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Our hosts, Kayla Ivey and Ian Hamilton, walk you through proven strategies to leverage your current customer base for breakthrough growth.
Ian - All right, welcome, folks. We're going to give it just a minute for everybody to file in from the waiting room. We appreciate you joining us today. Thanks for taking the time and we're excited to talk to you guys about strategies to activate your existing customers. We'll give that just another minute. Looks like people are filing in, which is excellent. Welcome, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Okay, starting to slow down a little bit. So Kayla, I'm going to go ahead and jump in.
Kayla - Let's do it.
Ian - Again, welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We're excited to spend the next 40 to 45 minutes with you to talk and dive into how improving the experience for your existing customer base can be a huge opportunity for you to drive additional revenue. As the car wash industry becomes more and more competitive as we've all seen over the last four or five plus years, the tendency is often to think about how you can grow by acquiring new customers, stealing share from the guy down the street, running a car wash, things like that. Today instead, we're going to talk about how you can actually drive revenue growth by focusing on your existing customer base. And we'll walk through some tips and technologies that help you create a better experience for your customers, which is then going to lend itself to greater retention, increase share of wallet and overall revenue growth. And we'll just do the quick housekeeping items before we get started. If you have a question for us during the webinar today, use that Q&A button that you should see down at the bottom of your screen. If you don't see that, try hitting the Escape button on your keyboard to get out of full screen mode. And we'll take some time at the end of the webinar to answer all of the questions we can here today. We'll also post a document with all of the questions we answered live and questions we didn't get to. That'll be documented, written out, and sent out with the recording from today's webinar. Anyone who registered is going to get the recording in an email, so if your buddy down the street or you know the guy across town couldn't make it today but they registered, they're going to get the recording and the Q&A as well. If you have any technical difficulties during today's session as well, let us know in that Q&A button. We've got some folks on the DRB side who are watching that or ready to give you a hand. And with that Kayla, I'm going to let you introduce yourself.
Kayla - Perfect. I'll kick us off. So I'm Kayla Ivey, I'm a product marketing manager at DRB And I came from the marketing, kind of car wash marketing side of the business. So if you haven't heard of SUDS, SUDS is kind of our part of the DRB family of brands and focuses on the consumer marketing strategies. And I worked for about six years or so at SUDS before transitioning over to DRB. And through that, really got a great chance to work with lots of operators of all different sizes, coming up with strategies for growing memberships, growing traffic, and anything of the sort. So that's my background.
Ian - Yeah, thanks Kayla. Much more impressive background than myself. I'm Ian. I am also a product marketing manager at DRB and I've been with the company since last October. If anyone was on our Insights 2.0 webinar last week, I think I said I forgot how to count how many months that is at this point. But I've spent the past five or six years in product marketing in the B2B space with a focus on helping businesses activate and engage their consumers to enhance the experience that they have with their brand and unlock new revenue streams for success.
Ian - Awesome. So I'm just going to dive a little bit deeper into what Ian touched upon in the introduction. So we're going to dive into this concept today that's called experience-led growth. And this is a concept I believe coined by Mackenzie. They have a lot of different studies and articles on this and really, what it means is focusing on driving a better experience for your existing customers and how that's going to return so much revenue growth, unlock additional revenue growth for you as a business. That's kind of an obvious, you know, that's a duh moment.
But when we think about competition and so much competition coming into the car wash industry, really, what we see oftentimes is that tendency, as Ian mentioned, to kind of think outbound and really, your focus becomes how can I beat my competitor? How can I drive new traffic, new growth, new business? And you sometimes lose focus of your existing customer base and how to unlock, you know, that revenue potential that you already have inherently in your business. So not that customer acquisition isn't very important, but today, we're going to kind of flip the script focus solely inward on this experience-led growth. So what we're going to discuss is essentially through the customer journey, how can you create a better, more upleveled experience for your customers and how can that lead you to unlocking additional revenue growth, whether that's through increased retention, increased loyalty, what have you, increased share of wallet.
So we'll walk through that entire customer journey and as Ian mentioned, give you some tips and tricks and also technologies that we can assist with that you might consider to enhance your experience.
And first, we want to start on this journey by analyzing how we're doing today. You guys already know your operational metrics. What we want to do is take some of those metrics and connect them to how they represent how consumers feel about your brand and how they experience your wash. So none of these metrics should be a surprise, but things like churn rate and member tenure. It's not just about, okay, how long can I expect for this member to keep providing me their you know, automatic recurring plan. But it's also a critical measure in understanding how the value of your membership is perceived by your retail visitors who aren't in membership yet and your current members.
Capture rate is another one. While it's not exclusive to just your current customers, this is also a good idea of how valuable that membership appears to your customers before they sign up for that program. So looking at things and kind of reading between the lines when you're looking at capture rate and churn is going to give you a more complete picture as opposed to them kind of being on their own and separate.
Another good one here is washes per customer. So by increasing the number of times your average retail customer washes, it's going to be a fantastic measure for loyalty and driving business with your existing customer base. And we also want to measure how often they're washing on average so you can figure out on the member side how much value they're finding in your plan versus one of those, "Hey, I signed up for the membership and I forgot about it and then five months from now, I'm looking at my credit card statement and I finally decide to cancel it because I've noticed it's been hit in my account." So the kind of newer on the scene way to measure customer experience, again, it's relatively new in the retail and convenience spaces, but customer satisfaction surveys beyond just, you know, give us a Google review or something like that. Like we would typically do. Using a tool like NPS or net promoter score or a different kind of customer satisfaction survey is going to give you a good idea of how your customers view your business today. And you can also leave open-ended response opportunities so you can get tips and tricks or comments on how they're experiencing and where there might be opportunities for additional value. So we really want to establish this baseline, identify the trends and those KPIs that we want to focus on.
From there, we're going to want to measure these over time and continue to evaluate those trends based off of each metric. And like we talked about, we'll be talking about different tools and technologies that exist today. Shameless plug again for the DRB Insights 2.0 webinar from last week. If you didn't get a peek at that, go find it. Contact Kayla and I after the call today and we can share some of the details with you. But DRB insights 2.0 is one of these tools you can use that's going to show you based off of your entire org or if you've got multiple sites and locations, it's going to show you trend analysis for each of these major KPIs. So now we want to talk about opportunities to optimize this experience.
Once we've established that baseline, we've evaluated how we're doing with current customers today, we want to dive into each stage of the consumer journey so we can identify opportunities to improve this experience across different phases of the journey. So everything from before the wash, this is both physical and virtual or online, how they're interacting or finding out about your wash, whether it's driving by, it's a special promotion that they saw, as a digital ad on Facebook or if you're going down to Costco or Kroger and trying to get people in with discounted washes and wash books, etc. At the point of purchase, it's also important both physically and virtually or online that we create an optimal buying experience. Again, this is both physical and away from your wash so having a consistent experience between the onsite and the virtual brand is going to be really important and making it easy to buy as simple as that sounds. And then after the visit we want to continue to engage these customers with the right messaging at the right time. So we keep our brand and our wash top of mind.
Kayla - Awesome. So I'm going to go ahead and kick us off, take us through the entire retail journey. I will say I've been battling a cold this week so I might have to take a couple sips of tea so bear with me. So I'm going to take us through the retail journey and if you have questions please put those in as we go along in that Q&A box and we'll definitely save some time at the end to go through as many as we can. So as you're thinking of them, please put those in.
Okay, so we're going to start with before the wash. So before someone even visits your car wash and we are talking about existing customers here. So we're kind of thinking of the retail customer that's between washes. So they've washed with you before but they're between washes. How can we get in front of that customer to get them to come back again, right? So we want to obviously meet them where they are. A lot of you may be doing quite a bit on digital marketing already. So kind of what we want you to think about here is making sure you're using the right platforms for your target demographic. So as competition increases, you may not be able to be the car wash for everyone anymore. You may need to start to dial in your strategy a bit. So maybe you are noticing your current customer base is heavily on the kind of family side or the younger professionals. Whatever you're kind of noticing with your customer base, try to really zero in on that and understand what demographics those customers typically are that are frequenting your wash and where are they online. Then your job as a business is to be front and center, be where they need you to be essentially, if they're looking for any information.
So with this initial point, think social media for the most part. We'll get into website in a second. But are they on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, something else. Make sure that you're engaging on those platforms both organically and maybe even more importantly, paid digital ads. So you're probably already doing posting on said platforms and answering comments and questions, but are you really reaching those customers that follow you? Just because they follow you doesn't mean they're actually going to see what you're posting. So keep in mind you often need to put budget behind these things to actually get your customers to see your content online. So make sure you're kind of putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak, with both the organic side and the paid strategy.
Next is thinking how we can simplify the digital experience. So there's many facets of this and I'll just touch on a few things to think about. One is make sure you're Google My Business or other kind of online listings are up-to-date always. It's so annoying as a consumer we all know to show up at a business and the hours weren't what they said they were going to be online or something's off. It's hard to find the website, what have you. So make sure that these listings are constantly monitored, kept up-to-date and you're providing kind of that brand experience online that you would want someone to experience on site. So that's going to help build up that trust with your brand over time. Make sure your website is easy to find. Easier said than done but make sure you have a modern up-to-date website that you spend intentional time keeping up-to-date regularly and put some SEO strategy behind it. You may kind of going back to the paid digital ads that I mentioned a moment ago. You may also want to put some of your budget toward SEO and actually like a paid search strategy. So trying to get your website easily findable if that's a word, by the customers that are searching for you. And then once they land on your website.
So we, as I mentioned, I worked at SUDS for six plus years, we did so many car wash websites and we really honed in over time what it is that people are searching for and wanting to look at using kind of heat map technology and whatnot. What are they looking at on car wash websites. And it's honestly pretty basic. So hours and locations, they want to see your menu and your pricing and then they want to see any like new relevant up-to-date like promotions or new locations opening, anything like that. That should all be on your homepage like super easy to find. You can also duplicate it on additional pages but make sure all of that is super easy. And then last component of this digital experience is the e-commerce perspective. So depending on your demographic, depending on kind of who your target customer is, a lot of them may want to start to make purchases online. So make sure your e-commerce, make sure you have an e-commerce platform for one, and make sure that it's essentially linked and creating that kind of seamless bridge between your website and your e-commerce platform. So it should be branded, it should feel kind of like an extension of your website and purchasing online should be an easy kind of checkout experience where they can then go onsite and redeem it with no hurdles. So kind of think through that whole buying process and make sure that you're creating that easy kind of end-to-end purchase experience online. Next is brand consistency. So this is a recommendation just from experience that we've seen over time. You could have a fantastic beautiful modern car wash site and then a website that's out of date and it really can damage kind of the brand reputation and the experience that a consumer might be having with your brand over time. So think through all of the touch points across the entire journey, both online and on site that your customer may be coming in contact with. And kind of best way to go about this honestly is almost like collage style. Do an audit. So take screenshots of your emails, texts, anything going out, social media, website, all of that and kind of put it next to pictures of your car wash site pictures of your signage and see if there's any opportunity there for upleveling the consistency and the way that your brand is being shown across all of the platforms that your customers are coming into contact with. So I'll leave it there. We're happy to dive into that more if anyone has any questions or needs help with that. Okay, so quick sip of tea 'cause we got a lot stuck about with menus.
Okay, so we're going to talk now, point of purchase. So this is one of my favorite topics because I've seen this go wrong and be able to kind of transition it and drive so much additional revenue in my experience working with car wash operators. So what we often see, and if we think kind of in the retail consumer point of view, they don't work in car wash day in day out like we do. So it's kind of hard to even unknow the things that we know sometimes. But what we have found, just talking with people organically is the retail customer experience can be a bit overwhelming, a bit stressful. There's a lot going on at a car wash and especially when they get to that point of purchase, they are, you know, looking at a menu, there's the pay station screens. Maybe there's someone talking to them, maybe not. They are navigating a lot of options on a menu oftentimes. They don't know what all these words mean. Maybe they don't know what ceramic is and they don't know if they need it, right? And then just increasingly, the pressure is added by having kind of a line of vehicles behind you. So what actually happens in that state when a consumer is feeling a bit overwhelmed and kind of stressed out about making a quick purchase decision is they will revert downward. So they will kind of look at the menu, feel overwhelmed, and then end up buying a lower tier wash. Obviously, that's not the experience we want them to have and that winds up reducing your revenue really. And so instead, what can we do to help them navigate this menu and make them feel like they're making a decision that makes sense, a decision that has social proof. Other people love this wash and just they're getting in and out quicker, they feel good about this experience.
So just a few elements to touch on, we have an entire, like a webinar that we did previously that we could share with anyone if you're interested in diving in deeper. But super quick elements to touch on. A simplified menu is simplify your pricing first off. So you don't need too many packages, doesn't mean three is the right answer necessarily, but simplify as much as possible. And then simplifying the design and using design psychology to really help your consumer navigate this menu is key. So as you can see, we're kind of really drawing the eye up toward that ocean wash in this case. With color, with size, with kind of that slanted design. It just feels easy to navigate as a consumer. And then the most popular tag, if you see that at the top, that is going to give your consumer social proof. So if they're kind of navigating toward that ocean wash naturally, that's going to make them feel like, "Oh, other people love this wash, this must be a good decision. I feel good about it." So those are some key elements to consider when thinking about your menu. And then your next kind of iteration of this is your XPTs or your pay stations. So how can we kind of carry those same simplified design strategies into your screens as well? The one on the left is an example of what we see very often where there's a lot going on and it's actually kind of chaotic from a consumer point of view. Your eye is bouncing all over the place with the icons in the colors. It's actually drawing my eye toward the express wash. Let me know if you guys feel the same, but because of that color, it's kind of drawing my eye that way. And that's going to in turn, make your revenue, your ticket average lower 'cause you're kind of navigating them that way. Instead, we want to use those same design psychology principles from the menu I touched on. So on the right-hand side, we're kind of, it's clean, simple, easy. We're navigating them really heavily toward that ocean wash and this is going to make it a better experience for your consumer but also lead to increased ticket average for you as an operator. Last component of the purchase experience, kind of that point of purchase at the menu and pay station is how can we personalize the experience? So this is something that you're probably seeing as a common theme kind of in marketing and business in general right now. Consumers are more and more expecting the experience to be personalized to them. They don't want to see something that is not relevant and they also don't want to feel like we're not recognizing that they have washed with you before. So an example that you could do that's really easy is a welcome back. So not going too deep into this, but it's hey, acknowledging that they've been to your wash before. And you could even go a step further like the example on the screen and actually offer them something. So welcome back, today's wash is on us, or whatever that message is that you want it to be. And this new capability with customer segmentation I think is huge to enhance this experience that a retail customer will have at the pay station.
Kayla - Okay, and then I'm going to round us out here with the end of the retail journey, which is kind of the post visit after the visit experience. So number one is how can we make their future visits more seamless, more easy, reduce any of the hurdles that might prevent them from coming back frequently? So as we touched on a second ago, there's a lot that kind of can go into making a retail customer purchase experience a little bit. Stressful, overwhelming, you name it. So how can we reduce that? I know, so just a quick personal anecdote. One of my favorite parts of being a car wash member, I'm a member here at a local car wash in Boise, Idaho, and one of my favorite parts of that is the seamless in and out. So I don't have to pull out my card, I don't have to navigate on the screen and choose a wash, I don't have to talk to anyone. That's definitely a plus sometimes. And so being able to get in and out definitely makes me want to wash more often. And so the thought here is how can we kind of carry that same experience, that really easy, seamless purchase experience over to our retail customers? So one technology you may want to consider is something like a Patheon's pay-as-you-go. So what that allows you to do as a retail customer is they put in their preferred wash, they put in their payment info and this is all done just on their phone. And then every time they visit, it will automatically recognize them, deliver their preferred wash and they're on their way. So they don't have to scan anything, they don't have to do anything. It's really carrying over that kind of member-like experience to your retail customer.
Next thing you can consider to make this experience better for your retail is offering loyalty or rewards program of some kind. So there's a couple ways you can go about this. One is an app, which is what I'm showing on the screen here. So think kind of Starbucks like where you're generating points every time you make a purchase and then you can use those points to get rewards. And the one I'm showing on the screen here is our Beacon mobile app, which you can essentially, it's a point for every dollar spent. And then you as an operator, can decide what you want the rewards to be, what those thresholds are. So that's a great one because your customer can actually see the rewards there that are being generated. You can engage with them through that app. So that can be a great tool. Another tool that you could consider if you don't think a mobile app is the right fit for your customer base, is just doing kind of an inherent loyalty program on your screens. So we can actually do something like, every X number of washes is free for a retail customer. So let's say we want to do every fifth was is free. It could recognize that customer that it's their fifth wash via license plate recognition, and then show on the screen kind of that personalized message with, "Hey, today's wash is on us, thank you for your loyalty". So that's going to go a long way in just creating a great experience and hopefully driving future visits as well. So there's plenty of ways you can do loyalty programs, but those are a couple of options that you might consider. And then lastly, for our retail journey, and then we'll get into members. We can leverage intentional marketing. We can and we should leverage intentional marketing. So what we don't want to be here is we don't want to be those businesses that are emailing every single day multiple times a day, content that's not relevant, not interesting, and just kind of annoying where we want to unsubscribe. We want to be the opposite of that. We want to be like the businesses that are doing it right where they're sending, you know, just the right message at the right time where it's actually making you want to make a purchase. So just a quick example of kind of a simple thing that you could do with this intentional marketing is timing things appropriately. So if someone washed on, let's say a Saturday, instead of sending them immediately a coupon on Sunday, "Hey, we want you, you know, come back to our wash, here's two bucks off," introducing a wait period. So it's kind of like that drip marketing functionality where you time things with the appropriate wait period and then send them that $2 off coupon maybe the Friday before. So maybe they want to wash that weekend. So that's obviously a really simple example, but how can you kind of take that concept and really introduce it across your retail marketing, make sure that you are leveraging these wait times, you're personalizing the message and you're sending the right message to the right customer. This is going to make the experience so much better for them and lead to returns for you. All right, Ian, I'm going to kick it over to you for the member journey.
Ian - All right, thank you. All I can think about when you were talking about intentional marketing, by the way, I get emails 10 times a day from Jimmy John's because I signed up for the rewards program one time to get a free cookie. So I actually just unsubscribed like three days ago because I reached my breaking point because it was all about, you know, on witch wraps and all that kind of stuff and not for me. So, as we kick off the member journey here, we're going to start at the point that a retail customer has decided they're going to buy a membership. So they've already made that decision, they want to sign up, they found that initial value, whether it's savings on, you know, a special promotion or gosh, it's spring and my car's been getting filthy and, you know, I've got some interviews coming up or you know, I'm going to the in-laws next weekend for the holiday, whatever it might be. The real trick is getting them to continue seeing that value so they retain that membership. So again, we're going to jump straight to that point of purchase where they've already made the decision to buy, but from there, there are going to be strategies you can leverage across that retail journey and kind of pick those into that member journey to increase that lifetime value. So again, the first thing we want to do at the point of purchase when they've decided to buy that membership, we want to make the sign up easy and future visits easy and simple and fast. So outside of just, okay, well you've decided to buy now you got to click on the kiosk or you got to, you know, an attendant in the lane or a semi-attended lane and now they're taking their phone and their email and their favorite color when they were four. And that kind of information. You can use tools like a customer portal or an account management tool to allow them to finish that profile away from the wash, right?
So at the point of sale or the point of purchase here, we can just get their phone number and their credit card and then after that, we can send them a link or we can have them scan a QR code that we've got posted in the lane that's going to direct them to that customer portal. And/or we could send an email and things like that to keep the line moving in the lane so that new member is immediately seeing the value after they've decided to buy that wash by actually getting their car washed. And we're helping increase throughput and make sure the lane isn't getting bogged down. Next, we want to talk about that personalization piece. So more than just how we're using it in our marketing for those retail customers, we also want to personalize any communication we have with our members. They've made a commitment to the wash to continue paying, continue that membership, they've provided some of their information. Not only do we want to give them that top-of-the-line wash, we want to make them feel valued with our messaging. So using a plan welcome text or an email is going to allow you to acknowledge that new member personally. Again, it's going to make them feel valued and recognized and help just the slightest bit continue to extend that lifetime value. So after that first visit, the number one thing we want to focus on is the next time they come back, we want to make sure that the wash experience is top-notch. And this is more than just delivering a quality wash every time. We want to recognize that member and deliver the right wash every time with minimal delay. So you can use things like RFID, but then you got to open the door. In some cases, I've even seen people put it inside the door handle, which is nuts in my mind, or it's on the inside of the windshield. Or we can use a tool like an LPR camera license plate recognition software. With Patheon, our point of sale, we've got AI-powered license plate software that's going to provide super accurate read rates. 99 plus percent in a lot of cases in almost every state we've tested so far, and ensure members are getting the right wash every single time and that it's recognizing them immediately when they pull in.
And then we want to make sure that we're keeping our members informed about their membership when they're not on site so they're continuing to kind of be reminded of that membership to come in and wash and reduce that involuntary churn. So using a personalized text or an email with customer notifications to automate proactive communication to address potential issues before they occur, like an upcoming plan payment or a card that's going to expire soon that's on file, we can notify them in advance of that or notify them of any payment processing issues and direct them to log into that customer account portal that we talked about before. The other piece of this, to go back to that customer account portal is empowering these members to self-service their plans and it's going to enhance their experience and create additional opportunities for more revenue out of that member. So more than just having a portal where you can, you know, update your credit card or you know, oh, I changed my phone number or anything like that, we want to give them a place where they can not only update that personal information, but they can make additional purchases like adding an additional vehicle to their plan and taking advantage of a multi-plan or a family plan or a multi-vehicle plan and family plan, rather, discount that we can set up. Or they can make additional purchases like gift cards and things like that. Now, one of the main reasons consumers don't keep their subscriptions in any industry, especially I'm thinking of like the Netflix and the Hulus and things like that, they don't see enough value. So I've run out of things to watch on Netflix, which is baffling, but that's how it feels a lot of times or they don't feel that they're valued as a subscriber. In car washing, it is no different. So the offsite experience is the primary area of opportunity we see to help increase that lifetime value in an increasingly competitive market. So one of the ways you can do that, personalize those communications and engagement with your brands. Like we keep driving this point home, but we really, really want to focus on it both from a transactional standpoint or an informational standpoint in our communications, but also in our marketing. Because we want them to feel recognized. We want to remind them to come in and wash. So they keep seeing that value of that subscription and they keep it longer than the guy who doesn't. So some of the tools or some of the strategies you could do here, recognize those key milestones. So if that member has reached one month, three months, six, 12, 18, five years, whatever it might be, we want to recognize them for that commitment, throughout their journey. So you can recognize for a six month you could even send a, you know, hey, next month, you know, come in and get a free towel or a free air freshener on us, or whatever that might be. And we want to offer additional value.
So remind the members regularly of that membership value and continue offering additional value with a discount on an additional car or even an upgrade to a better package opportunity. And we also want to notice a regular behavior and personalize the communication that we're sending, what we're trying to get them to get back into "regular behavior," quote unquote for a healthy member. So with a tool like Catalyst and the machine learning that's built in, you can recognize when an individual's behavior is different than the norm. And send them that personalized message reminding them to come in and wash or incentivize them to come in and wash. So implementing these best practices and strategies into the potential of your current customer base is hard. We totally recognize that and that's why there's not one car wash that's from California to New York or Maine that has every single possible member out there. It takes trusted partners, it takes good tools, and tools that are going to get to continue to innovate and iterate to enhance that consumer experience, both for the retail customer and your member. We hope you'll consider DRB for that. We've partnered with thousands of car washes across the country, across our comprehensive suite of solutions so we can help you achieve your goals. Regardless of whatever stage you focused on or haven't focused on in this journey so far. With those innovative strategies and tools like Catalyst and SUDS, Patheon, and the EWA, AILPR, Beacon and more, we're proud to say we've been able to help those car washes optimize the consumer experience and drive organic loyalty and motivated loyalty. So we're going to help and we hope we can help you differentiate before the purchase, enhance the point of sale interactions or the point of purchase interactions and personalize these experiences away from your site to again, build that loyalty, unlock new revenue potential, and achieve your most aspirational business goals. All right.
Kayla - Our spiel is over, so let's get some questions.
Ian - All right, the fun part now.
Kayla - Yeah, the fun part. Looks like we have a few minutes here. We won't keep you past 45 minutes just so you can get back to your day. And if we don't get to all of them, we will follow up in an email as Ian mentioned. Let me get these pulled up real quick and if anyone else has any questions, go ahead and throw them in now because we will follow up afterward.
Ian - Yup, look for that Q&A button down at the bottom. If you don't see it, hit the Escape button. That's been beaten in my head by some of our team members.
Kayla - Yes, perfect. Okay, so let's see, we've got, "Do you provide a guide or best practices for messages that I should use for my retail customers and my members?"
Ian - Yeah, I can take that one if you want, Kayla, but feel free to jump in as-
Kayla - I'll chime in when you're done.
Ian - As the cold allows. So we do. So we've got pre-built templates for both those transactional messages and the marketing messages that you can use. So pre-configured segments and those different kinds of bucketed communications you can do. I'll talk about the Patheon piece. Kayla, I'll let you talk about the Catalyst piece 'cause that would make a lot more sense. The Patheon side, Patheon's going to allow you to send transactional related messages. Transactional related messages are very different than marketing messages. If you have questions on that, I've got a whole spiel, I won't go into it too much here, but we've got these pre-configured communications. You can send both text and email where kind of what we talked about before where it's a planned welcome message that you can insert these little smart merge tags to input personal information. So you could put the new member's first name, you could put your that specific location's address or phone number if you wanted to include that, a link to your e-commerce or the EWA if you use Patheon today. And because they're transactional, we really want to make sure that people aren't unintentionally or intentionally sending marketing communications via Patheon so we can kind of maintain the law and not get anybody in trouble there. We've got those pre-configured and then when you turn them on for the first time you go to customize them, it's going to have a template for you already that you can tweak and adjust and put in some of that personalization. So Kayla, I'll let you talk Catalyst now.
Ian - Yeah, for sure. So in Catalyst, which is, if you haven't been in any of those conversations yet, it's our new marketing automation platform. And in Catalyst we do provide pre-populated segments. So those are built off of best practices that we have kind of honed in over the years. And then we also provide templates for kind of some of the messages we suggest that you send to these customer groups. So there's definitely a good amount in there that's going to be built off of best practices to get you started. Okay, let's see what we got here. "Do you have to have LPR for all of this to work?" Do you want to take that?
Kayla - Yeah, great question. So in a lot of cases, some of the stuff we talked about today, LPR is going to be very important. So for those retail customers that we don't have any contact information for, right? if I'm just coming to the wash, I'm one of those people, if I have another subscription, I'm going to lose it. So I have not signed up for a car wash membership, even though I've got like three within two miles of my house. I wash once a week at least, if not more. I just can't bring myself for another subscription. I haven't provided any information to my washes that I visit other than I show up and I have my car or my truck or my wife's car and I've got the plate. Using LPR, we're going to be able to capture that info and create a customer record based off of that vehicle, right? So using the license plate and using, if you have car picks or something like that, we're going to be able to create that profile. So with that, anytime my truck comes to the wash, it's going to recognize my plate and it's going to, oh, Ian or no name customer, but this license plate and it's a black Ford is here for his fifth time this month. We need to deliver him a membership. So using that, those personalized promotion that the XPT or the kiosk or being able to market to those people and Catalyst that Kayla talked about there, having LPR has immense value for being able to touch those retail customers, even if they don't make that commitment to us to provide their information or sign up for a membership. So you do have to have LPR for some of the examples we talked about, but I think the value versus the cost on that is just very heavily favored in the value department. So you can continue to engage those customers.
Ian - Yeah, I think an easy way to think about it, at least from my perspective is a lot of the member items we talked about can be done with RFID. Most if not all of the retail side of it would need license plate recognition because that's really your only avenue to knowing who those customers are. So maybe a way to think about it,
Ian - A simpler way to think about it. Thank you, Kayla.
Kayla - There's a couple questions, Ian, on, "Can I do any of this with SiteWatch? Do I have to have Patheon to use these tools? Yeah, you want to touch on that quickly and then I think we're about out of time.
Ian - For sure. Yeah, I'm going to do my best to be quick about it too 'cause we said hard stop at 45. So a lot of these tools like Catalyst, pay-as-you-go, those work with Patheon. Something like Beacon that we talked about with that loyalty or the ability to create and reward for their loyalty does have a SiteWatch integration. But the real value of all of those tools where AILPR and marketing automation and customer notifications with those smart tags and built in automation for these scheduled events, a lot of that's going to live on the Patheon side. And I also saw a question there about setting up Patheon pay-as-you-go. If you have Patheon today, it's really easy to set up for your EWA. If you don't, we can follow up or reach out to your sales rep and they can give you more of that information on Patheon pay-as-you-go.
Kayla - Perfect. Okay, let's call it, and then I know we have a maybe a couple others that we didn't quite get to that we'll connect with you guys and make sure your questions get answered. So thank you, guys, so much for joining us today. Hopefully, this was valuable and we really appreciate your time.
Ian - Yeah, thank you for joining, folks.
