5 Remarketing Tips for Your Auto Repair Shop

Depending on how long you have been working on developing a successful marketing strategy for your auto service business, you may or may not have begun to investigate customer remarketing. Either way, it’s important to understand that remarketing your business is just as important as marketing to people the first time. In the auto service industry, when people aren’t experiencing an emergency they are more likely to visit your site and leave without converting. By retargeting to people who have visited your site and left without converting you are significantly increasing the likelihood of conversion! In fact, studies have shown that customers are 70% more likely to convert after clicking on a retargeting ad, rather than stumbling upon the site via search.

It’s no secret that deciding to start a remarketing campaign is the easy part. Figuring out how exactly to keep in touch with potential customers and encourage them to use your auto services is where things get a bit complicated. We reached out to some of the marketing experts who work in many industries to get some of the best customer remarketing advice. With these tips in your back pocket, you’ll be able to dive right into remarketing for your auto services business. 

What is Remarketing? 

Remarketing is a way to connect with people who have previously interacted with your website but didn’t make a purchase or take an action. Remarketing and Retargeting are often used interchangeably, and while they have similar end goals, there are a few differences.

Put simply, remarketing is about re-engaging customers with traditional communication methods like emails, whereas retargeting is more about moving potential customers who have interacted with your company but not converted toward purchasing your services. In many cases these two terms are used interchangeably and for the purpose of this article, we can continue to treat them as falling into the umbrella term of “remarketing”. 

Types of Remarketing

Remarketing campaigns are typically categorized into one of six types:

• Standard Remarketing: Shows your ads to people who visited your website as they are browsing Google and other applications.

• Dynamic Remarketing: Taking standard remarketing to the next level, these are ads featuring specific products or services people viewed on your website.

• Remarketing Lists for Search Ads: Shows your ads to past visitors as they continue to search for services related to yours. 

• Video Remarketing: If you have a YouTube channel or videos elsewhere, this will show your ads to people who have previously interacted with your channel or videos.

• Email Remarketing: Traditionally what we would consider “remarketing” sends communication and ads to people who have provided you with their email addresses and shown interest in but have not purchased, your services.

Remarketing Tips From The Experts

Now that you understand a little better what remarketing is and how it can help you connect with customers, we can take a look at what the marketing experts recommend when it comes to remarketing your auto services company. 

Tip #1 - Align Your CTA Based On Customer Need

"There's a reason why you are remarketing, which is why it's best that at this point, you already know what worked and what didn't. If you are remarketing because you are happy with the previous results, realigning your CTA, will mean a bigger and wider market. What is the pain point? This is what your next CTA should be. What stops a customer from completing a purchase? In service-based businesses, quality and experience is the pedestal. Align your CTA to what you think your customers need."

- Willie Greer, Founder of The Product Analyst

"Just like in your initial campaign, you need to have a strong call to action for retargeting. The actions will vary depending on the readiness of the target audience but make sure that they are clear and easy to do with valuable offerings as well."

- John Webster, Owner of Wiringo

Tip #2 - Segment Your Remarketing Campaigns By Service Offering

You shouldn't treat every website visitor the same way. Your remarketing campaigns should be segmented to appeal directly to your customers' wants and needs. Visitors' length of stay, the number of pages they view, and the specific pages they visit can influence how aggressive or nurturing your remarketing campaign should be.

- Bogdan Krstic, Owner of RepairSprout

My advice to service-based businesses trying to bring in customers is to segment their audience. There are many people within your audience that have similar interests or checked out similar products. So, when you create a campaign, you will see more success with your campaign if you group members into specific categories. Let’s say you own a flooring business. You will have some people who look at carpeting, while others look at hardwood floors. Since they are looking at significantly different products, you want to remarket to them separately.

- Olivia Tan, Co-founder of CocoFax

Tip #3 - Emphasize What Sets Your Company Apart

Personally narrated radio ads are the most effective, low-cost, and authentic remarketing advertising that any automotive service business needs to spend money on. The rest should be word-of-mouth and drive-by driven based on the makes, models, and mechanical specialties that your business specializes in. If you and your crew can flexibly work in shifts earlier and later than normal business hours, even on weekends, your automotive service business will earn 50% more revenues each year by servicing more customers and completing more tickets before and after everyone else's nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday schedule.

- Baron Christopher Hanson, RedBaron Consulting LLC

Tip #4 - Use Your Budget Wisely

In the past when we ran remarketing campaigns for auto dealers, we'd qualify a website visitor who spent over 3 minutes and/or visited over 4 pages as a high intender for example. A website visitor isn't automatically an intender, if he stays on your website for 3 seconds. Be efficient with your marketing dollars!

What other pages make someone qualified? Perhaps someone who is looking into the auto loan approval process?

Once you define all of your qualifying parameters, set up your tracking pixels accordingly. We ran great campaigns on Social to remain top-of-mind, but the real ROI was running SEM (paid search) on a very robust list of keywords that would provide coverage amongst branded, generic, and even competitive searches.

-Pierre Babineau, Director of Digital Strategy at Reprise Digital 

Tip #5 - Don’t Forget About Social Media

Don’t remarket to everyone who likes your Facebook page. In most cases, page likes are accumulated through previous advertising efforts. A lot of those users are either fake people or people who’ve accidentally clicked like on the ad. Remarketing to that whole audience will waste a lot of money.

Do remarket to an audience who has shown significant engagement with you. An effective strategy for this is running a longer video ad and targeting users who have watched it mostly to the end.

Don’t remarket to your entire website audience from Google Analytics. This is too wide of a net and will waste a lot of spend. Instead, narrow down to an audience who has completed a goal on your website.

- Shane Griffiths Founder of Clarity Online SEO

Give It A Try!

From remarketing with social media and email reminders to realigning your CTA and segmenting your remarketing campaigns, these tips will almost certainly help you increase the number of people who are coming back to your auto shop business and converting. Keep in mind that marketing takes time. It’s natural to feel frustrated if you have implemented some of these techniques and aren’t seeing results right away. Give it some time and understand that remarketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Stick with it and be flexible and you’ll be on your way to success in no time!