In this webinar, learn exactly how the SUDS team plans for the most effective membership campaigns possible.
Ethan Morton, Marketing Manager, SUDS: We'll go ahead and get rolling here. I want to thank everybody for joining today. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about planning a high impact membership promotion, subscription services are no new thing really across any industry and especially not car washes. So really important to understand how to plan one that's high impact and actually going to make a difference for your car wash specifically. Couple things to go over real quick before we hop into the webinar itself. If this is your first time joining one of these it's going to function a little bit differently than Zoom usually does. So you'll notice down at the bottom left where it says chat, that button's disabled.
So if you have questions, you'll actually want to go two icons over to Q and A and that's where you can throw all of your questions that we'll be able to answer towards the end of the call. If you don't see that Q and A button, try clicking view options and then exit full screen. And what this should do is just automatically bump your windows smaller and make that Q and A button appear. This is a really great spot for you to point out if there are any technical difficulties such as you can't hear us well, there's weird feedback or the screen's not sharing or transitioning correctly. And then of course all of your guys' questions too, which we'll have time for as many as possible at the end of the QA or at the end of the webinar.
If we don't answer your guys' question, don't worry, we'll actually send out a document with the recording after the call that'll just go through the questions that we answered and then anything that we didn't get to that you guys have everything all in one place. And then you guys are probably wondering who you're talking to. My name's Ethan, I'm a marketing manager that's been with SUDS for just a little under three years now and I'm teaming up with Shawn Ho. He's our Senior Marketing Manager here at SUDS. He's been with us for a little over five years. So we've both worked with a plethora of different car wash operators, as small as one site operators, all the way up to a hundred plus. And so we really just bring all sorts of different perspectives around how different membership promotions can be impactful depending on the size of your site.
Our job is really to enhance our retainer bottom line through the power of strategic marketing, which is a really fancy corporate way to say that we use the magic of marketing to make you more money. So before we get into the membership promotion itself, if you're not familiar with SUDS or you are a little bit, it's worth just running through kind of how we function and how we're actually a part of DRB®'s family itself. So if you're familiar with Washify, Driverse, we're no different in the sense that we're just another extension of DRB and a part of that family where we can provide value on top of what you already get from DRB itself. But SUDS on its own, really what we do here is help you answer critical questions about your business specifically. So you may come to us and say, "Hey, we really want to increase number capture at the POS, but we're not really sure how." That's where we bring in the solution for that. We can work through build a promotion, build a pricing solution, whatever it may be that you need and kind of bring that to you. And so other things such as like "Where should I build my site?" You could be an established brand and you're breaking into a new market, but you know, like, hey, it's really expensive and high risk to build a car wash site. I want to make sure with like 95% accuracy that this is going to be the perfect spot to put it and we have a solution for that.
So today we're specifically going to talk about how you can plan a high-impact membership promotion and make sure that you get the return on it that you look for. And we're going to go over a ton of different steps and data. We're going to throw a lot of information at you. So before we do that, I just want to focus on four key takeaways. That way it doesn't get too busy for you upfront. First one, build your strategy using data. We'll show you how we walk through that research and data analysis component specifically. Second, we're going to get into how to tell the story that your audience is craving. So how do you use design psychology and consumer feedback to create a visually compelling promotion that's actually going to engage your customers? Three, testing, which is a no brainer, but really how do we make sure that there's a heavy standard of quality assurance and make sure you're prepared on site for the promotion itself.
And then lastly, how do you adapt to the market once the promotion has finally launched? This last quarter, we were able to apply these standards for a client of ours, Fullers, who's more established. We ran this across seven sites. And so because they're more established and had an already existing market of sites available, we couldn't just throw like a standard $9.99 promotion at this. There was a lot more that needed to go into it. And we knew because of their member and retail traffic mix that we didn't really need to bring in a ton of more members, but we still had a gap in the market to capture.
And so what we did here was set out to do a three for $30 where we could bring in 3000 members. Now the way that we kind of set some of these goals here is we knew based off of their sales team and sales pipeline, the way that it works, a 10% capture rate would not only get us above that 3000% mark, but it would also be something that would work well for their team and be an attainable goal. And then of course, churn is something we needed to factor in as well. We can bring in those 3000 members, but we needed to understand how many of those would actually churn out so that our overall net member account would increase by that 3000, taking that into consideration. And the results were phenomenal for this. Through all of the steps that we'll show you guys here today, we were able to triple our ARM sales for this.
We brought in about 10,000 members for those seven sites, our capture rate was just about 11%. And to our surprise, more so because of the offer we picked for the three for $30, we saw substantially lower churn. so not only were we able to surpass that 3000 mark, we were able to retain a good chunk of those members too. And the estimated overall revenue impact thus far since we ran that has been $3.8 million plus dollars. And that's just from the members that came in from that promotion. That doesn't account for their existing membership base or any of the retail revenue that they get on top of that. So I'm going to pass it over to Shawn now. He's going to get you guys kicked off with the first step and how we can build a successful promotion like this.
Shawn Ho, Senior Marketing Manager Team Lead, SUDS: Perfect, awesome. Thank you, Ethan. All right, so the first step for a successful promotion is going to go into it with a clear and concise plan. I don't know how many different operators Ethan and I have talked to, we talked to them about their unsuccessful past promotions and when we begin peeling back the layers on why it was unsuccessful, it always points back to an incomplete planning process. So make sure to create a well thought-out plan. It's going to lay the foundation for a successful promotion. Okay, now before launching the campaign, getting consumer perspective, it's huge. So there's plenty of different ways you can gather on your market's perspective. And one of the most useful tactics we suggest deploying is called a customer survey. Now, if you've watched any previous webinars, you've probably heard us talk about this. If you've listened to the great Chris Moriarty, he also brings us up, but we're going to keep hitting it home because it works so well and it's really, really important. So not only will the survey help set up the promotion, but you're going to gain valuable insight from your customer base as well. So what'll happen, you'll send out an email, you'll create a social post, but that will link to the survey and you want to send it out because you want to get the most responses possible.
So if you're trying to figure out how you can improve your wash, you really want to find out what your customers are thinking. So in turn, if you do want to get the most responses, you can incentivize this. And we've done, you know, fill this out, you can win a free membership, you can win free gaming console, really anything free, people love. So if you can incentivize it, you're going to get more people to fill out the survey. Now, in the survey you'll want some open-ended questions. Like what areas of the wash can we enhance? How can we elevate your customer experience? I feel like you only want a few of those because you will definitely get good info, but if people have to spend too much time typing the response, you're going to have a lot more incomplete surveys. So throw in multiple choice, some sliding scale questions, things like, on a scale of one to 10, how likely are you to wash if, but again, make sure to limit those questions because we have seen where the questions are way too long, there's way too many pages and so people just quit halfway through. But a really good way to show how this can work would be an example from a client we just recently had. They were actually contemplating introducing ceramic or graphene.
And essentially to set the stage, one of the questions in the survey was, "How likely are you to sign up for a membership if we introduce ceramic into the membership wash packages?" And then conversely, we had another question framed essentially the exact same way, but it was, "How likely are you sign up for a membership if graphene was included?" Now you could guess pretty much any customer's going to say they want a better wash experience. So the questions were favorable, but we saw people pick ceramic or ceramic scored a lot higher. So essentially, most people in the industry, or most if you do know chemicals, you're going to know what ceramic does over graphene. So most likely that was the reason why their customer base chose that. But I'll explain kind of how we roll that out. But a tactic you can use, so it's not only going to prime your membership, but it's also going to give your customers a sense of ownership. So they're going to feel like they helped make that business decision, right? They're going to feel like, "Hey, you know, we wanted ceramic, we answered that question." That's going to help build rapport, it's going to cultivate loyalty. All those things that really help, you know, if you have a good loyal base, we've seen it, people with really good brands, loyal following. churn is naturally way lower. So these little things do go a long way.
All right, so you send out the email, you've received your responses, now you want to announce to your customer base. You express your gratitude, say, "Hey, thank you for your input." And then when you go say it's on signage, say it's on an email, you're going to say, "We asked, we listened." You're going to announce the rollout of this new chemical. Say, you know, "We're introducing ceramic in all of our memberships. Try our new and approved packages with ceramic included. Wash unlimited for half the price this month." Or whatever promotion you choose, tailor it to that. So in a sec, I'll explain why choosing the right offer at the right discount is very, very, very important when you're trying to not only trying to maximize revenue, but you're also trying to mitigate churn. There's a sweet spot there that's really important. Okay, so that's it. So beyond using it to prime your promotion, I talked about how the survey's going to give you that insight. Your customer base, your team, you might have overlooked this, but like one example would be this here actually, "We wish you guys offered dog treats like the folks down the road." And it'd be those small little nuances or details that if you were to implement and listen to what your customers are saying, it can give you that extra edge.
So then when it comes down to a customer just choosing based on location, they know and they remember those small impactful things. So when it does come down to picking the location, they're going to remember who they want to wash with. All right, so you've sent out the survey. The next step in planning is going to be deciding the timeframe of the promotion. So we use our climate seasonality, shout out to Ethan putting that whole thing together. But he essentially put that together with DRB's traffic data. So DRB's traffic data combined with the climate seasonality. And then we look at your historical traffic data. Now we're looking to see which months are the busiest and which months are the slowest. And if you're trying to maximize revenue and make the most of your marketing dollars, you need to run your best promotion during peak traffic season.
So running promotions, it's a lot like, so running promotions when you're busiest is a lot like running with the wind. You're just going to get there faster. So that's really something important to think about. You can run promotions when you're slower, but you need to know if you're going to channel your marketing dollars to spend the most, you should definitely run when you are the busiest. Okay, and then you can see, so this one is a little bit, this graph, if you look at the hot and humid, it's a little bit different, but most washes, I'd say 90% of washes have two distinct traffic periods where traffic is higher than the other months. So again, you'll want to plan your best promotions around these two. In this case you can see April and May are the 8.5 and the 10.3% are going to be the busiest for that time of year. So you'll want to run your spring promo during April and May.
All right, so now you know when we're going to run the promotion, but the next most important items going to be planning what the next promotion should be. And I mean, all of us here, we've trialed literally hundreds of different promotions. Some work, well, some don't work well, a lot of it to know what actually works good is going to be understanding your market. So luckily, from past promotions, past campaigns, we've taken those bumps and bruises and then found out which ones don't work. So what does work, why it works, and how it works, we already know. So that's one thing to keep in mind. If you're trying to figure out what offer to go with, you need to absolutely analyze your historic KPIs. We've had, well, we'll get into it, but, so you need to analyze your historic KPIs and you look at your past promotions that you've ran, and then you need to understand the structure of your sales team because if you get those three things in line, you're definitely going to optimize your marketing and it's going to help you choose the right offer. Okay, so one major thing we'll look at is your current and historical traffic breakdown.
So generally, usually as a rule of thumb, we know healthy membership to retail is about 75 to 25, so 75% membership, 25% retail. And when you begin getting into that 80% range of membership traffic, we do see, it's almost like clockwork. You start going up, churn does increase for sure. So members will quit coming as often if they see their member line because the value of their membership goes down, it's no longer quick and painless, or the quick, shiny and dry in three minutes or less, that's no longer real because now you're waiting in line for, you know, a few minutes. So please keep in mind you want to monitor that breakdown. And if this is the case for you, what this can tell you is maybe you'll want to focus on bringing in new traffic, maybe extending your member tenure. So campaigns focus around that, but you want to focus it around something other than just membership or enrolling more members. So until you can bring up that retail traffic, that is what we suggested. We'll get into it a little bit more later.
So for example, if this was your membership traffic above in the graph, you'll see membership traffic only accounts for 56% of total traffic. So if you did run a membership promo, you're sitting pretty, you're teed up for very successful promotion and you won't run into any of those issues that I mentioned above. All right, so next to really help hone in on those historical KPIs, one thing we like to look at, it's called a cohort analysis. And these are awesome, so you can... Essentially what cohorts do, they're going to put customers into segments based on shared characteristics. So in this case you can see the shared characteristic would be when that certain customer signed up for a membership and what they share is essentially the month they signed up. So you'll see green and red. Those green and red colors essentially correlate to retention. So you can see across the X axis numbers 1 through 12, those are the 12 months. And then the number under the month indicates the percentage of the segmented members that are still enrolled in the membership at that given period. I'll give you an example and make that make more sense. So if this is your cohort, you can see in April, 2022, during month one you signed up 4,548 members. So you'll notice under the one it says 100, so that means 100% of the members signed up in that first month are still members. Does that makes sense?
But now if they did churn out, it will show under month two. So in this case they retained 91% of the 4,548 members. So to make that even make more sense, April, 2022, you can see as you progress through additional months, you have a lot more green, meaning people who signed up in April are staying on longer in comparison to some of the other months. Now on the other side of that, so you'll see August, 2022, you see more red. So earlier in the months you have higher churn. So members that signed up in August churned out faster. Now if you're reading that, it just shows you, I bet you ran a promotion in August because churn increases, right? Whenever you run membership enrollment promotions, you're expectd to have higher churn a little bit earlier. And in this case, aside from June and July, 2023, you can see that August had the most ARM sales. So we'll use cohorts to see when members are staying on the longest, the shortest, what months are best for enrolling, et cetera.
But then for promotional periods, these are really, really valuable because you can check up and see how your member enrollments are holding up over time. All right, so going off that, let's say you came to us and you wanted to run an aggressive membership offer because you tell us, "Hey look, I have low churn, so we shouldn't expect the normal promotional churn after, right?" Because naturally we're already low. So I mean that's a good way of looking at it, but there's a lot of other factors to consider and so let's just, you came to us, you said that, this is why I wouldn't suggest it. Let's say you have a top package at $54.99 and you said, "Hey, that aggressive offer, we want it to be a $5 first month or $9.99 or something like that. But one thing we've learned relatively early on is if the discount or the enrollment amount is so much lower than the monthly recharge rate, there's going to be higher churn. So the regular price is so much of a shock to the member compared to what they enrolled at. It causes that churn to spike. And I mean we see this all the time and I feel like a lot of people will focus, okay, well we want a better capture rate, but that capture rate's essentially a vanity number because so many members ended up churning out early.
And so you still need to mitigate that churn. And when you do mitigate it, that's when we see maximized revenue. So because of this, like in this situation, we would suggest something like a 50% off first month. So we're going to reduce churn, but we're maximizing revenue even though capture's going to be slightly lower. Now we've been to this scenario a hundred times, and then we will hear, you might come back with, "Hey wait, well my competitors just ran a $9.99, shouldn't we run something aggressive like that?" And we can't stress enough, you'll obviously notice what your competitors are running what they've done in the past, but most of the time you don't want to make your decision based on what they're doing. And it's a lot like pricing. If you change prices based on what your competition's doing, you're always going to be at the mercy of their decision. So you want to keep an eye on them, you want to know what they're up to, but you want to be the leader. You want to be the innovator. And if you are, you're going to be in a lot better spot competitively and yeah, just you'll be in a better spot competitively. Okay, so now you know when we'll run the promotion, we know the offer or at least how to kind of make that decision. Ethan's going to show you how to get essentially get the promotion off the ground.
Ethan: Awesome, thanks Shawn. Yeah, so we've done a ton of research. Now we've looked at all of your data and now we have to understand how do we piece these components together to get the full picture. This is where we can have a lot of fun with the overall strategy itself. And that's going to come together in a pretty formal document that we call a campaign brief. And we don't spend too much time on this because I mean this is pretty standard for really any project. It's really just a marketing plan that's going to show you what our goals are, which is informed by that data, what's realistic for your team, what marries into your overarching goals, what's going to give you the revenue that you're looking for, and then also what's within budget for what you have planned out. And if you don't have a budget, what can we project is going to be the most bang for your buck on a high to low end by combining what we know your competitors are doing digitally as well as what we know financially our data team can tell us is going to be most sustainable for you. And then of course it's going to have all of the project management fun stuff like timelines and deadlines and all the fun assets. So, but what does it look like to actually build this out?
So in this case we saw that, you know, you have room to do a membership promotion, there's still room within your traffic mix to gather more members and we have the retail traffic coming in for it, but your prices are pretty high. So we can't just throw a standard $9.99, 2 for $20, 3 for $30 at this. We're going to have to land closer to a 50% off offer so that they don't get the sticker shock and churn off immediately. Well, it's not going to work for us to just throw that offer out there and hope that people stick to it. Sure you've got lots of customers coming in, but they might not be nurtured enough for your CSAs to sell that. This is where we look at our marketing funnel that we use pretty, pretty predominantly across most of our promotions to understand where your customers at in proximity to your brand. If you're established, you may not need to gain awareness around your brand. People may know that you exist, know that you're one of the car washes in the area, but you still need to pique their interest.
On the flip side, you could be a mom and pop shop that recently opened up and we're going to have to do a lot more heavy lifting just to let people know that you exist first, then get them on site to check it out. So let's say again, in your case you guys exist, people know you're there, you've been around for a little bit, but we need to get people on site. In this case what we would do is throw a free wash offer and actually take that up an ante and leverage referral through a share with their friend. So the way this works, and I'm sure you guys have seen this in the industry, is you attract customers with the most valuable offer we can give them, which is a free top wash, but you add a share with their friend component so that they can refer out to their friends and gain more awareness on top of them coming in around interest. What this does is it brings them on site with that coupon to consider your product to try it out. They may have tried it before and if that's the case, this gives your CSA more leverage to sell to them.
But this might be the first time that they're actually trying you out. So this is a really good chance for you to prove to them, hey, this is a good spot for you to get your car wash and you should choose us over the competitors for whatever reasons we communicate in the messaging. From there, once they're onsite, your CSAs have the perfect chance to sell them on that 50% off offer. And even if they don't, you still leverage the awareness and interest and got them in the door and we have a better chance of converting them in the future on upcoming membership promotions or others of sort. There's other things we can do with retention that's not specific to this specific promotion itself, but on some of the clients that we work with on a higher level, or if we work with you on an ongoing basis, we can build in email automations and upcoming promotions that help retain members specifically. So now that we've got the plan that goes through all of the promotional components, we've solidified budget, we know our timelines, we know what marketing channels we're going to utilize for this, we get to have some fun.
This is the part of marketing that attracts people the most. It's the visuals, it's the messaging, it's what our customers are engaged by. But it's not just throwing pretty stock pictures of car washes together with really nice verbiage. There's actually a psychology behind all of it that we utilize at SUDS to ensure that we are persuading your customers in a way that's really engaging for them. So if you've joined our webinars before, we have a phenomenal Senior Art Director, Scott Ginter, and a Junior Art Director, Derek Burton, who did a whole webinar just going into the psychology behind design and how we incorporate that. I'm going to give you guys a cliff notes and I probably won't do it justice, but really the short gist of how we do this is we think about our customer's brains as operating on one of two systems. And you've heard of the left and right brain. So this isn't any different. You have an intuitive side and one that's more discerning, one that's more emotional, the other one's more logical. But the thing that we're looking at here is the time constraint on both. So when your customer's in system one, they're in limited time. This is when they're on site at the POS, in line, waiting to purchase their offer and they have to make a quick decision. They're more likely to spend more money at this point. And this is our best opportunity to leverage design, to cut out as much noise, reduce the cognitive load and show them what they need upfront.
This looks like a really simple menu that prioritizes the top wash first and makes everything else look minimal by comparison, it makes it easy for them to say yes to the offer we want them to, and this bleeds into the XPT and anything else that's within that window. Now in the flip side, they may not be on that time constraint. They could be sitting at home scrolling on their phone, on Facebook, they might just get an email from you, here they're in system 2, a little more discerning and logical, they're less likely to spend money. This is where we can shift our design and messaging to sort of nurture them a little bit more into considering the offer as opposed to saying, "Yes", immediately. I mean we know that the human brain views the world as a sort of puzzle. So when you look at something, say like two dots, your brain wants to make sense of that and make a smiley face or a caterpillar or something to make sense of out of that. And these are considered the just all principles.
If you're familiar with design, this is what most designers base a lot of their marketing and other content off of. What we can do with this is utilize these principles in conjunction with the understanding of these two systems to create design that works cohesively together to engage your customer and get them to come onsite for the offer itself. And so how this looks on a project basis is once we have that campaign brief built out and it's all approved by you, we take all of this back here at SUDS, we disperse it to our creative directions and we essentially just let them sit with it and pick it apart and come up with ideas before we all come together in one meeting. And essentially have a brainstorm where you put everything together on a board. This could look like sketches like you see in the top left corner, primary and secondary messaging options, visual components. And what we're trying to do here is we're trying to find messaging tones that give us a concise language that evokes emotional responses from the customers, but also is what they're looking for and tells a sort of story that they can fit into. And the visual components support this.
They bring that story to life in a way that engages the customer and is also consistent with your brand as well. And we're able to wrap all this up with a really clean and concise call to action. Whether that's the phrase that we use for the call to action or the amount of times we put it within the email or whatever else, or even just the color of the button itself. How do we marry all of that and give them almost relief by clicking that button so that they can continue on with that story. And once we have this, we're able to hop on a call with you and have a really fun pitch deck where we can show you visually what the promotion will look and feel like before we ever build anything out. And so in this case, you know, say we're doing a 50% off promo and we know that you're in an area where people really like to road trip and you know you're in the mountains. So we want to show this feeling of adventure. And so we picture a car on the right who's really dirty, a car on the left. We know that our consumers are primarily families who wash their cars. So we leverage that imagery of the family stick figures and have them crossing from the dirty car to the clean car. We bring that story to life and then we have messaging to support it. And from your standpoint as the client, we can show you what this looks like on the marketing channel that you're spending the most money on and that is going to have the highest impact.
In this case it might be a social ad. So you can see before we even get rolling on the promotion, what that'll look like before you sign off on it. There's usually a couple revisions, we go back and forth on this, but once we have this set in stone, the project can go by exponentially quicker because we know and we've agreed upon what sort of visual elements and messaging is going to guide the rest of it. Now there's a ton project-wise that goes into actually building the promotion. This is where our project managers shine the absolute most. This is where you're getting a ton of emails from us, on deadlines, reading copy, looking at designs, making sure everything's good. But we reached that critical point a couple weeks before the promotion where we have to make sure we're prepared to launch.
We've spent so much time on researching and getting the right data and choosing the right offer, building the project, building out the actual elements for it and bringing it to life. But none of that's going to matter if we don't have everything ready to launch. This looks like really, really strict quality assurance, understanding that the promotion is working from start to finish and we're running through it from the customer's perspective, one, two, maybe even three times. This was like supporting your sales team. When we build out that marketing promotion for you, we're trying to understand how your sales team operates on site. Do you have CSAs? If you do have CSAs, are they manning the pay stations at all times? Do you incentivize them? How does that work? And how can we support you? Whether it's through script verbiage or additional XPT prompts or other items that can help you sell that. And then finally, how do we work with scheduled services for you so that we can make sure that everything's ready functionally?
And of course you have the coupons and everything else to test before we actually get to it. Once we launch the promotion, we don't just wipe our hands clean a bit and move on. This is actually where some of the most work can come in. Within about the first week or so, we can tell with pretty high accuracy what marketing channel is performing the best and is going to continue to do so. And on the flip side, which ones are going to fail us or at least not perform the best that we want them to. This is standard and we expect this. In this case we're running, you know, a free wash with her friend that slides into a 50% off promo. We're going to use a couple different marketing channels, whether it's email or Meta ads or onsite signage or mailers to attract customers in to use that. And within those first couple days we can tell based off of conversions and lead submissions who the front runner is. In this case it looks like Meta ads are leading the pack.
So we know that the budget we spend on that is allocated well. But on the flip side, mailers didn't do so hot and we actually spent twice the budget on that. Now with mailers you can't just pull that budget out and re-funnel it into meta ads, it's a one and done drop. But what we can learn from this is cool, we got some awareness out there. People know we exist, they may not have converted immediately, we still have time to see if they do, but now we know for future promotions that we can slash back that budget for a free wash mailer or slash it completely. Now if we had ran other things such as geo-fencing ads or Google display ads, we have more flexibility there. We can take the money out of those, turn them off immediately and re-funnel that money into the meta ads to ensure that we're squeezing out as many conversions as possible.
Another thing we're going to look at too is redemption rates. So how of all of those coupons that we're distributed, which is phenomenal, how many of them are actually coming onsite? When are they coming onsite? How many days does it take for them to do that? And how can we leverage that to send them follow up emails and further marketing to ensure that they come in to actually redeem their coupons themselves. Now there's a ton of other data we're going to show you. We're not just going to focus on marketing channels. We'll show you everything you see in the GSR and actually make it look visually compelling for you. We're going to point out the trends, we're going to get feedback from you and your GMs on what's working on site, what's not. And from there we can kind of innovate and help you ensure that you're getting the most out of the promotion itself. I talked a little bit about Meta ads and I want to take a second to really hone in on them because for a lot of our promotions these lead the pack on the biggest return on your marketing spend. This is typically where our clients spend the most and see the highest conversion across the board too. And this doesn't just look like us taking one image or ad set and uploading that and calling it good.
Most times we have multiples of different ad sets that are static or dynamic and animated and move and function in different ways with different messaging strategies and are maybe even hitting different target demographics and bidding differently so that we can essentially in the first couple weeks test out to figure out what's going to be the best fit. And we can know pretty easily and really quickly within the first week or so, just like the marketing channels, what is going to work best and what we can pull the money out of. So let's say we launch this promotion for you. We notice that you have a dynamic animated version of these raccoons that people are just loving. They're clicking through, they don't even know what they're clicking for but they just love the moving raccoons and so that's performing 200% higher than your other ads. What we'll do then is identify the lowest performers, turn those off, take that spend, plug it back into the moving raccoons and then we'll actually build additional content outside of that so we can keep testing and making sure that we're staying on top of it.
This also ensures that your customers and consumers in the area aren't getting ad fatigue, they're getting fresh content and if we don't catch them the first time, we can catch them the second time as well. The optimization doesn't really stop there, at least the analysis part of it. Once the promotion has fully ended, there's still more that we want to do afterwards. And this is where we bring in the post campaign analysis. We're obviously going to go through what did we do, what was the promotion we ran, what were the goals we were going for? And then we're going to look how did our results match up to that? Did we exceed, did we fall short anywhere? We're going to go back to what marketing channels worked versus didn't. But we're also going to understand of the things that worked, why did they work and how do we replicate that in the future? And this takes this seven step process and it essentially turns into a circle where we go right back to step one all over again. This supports the research and data that we utilize to ensure that whatever promotion we run in the future, whether it's membership or retail or whatever it is, we're using these insights to inform a really successful future promotion as well.
Okay, we've thrown like 28 slides at you and a ton of data and a lot of buzzwords and corporate speak, but really again there's four things that you should take away from this that SUDS can help you with with building a high impact membership promotion. First, build your strategy using data. I'm not saying that you have to make every decision based off of a spreadsheet or a data table. I don't want you to do that either. I think that there's so much beauty and intuition in just a hunch. And as car wash operators you know what works. You can get a sense and feel for what's going on. This data is there to just help support that hunch and make sure you're guided in the right direction. This can look like the climate seasonality that Shawn pointed out. That cohort analysis is gold. We use that for so many different things and really has been just so valuable for our customers.
And of course historic KPIs, we need to know how past promotions are running for you. To tell the story your audience is craving, use those principles of design and really understand how to bring that promotion to life through clear and concise messaging and also understand the time limitations that your customers feel at any given point throughout the promotion too. If you can do this then you know the strategy is supported by a really solid foundation that your customers will engage with well. Three, and you guys know this thoroughly, especially working on site, but test everything. SUDS can help you with quality assurance. We can help you ensure that your CSAs have everything that they need on site to sell that appropriately. And we can also work with scheduled services at TRB to make sure that everything is ready to go once you launch the promotion itself. And finally, and arguably one of the most important key takeaways here is learn to adapt to your market.
This is where SUDS can really shine the most. Through ad optimization, that post campaign analysis we can essentially build ongoing data and research that helps support all of the promotions we do in the future. And it poses you as an industry leader because you're listening to your customers, you're taking that feedback and you're applying it in ways that are really impactful for your bottom line. If you guys are interested in this approach or any things we talk about today, whether it's running a one-time promotion or just ongoing marketing relationships, go ahead and scan the QR code here. It'll shoot a message over to our team and we can certainly get a conversation going with you guys. It looks like we've got about five minutes now for questions. I'm going to pop it over to Shawn and he'll get us kicked off with the first couple ones.
Shawn: Cool, thank you, Ethan. Alright our first one, it says, "When run promotion with low price. What about previous members who pay the regular high price?" Okay, I get what you're saying that that's a good one. I would say you won't have as many members complaining about the promotion. But if you do, I would take care of them. I would either let them enroll, like get them that first month at a discounted price. But we get that question a lot. There's few and far in between members that do complain, but if they do just for the sake of customer service, I would take care of them. And Ethan, I don't know if you have anything to add to that. You definitely can, but I always take care of them. If you don't take care of them, they're going to get mad, go on social, they're going to, you know, whatever.
Ethan: Yeah, you'd almost rather take the revenue hit of that first recharge month of that churning out and coming back on than losing them for life. They'll take it a lot more personally we've noticed if you don't abide by that discount and really it's just a way for you to give back at them. And pose it as like, "Hey you've been an awesome, loyal member, of course we can do that for you." We're never going to make you run membership promotions long term or all the time. So it's few and far between and if it really did become an issue, there's ways that we can reduce the discount and go in other directions that would mitigate that.
Shawn: For sure, yeah, good question. The next question, "When should we be using a cohort analysis?" Ethan, you can jump in whenever too, but that's actually a really good question. Honestly anytime, but I feel like one of the best times is going to be post promotion. And you do want time to go, I would say up to six, around six months past promotion because you can really tell then how your promotion is holding up against the other months where you were regular price. So it's not just membership. Oh and then also actually it's not just memberships you can look at, you can look at revenue cohorts too. So how much revenue did you make each period from those promotional efforts I guess. But if that makes sense.
Ethan: Yeah, I'd say also if you're running a membership promotion, obviously we want to look at it in the following months afterwards. The first six months after a promotion is really telling of how many we're going to keep on long term. But especially if you have a really successful membership promotion. Like the Fuller's example where we set out for 3000 and got nearly 10,000. That's our queue as the account manager to look like obsessively at that cohort analysis and make sure that they stay on. And if they don't then that tells us, okay, there's either something with the offer or we need to deploy a survey to those customers to figure out maybe what's going on. Is it seasonal? is it the offer we made? Is it something else? And then that can also help inform when we run future ones what to expect churn wise based off of the time of year and how aggressive that that offer is.
Shawn: Yeah, good call. Chris, let's see, you said, "How can I get my data to look like this? All of the DRB data looks rough and can't display in graphs except one report." Chris, we'll reach out to you after this. That is a great question. We got you, that's awesome. Yeah, we'll reach out to you. We can show you how to do that for sure. Let's see a couple more minutes. Let's see. "What do you do when you have a higher membership to retail percentage in that 80% range?" I would say you want to focus on driving new retail traffic. So free wash, focus on a retail promotion because you don't want to get up into, you know, up into that range where it's, you're going to churn out a lot. And Ethan, you can again say something here too, but I feel like that's probably the best way you want to focus on a retail promotion for sure.
Ethan: Yeah, retail's huge. That's really our indicator that there's room for you to bring more customers in. It's kind of like a cycle. You're going to expect that churn, it's always going to be a moving target. And so understanding where that mix is tells you what promotion to run and do we need to focus more on retail? Do we have room for marketing? But it also tells us, hey, this is a really good chance for us to focus on retention for our members. This could look like sending out a survey to members specifically to understand what they're liking or not liking. What do they want to see more of? This is your chance to give back to them and kind of lock them in for life. Other things you can do too is member appreciation. There's promotions you can do to give back to your members, specifically make them feel special, give them a little extra love because you've done the great work to sign them on. They bought your brand now you just need to make sure you retain them and SUDS can help you with all those retention measure measures too.
Shawn: Awesome. Let's see. Theresa Holt, you said, "We are a small, family-owned car wash. What tips would you have to bring in more traffic?" That one's a little more deeper. I would say we would need to look at... I mean there's a lot of things you could look at. There's always a way to help bring in more traffic, 100%. But without looking at some of the KPIs and it'd be hard for us just to say it, but there's a lot of questions on here that we'll reach out for sure.
Ethan: Yeah and Theresa I'll say too, there's a couple things that you can take from this just in the way that we like that funnel that we talked about with customers where we're understanding where they're at in the process. There's ways you can leverage that to like get attention out there so they know who you are and hit them with offers that are undeniable at least. And definitely scan that QR code and chat with us. Or if you're coming to the Car Wash Show, Shawn and I will both be there, come up and chat with us because we'd love to kind of just dig into it with you and come up with some cool ideas.
Shawn: Yeah, that's good. Well, probably the last one, "Do you have customers where you have built effective screen flows to sell memberships? In my experience, some people do not like to pull up to a pay station and know they're going to be pitched." That is an awesome and that is very, very accurate. I hate it myself and I'm expecting it every time, 100%. How Ethan was talking about our design team has won many, many awards based on some of that left and right brain and all that stuff. So there are certain screen flows, different times we would like to see an upsell or not based on your pricing and how to make your top package more attractable just when you instantly look at it. So 100% there is effective ways to help sell memberships with XPT screens. And Ethan again, jump in if you want, if not, we're good.
Ethan: I think you hit the nail on the head. We have some operators that don't have any CSAs on site at all. And so there's higher pressure for us to ensure that the XPT screen flow is simple, quick and easy for the consumers, but also like we mentioned before, reduces cognitive loads so that they know what to select, they can find what they need and maybe even upsell to something that they weren't originally looking for, but they seem more value in because we were able to kind of prioritize that. So we have a ton of really awesome questions here. We're just at time. So what we're going to do is we're going to take all the questions, we'll provide answers for them, the ones we answered already, and then also the ones on here that you guys have, that we haven't been able to get to yet. I mentioned we'll both be at the Car Wash Show. So if you guys are there, come say hi. We'll be at the DRB booth, bring your questions, come chat. We're going to be there like all day, every day. So we've got the time to hang out and chat with you as much as possible. But I want to thank everybody so much for joining today and we will send a recap of everything out here shortly.
