March 02, 2026
In our second webinar in our Unlocking Growth Series, “Unlocking Growth: Smarter Retail Strategy & Promotions,” where you’ll learn:
- Seasonality and weekly pattern strategy: Identify high opportunity windows and align promos to maximize retail customer engagement.
- Drive retail growth through holistic promotion strategies: Gift cards, coupons, partnerships, and themed experiences that lift conversion and average ticket.
- Retail loyalty, beyond memberships: Tools like Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) and tailored perks to keep retail customers coming back.
- Localized messaging that resonates: Use behavioral and demographic signals (including multilingual tests) to improve response.
Transcript:
Mandy
Hey, everybody, and welcome to our second webinar within the unlocking growth with data series. Today, we're going to talk about unlocking retail growth with strategy and promotions. Before we start, let's do a quick round of intros. My name is Mandy and I’m the Director of Engagement Solutions products here at DRB, and I get to work specifically on things like data analytics, warehousing, and all that fun stuff along with our overall engagement solutions.
Jocelyn
And my name is Jocelyn. I'm the lead data analyst with SUDS Creative within DRB. ⁓ My role focuses on using wash performance data to understand the car wash industry and advise on how car washes can use their data to improve operations and revenue.
Mandy
Let's get into it. Let's start with the importance of retail before we dive into some of the strategy and promotion talk. When we talk about retail revenue and car wash, what do we mean? Retail customers are those that come in for a single wash without committing to a plan. Now, some of those people do end up converting, some never will, and honestly, some shouldn't, and we know who we're talking about there.
The key is that retail customers pay more per wash than members, and retail is your top of funnel engine for your membership growth. As you can see here, this is a good example of healthy retail and what that should look like for your business and your wash. We look for your retail traffic base to be between 20% and 30% to represent a healthy mix. So the question is, it's not rather, how do we eliminate retail? It's how do we maximize it strategically?
Let's start with two numbers that might change how you think about retail. The average retail customer spends about $13.84 per wash. The average member pays about $30.34 per month and washes about 2.8 times, which works out to roughly $10 a visit. As you can see, per visit, retail customers end up spending more than your members do at that specific visit count level.
We should look at this as membership giving you predictability. It's a great thing to continue to emphasize. We want conversions. We want folks to stick with us long term, right? But retail is going to be the place that you're going to get that higher margin. And that's really your opportunity to continue to drive that. Too often in our industry, when we push too hard on membership growth, retail quietly becomes secondary, right? But neglecting retail isn't neutral, it's costly to you. And the reason for that is, like we said, retail is your highest per visit revenue pipeline for future members, and your early indicator when competition enters your market. We'll talk more about that later. Today, like we said, we're going to talk to you about how to turn everyday traffic data point into a true retail strategy for your business.
Jocelyn
Like Mandy said, we have a chart here showing the traffic breakdown. This is the industry level average that we pulled for 2025 showing that in the industry, membership traffic took up 69% of total traffic and retail traffic is still maintaining a really healthy portion of that circle at 28%. And as Mandy indicated, we do want retail to stay between 20 and 30% of total traffic to maximize the effects from retail. We found if retail drops below 20%, membership growth does stagnate, slowing over time because retail feeds that membership funnel. Additionally, retail contributes to a significant portion of our total revenue due to that higher per visit price. So, retail dropping below 20% consistently really does hurt from a revenue perspective.
Mandy
The goal is to understand who these retail customers are, what motivates them, and how to make them loyal, even if they never end up joining a plan.
Jocelyn
When we're working with retail data, we do find that the greatest predictor of retail traffic, statistically, is total traffic. That might sound a little silly, but that's where our demand comes from. Retail declines are often blamed, partially or almost entirely, on shifts to membership. Yes, some of that reduction in retail is due to a shift towards membership, however, your true demand for retail washes is coming from those cars on the road. You want location awareness. You need to tunnel throughput. Traffic preservation and growth is the single most important retail protection strategy. Even if you are focused on a membership-heavy future for your business, it's still vital. Using this information, we can find predictable patterns that point to opportunity windows for customer engagement. We learn more about our customers' motivations and we understand how to leverage that, through a pricing funnel, through timing of offers, and through all the offerings available.
Let’s talk about three main categories of how to leverage this behavioral data, starting with seasonality and weekly patterns. Car wash is a unique industry for quite a few reasons. One of them being that we are massively impacted by fluctuations in seasons and weather. And a second being that car wash is considered an errand to run, not only an errand, but oftentimes it's considered a luxury errand.
We have a few ways of looking at data, both at large and small scales, to understand when and why customers will be looking to wash cars and how we can capitalize on that. Then we'll talk about retail loyalty beyond membership. Retail customers, aren't all one time buyers. In most data sets, we can find a segment about 25 to 30% of our retail customers behave similar to members. They have multiple visits per month, high lifetime value, but low plan enrollment. They're not signing up, but they're being consistent. This is showing loyalty even at that retail level. So that segment is measurable and their patterns and distributions are trackable.
However, these loyal, consistent retail washers are often one of the first groups to jump over to new competitors when they enter your market. So, if we can really lock in the loyalty of that group, it can increase our stability on the retail side, especially when facing incoming competition. We're also able to build retail loyalty by truly connecting with our customer base. You need to understand who your customers are, what motivates them, and how you can build the connections that are going to keep them coming back to you. For example, markets with high bilineal populations respond well to targeted Spanish language campaigns, so maybe lean into that. Certain demographic areas correlate very strongly with premium wash adoption, not just high revenue areas, but areas that put a key importance on a vehicle as a status symbol.
If overall traffic is our strongest predictor of retail wash demand, then we need to focus on driving traffic to the site. And to drive traffic to the site in general, we need to leverage all of our offerings holistically. We want our efforts to strengthen our brand. Brand awareness is the single most powerful tool we have for getting customers onto our site. Because once a potential customer is aware of our brand, then we have a chance to reach them through existing products, existing promotions, and business outreach activities. We want to focus on the value we offer to the customer and how we can fit into their lives.
Mandy
In order to get to the answer of how we get more retail, we need to understand when is demand the strongest? When is it weakest? What happens before or after, for example, rain? When are customers more likely to upgrade or visit in the first place? Retail revenue is behavioral revenue and behavior can be influenced.
Jocelyn
Let's jump in and let's talk about weather. A single rainstorm or a single snowstorm has huge effects on your business. Everything seems to stop during a storm, but then comes back in force after that storm clears. Zero rain at all can cause customers to start building routine-based patterns. And then every year, in pretty much every climate zone we've analyzed, there is a pollen season that's going to drive customers in due to that lovely pollen effect. However, due to the predictability in climate, seasonality is predictable. We just need to look for those commonalities.
Mandy
Right. Obviously you don't control the weather, but you do control how you respond to it, even as a business. For example, what if instead of reacting to slow weeks, you proactively anchored your wash into your customer's routine after work, maybe before a weekend event, maybe post-rain cleanup. That's the kind of strategy we're talking about.
Jocelyn
We want to look at the big picture, and when talking about climate, that's very big picture. We want to do an industry-level analysis of traffic patterns so we can start predicting how those traffic patterns are going to look in the future. We can look at seasonal and climate patterns by state, but we know that a storm doesn't stop at a state line. So, we elect to look at common these between climate zones.
For reference, we use the IECC climate zones to define our regions. Generally, these are defined by broad temperature patterns and comparative precipitation. We find areas in the east of the country tend to be more humid than those areas west. Then on the far west coast we see a slightly different climate called the marine climate and it's got some unique patterns there. Our northern bands tend to have colder temperatures and as we move south it's going to keep getting warmer. So, we analyze our data and we do our research within these climate regions to give us insight into how car washing responds to each unique climate zone.
If we zoom into one of these climate zones (I went ahead and picked the 5A cool humid zone) we want to see how this can affect car washing.
We define this region as being seasonal, moist, and variable. That's saying there's a clearly defined seasonal weather pattern. This is one of the areas where we actually do get four seasons. Looking at a more humid climate, you're going to see more precipitation, but there is variability in that precipitation. Other weather conditions have that variability as well. Suds has researched the temperature and precipitation averages for this climate zone. The temperatures show that fluctuation from summer to winter is what we would expect in an area that shows four seasons. Then precipitation is moderate for most of the seasons, but it is higher in the spring and summer. We also find that this climate zone does experience the highest tree pollen in the spring, with other pollens peaking throughout the summer and the fall.
Taking this information from the climate, we then compare it with our lovely graph of monthly traffic distributions within the climate region.
Mandy
Interesting. So help us understand that graph there on the bottom right corner. What is the axis on the on the y side there? What are those percentages supposed to mean?
Jocelyn
Those are the percentages of a year's traffic that occurs each month. For example, in January of 2024, we see just over 9% of the year's total traffic occurred in that month. If we were to add up the percentages for all twelve of those months, they will add up to 100%. This allows us to focus on the relative volumes and identify months where the traffic is stronger and the months where the traffic is weaker.
In this 5A climate region, we see consistent traffic in January and February. It drops in March consistently, then rebounds in April and May for a nice, strong spring. The summer does maintain middling percentages but does start to drop off towards the end of the summer, with one last big push in October before we hit November and December, which are the slowest months of the year that's going to be a holiday and weather effect.
Mandy
That's super helpful. As a wash operator, I'd like to know where my sites fit in. Does Suds have information about all the regions?
Jocelyn
We have almost all of them. There's one region that we're still gathering the traffic data for. We adhere to very strict rules as far as how we aggregate this information. We are still gathering information for one of the very small marine regions, in the very far west, but we do have complete information for the rest of them.
Mandy
That's really cool. Tell us more about how you use it, and how you advise customers on their strategy using this.
Jocelyn
Absolutely. Our Sud's marketing team use this information every single year to inform our annual marketing strategies for the clients we have the privilege of working with. For example, I've put together a very light annual marketing strategy sample, similar to what we put together for our clients. It is missing some of the details that we add in for clients we have a standing relationship with. This is very broad but could apply to a lot of different people.
There are few different focus areas we discuss when we're building a marketing strategy. At the top of that list is membership growth. I know we're talking about retail today, but membership doesn't go away. We just want to make sure that we capitalize on the ideal times for our membership promotions.
The spring, so that April or May timeframe that has that high traffic, and then that bump in October of high traffic, those are ideal times for us to run membership promotions because the traffic is already high. We can focus on our membership growth. Then we move on to our other focuses.
We want to focus on brand awareness. We've already said brand awareness is powerful in getting traffic into our site, so we want to make sure we're promoting our business and building brand awareness year-round. So, we have evergreen ads running the whole year. We want to make sure that people are aware of our car wash at any point during the year.
Now we can promote brand awareness through other methods. For example, we may do some customer education in January talking about how important it is to wash that road salt off your vehicle during a snowy period when roads are being treated. Moving into the spring, if we want to look at boosting traffic, in the March timeframe, maybe you look at sponsoring the high school baseball team. That's just an example but getting some of that outreach really gets your name out there. It supports the community, but it also comes back to you because it has a positive effect on your image.
Then towards the end of the year, in November and December, which are yearly slow in a lot of regions, this is a great time to get a secret shopper in. Using a secret shopper can confirm that the customer experience on your site is meeting or exceeding the expectations you have, and the expectations that your customers have.
The last layer is driving traffic. This is where we have promotions that are going to drive traffic as their primary focus. An example in quarter one could be a “share with a friend” promotion. If a customer comes in, they get a coupon that they can give to a friend to come in and get their car washed. So, you're getting more people and you're connecting through word of mouth. Valentine's Day is a great time to talk about people connecting with people.
In quarter three, we had kind of a gap. We haven't put any sort of membership or brand awareness focus in. This is a great time to run a” buy one, get one” offer. August is generally back to school, so that's a great theme to center your promotion around. Maybe you're going to get some new people that can roll in and build that that back-to-school habit. Then, we end the year with our holiday gift card sales. We know traffic is low, but gift card sales are a great way to finish out strong, and it sets you up for higher traffic the following year.
Mandy
I love this because you're taking broad climate patterns and what's going on at that time of the year, then turning it into strategic actions to support all parts of the business. Now, because retail traffic is so demand-based, traffic-based, maximizing the effects of marketing efforts here is going to make a huge difference.
Jocelyn
Absolutely. So going from this large scale look at a whole climate view, now we’re going to look at data from a single site. So very small scale. We want to use this data from a single site to help us understand and grow our connection to our retail customers at their level.
Beyond the effects of weather, car wash is built around convenience. It’s an errand to run. If car wash is convenient, customers are more likely to come in and get it done. So, if we take information about what day and time your customers are washing at any particular site, we can begin to understand the routines of the customers in that area. Things like commuter traffic, event traffic, weekend morning, family running errand traffic, these are all life rhythms that can correlate into retail demand. And when you understand those rhythms, you can anchor any sort of promotions or activities to that routine instead of just guessing.
Mandy
Yeah, so instead of asking things like, why are weekdays and mornings slow, for example, we should ask ourselves things, what do weekday mornings mean in my customer's life? Are they busy? Are they price sensitive for some reason? Responding to convenience may be more than discount. Retail growth really starts with understanding customer psychology, which is interesting, right? Backed by your traffic data.
Jocelyn
Absolutely. Let's look at a little bit of data. Now, quick note, this data is intended to be relational only, but it is based on patterns that I see across multiple clients that I do this exact analysis with.
This is what I call a heat map that we use to dig into the patterns within traffic flow at individual sites. This shows the total number of washes that happened each day of the week, at each hour during the last 12 months. In this example of our simulated data, we can see that there were 110 washes during the seven o'clock hour on Mondays during the last 12 months.
It might feel a little silly to zoom into it that far, but let's check out some of these patterns and see what we can understand from it. For example, early mornings on weekdays are generally going to be your commuter traffic times, but this site has very slow mornings. That would indicate maybe we aren't capturing the commuter crowd. So how can we connect to those early morning drivers? When we think about commuters, we know they value speed, they value convenience, they have places to be. So early bird specials may get them in the door. Retail loyalty tracking or saved payment methods can speed up and reward consistent visits and that's going to be appealing to a commuter crowd.
Looking at some other patterns here, Friday and Saturday are the busiest days of the week consistently and that stands to be true in a lot of places, so you need to make sure that you are prepared. Make sure you're staffed. You want to be able to provide the best customer experience and have staff on hand to maximize any additional sales during those time periods. If any customer comes in for the first time on one of those busy days, you want to make sure they don't get lost in the rush. You want to make sure they have a top-quality experience because those first impressions mean so much when a new customer comes in.
On Sundays, we see a late start. After our very busy Friday and Saturday, we have a very slow start on Sundays, which may indicate a strong church crowd in your population. If you have those demographics within your population, use your volunteer efforts, your community outreach to connect to that group. We also know that most church groups, most church families, support family values, so how can our business highlight our own family values to create that connection?
Then the last one and probably the strongest pattern is the consistently strong weekday afternoons. Every weekday afternoon, from three to four o'clock, we see boosts in traffic. To me screams that you might be near a school. You might be getting after school pickup by parents. And if that is true, you need to maximize on any after school errand running. You could connect with the school and do a sponsorship. Another way to connect is by looking at local businesses that are also frequented at this time and try building a business-to-business connection that can be mutually beneficial. Increasing the visibility with this after-school group could be extremely valuable.
Just from this brief review of these patterns, we're able to give ourselves a variety of potential actions to take. Combine this information with your other existing knowledge of your area and your business, and it's likely that you'll know exactly what you want your next steps to be.
Mandy
Let's talk a little bit about loyalty beyond memberships and what pay-as-you-go means and understand that concept within the context of retail.
When a new wash opens nearby, we tend to see that our customers experience a traffic drop in retail by about 30 % on average. But, within your retail base is a segment that we call proxy members, and that's something you can focus on as this pattern occurs if competition is nearby. These proxy member customers tend to be customers that visit frequently,
They have high what we call lifetime value because they're coming back repeatedly. And remember that high price point we talked about with average retail customers? They provide you that high ticket value every time they come to visit. They behave like members because they're coming back often, but they never commit to a monthly plan. This could be a psychological thing. It could just be because they don't want that commitment. They don't want another subscription yet, but they do tend to represent about 25 to 30 % of your retail volume, which is a good amount. Watch this segment closely if competition enters close by, as they might try the new competition in town. This isn't just marketing; think about this as protecting your revenue, protecting those retail members that show some sort of loyalty because they keep coming back. If we can identify and nurture this group, we will reduce volatility and increase stickiness with that group.
Next, let’s look at this concept of pay-as-you-go within Patheon. This works well for customers who want flexibility. Maybe they aren't ready for commitment, but still value recognition that they choose to come back to you repeatedly.
Here's an interesting data point. This came from some recent research into the payment space. While most consumers are neutral towards expanded payment options, nearly half say that they're more likely to choose a car wash that supports saved payment information. That's about 44%. Followed closely by digital wallets, indicating that modern payment flexibility enhances appeal, even if it's not yet a primary driver. This reduces one layer of friction for consumers who show loyalty to you, even if they're not members.
Pay-as-you-go in Patheon is allows for this saved payment method, and it works within our e-commerce platform seamlessly. It allows you to store customer preference, credit card & vehicle information, so they are fast-tracked through the member lane, without having to buy a new retail wash at the kiosk or attended lane every visit. This is not replacing the membership, but it is building a bridge. It's essentially a way for you, as a brand, to say I do see your loyalty, even if you're not ready for a subscription. Retail customers don’t lack loyalty, they just might lack commitment readiness, especially those proxy members that we talked about.
Pay-as-you-go is one way to create that belonging and show them reduced friction, making it easy to revisit us without forcing commitment.
Jocelyn
Absolutely. This is also fantastic for those retail members who haven't joined as a member because they're not ready to wash two to three times a month. Maybe they want to wash once a month, but they still want convenience and want to feel like they're part of your customer base. This is a great way to reach those customers.
Jocelyn
We're going end with our last section about holistic promotional strategies. Promotions that perform best share three traits:
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The value is clear
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It’s simple to redeem
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Timing is strong
For example, holiday gift card sales consistently boost site traffic during the sale and in the month following. We typically run them in December because of the timing of gift giving. It's hitting what our customers need at exactly the right time. “Buy one, get one” offers help boost consistent wash usage for retail customers and it's a simple redemption. Customers come back with a coupon and get a price reduction.
We know from observation of memberships that usage does prevent churn. On the retail side, usage is going to keep them coming back and will build a habit for them. All promotions are valuable for starting a customer's relationship with your business. But again, that's just a start. We want to make sure that after a promotion; the customer makes the decision to return to your wash. Are they returning just to get another discount, or are they returning because you've clearly demonstrated the value that you can provide?
Mandy
The question becomes, are your promotions just traffic spikes or are you seeing behavior shifts? Are you building brand memory or discount dependency? Retail promotions should anchor routine, reinforce your value, but also create repeat motivation for your customers to come back and visit you.
Jocelyn
Absolutely.
Now we’re going to talk about how your existing offers support your retail. Starting with your evergreen advertising that builds brand awareness. People aren't going to come to your wash if they don't know it exists. But if they do know it exists, you've accomplished the first step for them to visit your wash and experience what you have to offer. That's your way of reaching new customers at its very base. So, always work on your evergreen promotions, your evergreen advertising, and build that brand awareness. This will drive traffic, which will drive your retail.
Membership promotions drive retail because membership offers get customers on site. If you have a group of members that aren’t ready for a membership promotion, they can still be aware of and experience your site. So, a membership promotion can still have a positive effect on the overall traffic and therefore, the retail traffic.
Also, your gift cards, wash books, or any prepaid offerings will help address the needs of a large variety of customers. They give undecided customers a chance to experience your business firsthand, drawing them in to engage with your brand, boost immediate traffic, and build loyalty if they like what they find.
Then from a marketing perspective, there are a lot of different approaches you can take from a promotion or a community interaction standpoint. These are all different ideas of how you can use marketing to drive retail traffic. So, we've talked about holiday gift cards. Get a gift card out there. It's going to get a person coming into your wash. A “share with a friend” promotion, capitalizes on word of mouth and allows you to obtain contact information for future marketing. A “buy one, get one” means they wash today, and wash again later. This will drive traffic at a different time and there’s value in that. Gamification, any sort of a raffle, an app game, or anything like that will drive customers back if they think they might win. If it's fun, they will show up.
Next, let’s talk about client education. This not only communicates the value of your wash, so more customers understand why it's valuable to them, but it also presents you as a business partner who supports its customers.
Speaking of partnerships, business to business partnerships can be very mutually beneficial and will your name out there. If you have a partnership, for example, with an auto care company and you're dropping their name and they're dropping your name, you're both getting your names out to reach a wider base of customers.
Community outreach efforts, like volunteering, school partnerships, and donations, strengthen goodwill while expanding your presence in the local community. And then finally, make it a show. I'm sure we've heard about the success of haunted tunnels, which turns that errand into novelty entertainment. Put on a light show, a music show, or whatever you can do to make washing a car an exciting entertainment activity, instead of just an errand.
Mandy
Let's zoom out here for a minute. We know retail strategy promotions are very valuable, but it's not just about promotions, it's also about experience. With Patheon, we can design agile, flexible customer experiences that respond to consumer behavior in real time.
Here's what that looks like in action. Customer recognition at entry, segment-based kiosks screens, smart upsells based on behavior, and targeted rewards triggered by visit patterns. This is where retail starts to become intelligent. We're excited to talk about this because it is something that we've spent a lot of time investing in Patheon, creating the right tools for our operators to use. When your system recognizes a high frequency retail customer or a customer who hasn't visited in 30 days, for example, you can adjust the experience instantly.
This means that instead of a static screen for everybody, you can create personalized repeatable experiences at scale. On the retail side specifically, kiosk promotional flows allow for things like dynamic upsell paths or reward messaging tied to behavior. With Patheon you can create targeted promotional flows by segment that you can define triggers against. Paired with LPR recognition, this becomes a powerful engine to increase loyalty, reduce churn risk, incentivize behavior, and expand marketing reach through automation that you have control over. Retail doesn't have to be anonymous traffic, it can be known, recognized, and even guided.
Moving over to end-to-end personalized customer journey, this is where everything connects. Retail is not a standalone moment, it’s a modern retail journey that can look like this; recognition at entry, targeted segmentation, personalized on-site flow, automated follow-up messaging, and then omni-channel loyalty engagement, which is another thing that we're very focused on this year. When all of those pieces are connected, like the point-of-sale kiosk, mobile app, pay-as-you-go, messaging, and segmentation, you move from transactional revenue into tools and functionality that allow you to create true relationship-based revenue.
Personalization isn't about complexity, it's about relevance. When your end consumer feels recognized and known, even if they're not a direct member with you, they upgrade more often. They make that decision because of trust, they return more consistently, and there's a likelihood that you're going to see with data that they're going to convert to memberships at higher rates. And when they do convert, they stay longer. That's lifetime value expansion.
Jocelyn
Awesome. Speaking of the customer journey, the last time we got together in this series, we discussed causes and prevention of churn, which is the end of the car wash journey. Today, we flipped the script and discussed retail traffic, which is the very start of the car wash customer journey. So, what's next on our agenda?
Mandy
Next, let’s dive into step three of the customer journey, where we focus on working with customers throughout their entire tenure. This is really about the full lifecycle of the plan. Once customers know about you, did they visit? Did they come back? Did they convert? How long did they stay? At this stage, we’re digging into member tenure and lifetime value, who that customer or member is to you, how you strengthen that relationship over time, and how factors like redemption rates play into it. I’m excited to dive into that next time.
Jocelyn
Yeah, that sounds fantastic. We might pull in some ideas about member engagement and how businesses can show member appreciation. I’m looking forward to it!
Mandy
If you take one thing from today, it's that retail is not leftover revenue, it's behavioral revenue. And behavioral revenue, like we talked about, can be influenced through things like timing, segmentation, smarter offers, and even through tools like pay-as-you- go. The operators who win in 2026 and beyond are not just going to be driving traffic, they'll understand it and be able to shape it.
Jocelyn
Absolutely. The data is already in your system. Your weather patterns, your traffic patterns, your day of week trends, your price bands, your visit frequencies, it's all there. The opportunity is not theoretical here, it's measurable.
