Fixed Ops Journal - June 2017 - 16

FIXED OPS JOURNAL

STRATEGY OVERHAUL

 Dealership taps local roots, social media to gain customer pay work
RICK POPELY

foj@autonews.com

anley Subaru East overhauled its
service marketing strategy last
year, putting most of its effort into
email and other online platforms.
That was a marked change from the suburban
Cleveland dealership's previous reliance on
direct mail.
Instead of just trying to sell more service and
parts, though, the dealership also emphasizes
selling itself as a good neighbor and active
supporter of community causes, through its
website and social media.
Ganley Subaru East sponsors such community events and institutions as the local humane
society and county park system. At a winter festival last January, the store donated six blocks of
ice carved in the shape of a Subaru Outback.
The dealership posts photos and videos
from these events on YouTube, Facebook and
other social media outlets as well as on its
own site.
One video captures employees singing "Put
a Little Love in Your Heart" to promote Subaru's annual Share the Love charity event; service technicians drop their wrenches at the
end. Another video shows dealership employees frozen in position in a "mannequin challenge."

Service links
People who click on these social media
posts are redirected to the dealership's website. Phil Almas, the store's service manager,
said that effort has attracted new customers
and helped turn around an underperforming
service department.
Almas says his shop's number of customer-paid, flat-rate service hours rose from 1,303
in the first quarter of 2016 (not including internal or warranty work), to 2,167 hours in the first
quarter of this year - a 66 percent increase.
Moreover, the effective hourly rate that service
customers paid climbed from $77.66 to $87.78,
Almas adds.
He says total customer-pay service is up 168
percent year over year, although he declines to
divulge revenue numbers.
"We're just driving people through social
media channels to our website, where they
elect what they want to look at and purchase

PAGE 16

JUNE 2017

Service technicians at Ganley
Subaru East drop their
wrenches at the end of an
online promotional video

and elect to do business with us," Almas says.
"It looks like it's working."
Traffic on Ganley Subaru East's website has
increased by 36 percent in the past year, and
visits to service-related pages have jumped
31 percent. "That is more exposure for all the
departments and the more [service] leads we
can get," Almas says.
The dealership displays Subaru vehicles at
community events. Employees hand out sales
and service brochures and award dealer-branded prizes for contests.
"This industry is typically one where there is
not a lot of trust from the public," says Brittany
Klucaric, the marketing manager of Ganley
Subaru East and another store in the 29-dealership Ganley group.
"Getting involved in community events is a
way of locally branding us and getting our faces out there, so people can see us on a personal
level and see that we do give back," she adds.
The dealership's exposure through social
media helps the service department recruit
technicians, Almas says. Job candidates
"want to join our team because of how involved we are and how much fun it must be to
work here," he says.
Visibility at community events also brings
non-Subaru owners to the service department, Klucaric says.
"If we're at an event and we're talking about
our brand, and they say, 'Oh, I don't drive
that,' that's a great opportunity to give them an

express service brochure and say that we actually do all makes and models," she says. "We
say, look at all the great things we can offer
you that you can't get at the quick-lube stop or
independent shops."

Targeted selling
Ganley Subaru East's service department
doesn't advertise its specials on social media,
Almas says. Nor does it market by text messaging, which it uses mainly to communicate
with service customers about appointment
confirmations and reminders, status updates
and repair estimates.
"We want to be a choice that you make and
not always trying to sell you something," Almas says. "We want to sell who we are, not our
product."
Instead, he says, the dealership relies mainly on emails that promote specials or offers
that are targeted to specific customers based
on their vehicles' age and service history.
While direct-mail postcards mainly attracted customers who wanted the deal of the
month, Almas says, the digital marketing approach brings in more customers who pay full
price for service and repairs.
"Digital marketing is what brings back customer-paid business," he says. "When you
stop giving away the farm to get a customer to
buy an hour [of labor] and you start selling
your hours at full rate, that's where you get the
kind of growth we have." 

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Fixed Ops Journal - June 2017