Car Count Daily

Hi shop owners. Thank you very much for joining me on this edition of Car Count Daily. My name is Ron Ipach, but you can call me Captain Car Count, because that’s all I’ve done for the past 20 years, is help thousands of auto repair shop owners, just like you, to get and then keep all the top-quality customers their shops can handle.

Now the other day I was looking back down through a lot of the comments that a lot of you are leaving below these videos. And, first off, I’d like to thank you very much for leaving all those comments. I really love reading them and responding to them. And I came across a message from a shop owner named Jim. He said, first off, that he loves my videos and thank you very much for saying that you love the videos. But (there’s always a but), he has a lot of difficulty whenever I’m talking about using text messaging marketing / mobile marketing to market his shop in Venice, Florida – where his shop is located. He said his average customer is over 70 years old. I actually, I did a little search on there and found out that he was pretty darn close. The median age is 67 years old, which is pretty darn old, even for Florida standards. It’s much higher than normal. So he does have a lot of older clientele there.

His problem is he can’t imagine sending a message out, an advertising message to something so personal as the person’s cell phone. He thinks it’s an invasion of their privacy and he just can’t seem to get over that hump. So, I figured I’d go ahead and address that a little bit more detail on this video than I did the response that I wrote to him. Again, first off Jim thank you very much for watching these videos and leaving that comment and especially my mom thanks you for saying that you love these videos.

But let me give you a few points here. First, as I mentioned before the median age in Venice, Florida where your shop is is 67 years old. Now what median means is, it’s right there in the middle. That means half the people are older than 67 and the other half are younger than 67. So, just because you have a lot of clients that are in the 70 year old range, doesn’t mean all of them are. It really should mean that maybe half or, I’ll give it to you, three-fourths of your customers are in that range. I get it. I understand it. No problem with that.

But here’s a few details that you may want to consider before you say you’re not gonna use text message marketing for your clientele. According to an Experian survey that was done just a few years ago, 94% of smart phones users that are 70 years or older are using text message marketing. This is for everybody out there. Just because you have older clientele, do not assume that they are not text messaging marketing. Because 94% of them that actually have a smartphone are actually using text messaging every single week. So it’s not a foreign concept to them. Throw that out. So first off, half of your potential customers are less than 67 years old, the other half are older, but even the older ones are using text message marketing. It’s not an invasion of privacy and it’s not something that they’re wondering what the heck just happened on their phone. They get it, they use it on a weekly basis.

Now let me address your personal feelings on this. And this goes to everybody. I often run into times where people say “well I would never do that or I don’t like that kind of marketing, therefore I’m not gonna do that.” I want to caution you from saying that because the reality is what you think doesn’t matter. What I think doesn’t matter. The only thing that really matters are what your customers and what your perspective customers think. That’s the only thing that matters. Let me tell you there’s a lot of marketing I do currently and have done in the past that, hey, I found out it’s just not my cup of tea, it’s not something I’d want to do. However, the results tell me it’s something I must do. My customers and perspective customers like some of the marketing that I personally maybe wouldn’t do if I was just marketing to me. The only thing that matters, the only opinions that matter are the people that you’re trying to attract to your shop. And, they will let you know what their opinion are, especially on text messaging, because text messaging isn’t a spam service. You should not be sending text messages out to anybody that didn’t willingly give you their text number.

That’s another important aspect to understand. They must give you permission to text to them. So when they’re across the service desk from you and you ask permission to get their mobile number so that you can add them to your text club or whatever you want to call it and if they say no, they gave you their opinion, and their preference. So you just don’t simply add them to a list. You’re not really crossing any lines here because you have to ask and get permission. Now, there’s lots of ways to get permission on there, but in your case Jim, just simply ask them. You know you don’t want to cross that line.

I understand you don’t want to get everybody upset, but the reality is if somebody is giving you their cell phone number and maybe they’re getting special offers that most of your other clientele do not receive those text message offer will get, chances are they will say yes because who doesn’t want to save some money, right?

Keep that in mind that older people do text. If you’re worried about that invasion of privacy and it’s something that maybe you wouldn’t personally do, all you have to do is ask. If they give you their number, they’re saying “yes, please send me a text” because they want to get a special offer that most other people will not get. Don’t eliminate everybody based on the people that say no as well.

Let’s say you have ten people come into your shop today and you ask and seven out of ten say no. Well don’t say this isn’t gonna work because three of them said yes. And that’s today, what about tomorrow and the day after and the day after? Don’t worry about the people that say no. Worry about the people that do say yes. Those are where your opportunities lie. Too often shop owners look at this and say well I gotta complaint here or there. People don’t like this. Well they’re listening to the minority. We don’t market to the minority. We market to the majority. And in this particular case the majority are going to tell you exactly if it’s okay to send them text messages because they’re giving you permission when you ask.