assets that's created for the go-to-market, and you want it to be cohesive. The second one is strategic content and design for signage and assets. So at SUDS, every design is thought out and strategic for the campaign assets, from the copy through to the design. You want to have a design theme that is showcased throughout everything.

And when I say asset, I'm talking about your emails, your ads, landing pages, banners, everything that you're using for your go-to-market. And then lastly, Ethan mentioned this as well along with Shawn, but just making sure you're site operations are dialed in. So your CSAs have a sales script to use to sell a membership. You want to make sure that the car wash, in this case, it was a new client with their very first wash. They needed to make sure that that equipment was all dialed in so that the car wash comes out the other side, you know, clean, shiny, and dry. So just buttoning up all of the operations on site. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Ethan. He's going to wrap us up with today's webinar.

Ethan: Awesome, thank you, Hailey. Couple key takeaways that I want you guys to just think about when you're reflecting on, you know, the different promotions that we've presented here today. One is just clear and concise messaging just across the board on all of your promotions, making sure that your offer is really presenting the value proposition well to your customers and is really answering a problem that they have and pointing out their needs as well within the market can really make the difference between a really successful promotion and one that just doesn't stick as well. Next is strategic timing.

You saw this in just about every single one, but we really utilize seasonality data to better understand when are the best times to run promotions versus when aren't. And that also helps us set realistic goals that we can communicate with our CSAs. Next is promotion, distribution and accessibility. So how are you running this promotion? Are you emailing people? Are you sending out Facebook ads? What are the marketing channels that you're utilizing? And are you getting the most bang for your buck out of them? That's something that we're able to help out with, but it's certainly something that you can take on yourself just using some of the little bits of wisdom that we pointed out in the webinar today.

Next is just creating measurable goals and tracking. So there's no way that you can measure the success of your promotion if you don't understand the goal that you are reaching out to. I'm sure plenty of you are familiar with SMART goals and that's not something we're shy of here. So we want to make sure that we're utilizing that data and your historic KPIs and all of the other wonderful factors that go into your market to understand what is a reasonable goal and how do we track that so that we know that this was successful and you can tie that back to a profit.

All right, I hope that you guys got, you know, lots of tips and tricks from this and things that were helpful. We do have time for a couple of questions and we've got a ton that I've rolled through. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through some of the ones that we got through the webinar. It looks like they're pinpointed towards some of the specific panelists, actual portions themselves and then we will kind of go through as many as we can get through here in the next couple minutes. So the first one that I have is, why do you think the Facebook ad performed so well for the client you mentioned? I think this one's for Hailey.

Hailey: Yes, that is a really good question. So as far as this ad specifically for this client, one thing that they did that helped them was that they had an organic ad. And when I say organic, I mean it was a real photo of the car wash within the ad graphic. So that's something that we always encourage people to do if they can, is send us over a real site photo and let us add that to the actual graphic. We find that people just interact with it a lot more. It feels a bit more real or personable than something that's just designed. So that did really well. And then another thing to call out too is just making sure that your call to action is really clear so people understand what do I do. So just picking the right button. So in this case, it was a coupon to actually get the offer. So just making that very clear so there's no questions that would maybe lead to people not following through in the ad.

Ethan: Sweet, thank you, Hailey. Let's see, another one we have here. Shawn, this one looks like it's for you. It says, "what other promotions, other than the 9.99, do you like to run for price changes specifically?"

Shawn: Let's see that, yeah, that's a good question too. We have done other promotions with a price change, but 9.99, in terms of performance, performs, for what we've done with price changes, the best in terms of capture rate, churn, but then the biggest thing, it pushes new members to the top package. So when they do hit that first recharge, the fact that they're up at that top package, that's when you start seeing that revenue coming in a lot higher. So that 9.99, while we have done with other ones, I think it just performs the best.

Ethan: Thanks, Shawn. Okay, this one came in while I was doing my end of it. It says, "we've ran enrollment promotions at our locations such as 9.99. How does churn perform when compared to 3 for 30?" This is arguably like the number one question that we asked ourselves when we did the 3 for 30 and it's the number one question that we get from clients when we present this to them just as an idea. So we were able to look at the last couple years of all of our clients that have done 9.99 promotions, as well as the last, like, 12 or 16 months that we've done 3 for 30. We've tested it in quite a few different markets, both big and small. And what we were able to identify, similar to that cohort analysis, is what is a percentage of those members that we can identify actually retain their membership within the first 120 days? T

hat 65% that I showed you for my client is actually really consistent across most 3 for 30 we've had. So we expect that really out of everything we gain, 65% will still be there after the first four months. With 9.99, that's actually dropped significantly. So it's a lot closer to 20%. And now that's not to bag the 9.99 because there is a time and place for that specifically, but kind of what I touched on, is this alludes to fitting the right offer to the right market. So understanding, you know, how is that churn going to affect your net member count and how long do you need them to stay on versus can you take that hit essentially.

So we've got time for just one more question. Let's see. It says, "how many mailers/digital impressions were sent to get the 4K customers for the spin-to-win?" Okay, we didn't utilize any mailers for that one specifically, but in terms of digital impressions, I'd have to look back at that client's, like, how many people were reached specifically? Impressions is how many times they've seen it on their phone. So the reach specifically. Typically when you see that many participants in a zone that large, I typically see around like 40 to 60,000, but I'll have to get that number and put it on the Q&A sheet for you guys afterwards.

Sweet, okay, it looks like we are just about at time here. So what we'll do is go ahead and just wrap up. I want to thank everybody on the call here today for joining us for the webinar. I hope that you guys got some sort of, you know, tip or trick that you can apply to your wash on site. If you do have questions or concerns that, you know, that weren't specifically answered, keep an eye out for the recording and sheet that we send out afterwards. And then if you want to request a consultation to just get more information about SUDS and how we can maybe help your car wash, go ahead and call the number on the screen here or scan the QR code and we'll be happy to help you guys out. But lastly, I just want to thank Hailey and Shawn for being on the call today. And yeah, thank you guys for joining us today.

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