How ATS Outdoors Uses TargetCRM to Increase Service Revenue Off-Season
How should dealerships balance real customer relationships in a world where technology touches nearly everything we do?
The ease and comfort of accessing anything you want from your mobile device has made it common practice for people to do most of their shopping online – before they even step foot into a store. Today’s dealerships need to be able to reach their customers the same way: directly on their mobile devices. Dealerships that can connect and personalize their customers’ mobile experience will be able to stack up against Amazon and big-box retailers.
For ATS Outdoors, a two-location dealership in Texas, their commitment to customer service has allowed them to stand out to customers and grow their business through referrals. Recently, Cody Armstrong, co-owner of ATS Outdoors, adopted TargetCRM at his dealerships to communicate directly with customers and enhance their overall marketing operations.
The problem: How to reach customers directly for an easy mobile marketing experience without the technical infrastructure of Amazon and other big-box retailers.
Cody: “I still feel like I’m a local guy. I still feel like I need to support my local business. I want to go support these guys, but the Amazons of the world have made it so dang easy to not do that. For me, I need to be able to reach my customers in that way. With a very clean, intuitive website that links to my DMS, that shows current inventory, where you can just push a button and pick it up at the store. If you don’t want to come inside, we’ll bring it out to you in the parking lot.
But that technology is very expensive to set up, although I’d like to get some form of that to make it easier for our vendors to do business with me. The easier our vendors are to do business then the more product we sell for them, the easier we can be to do business with our customers and keep growing.”
Feeling unsatisfied with previous advertising companies he used, Cody decided to try out TargetCRM.
Cody: “I’ve hired a few advertising companies that represent a lot of different businesses across the board, but they didn’t really understand our business. It took me a lot of time working with those guys to try to get them to understand what we were trying to accomplish, and it never really worked.
I’ve spent a lot of money doing it. I just never really felt like I got the return there. When a TargetCRM representative came to me telling me about Target and about a CRM – which I’ve never used before – he was telling me all the things that were possible and all the things that it could do. I said let’s give it a shot, let’s try it out.
In as little as 2 hours, TargetCRM was up and running for ATS Outdoors.
Cody: “It’s really easy. It’s very intuitive. It’s easy to operate. I recently hired someone from another advertising company to do some things and we got him to do a two-hour training session for TargetCRM and now he knows it, he just got it. It’s pretty easy to use.”
Cody’s Favourite TargetCRM Features:
Cody: “I like the customer groups. I like being able to go in and build a customer group and define some things down to a certain zip code, a certain group of people, a certain product. Whether it was Hustler, BigDog, EGO, eXmark, whatever it may be. I can just define those customer groups, filter that down to target a certain set of customers and then send them the MMS, SMS, email, however.”
Ever since they implemented the text messaging feature of TargetCRM, ATS Outdoors has been loving their results.
Cody: “The results have been really good. When we use it, we get a lot of feedback. It really works. For example, the last couple of years we’ve always done a winter service special. We try to get a bunch of machines in the wintertime and our slow time to keep them from bogging our shop down in the spring. Last year we did a handful. I used Target, but I didn’t really do it effectively, and we ended up getting a couple hundred of them done.
This year, I tried some different things with Target. We did the email as well as text. I didn’t do texts last year. I think the text really worked for us better than the email. We still got several from the email but being able to text it out with an MMS really helped. My goal was to do 400 this year and we did 430, so we met our goal.”
Benefits of Text Messaging with TargetCRM:
Cody: “It’s instant marketing. Whereas email, I think a lot of our emails get lost in the spam folders. They don’t ever make it and if they do make it, they get lost in the hundreds of emails that busy people get every day. Text is instant. Everybody’s used to it and it’s how most of the world communicates these days.
We use texts for a lot of different things. We use it for work orders, for sales orders, for notifying customers their parts are here. It’s automatic. We punch a button and we’re done with it. We’re not having to pick up the phone and call them, hoping they answer or leave them a message. Then they call back and we’ve got 10 people in the line at the counter. I like the text feature. They can respond at their leisure or instantaneously.”
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