Kirk Richardson is a self-described “numbers guy.” The owner of South Street Auto Care in Rochester, Mich., was an Accounting Major at Michigan State University and has always been interested in tracking the return on investment when it comes to advertising, which is what made Kukui, a custom marketing platform, stand out to him four years ago.
“There wasn’t anybody tracking [analytics] the way that Kukui was,” Richardson says.
Over the past four years, Richardson has been able to track the ROI he’s seen with Kukui and the results are overwhelmingly positive.
“I’m most definitely winning through Kukui,” he says.
Integrated System
When Richardson started with Kukui, another thing that stood out to him was that multiple tracking systems can be incorporated into one dashboard.
Kukui can integrate with a shop’s management system, which allows its users to manage everything on one dashboard. Richardson says he has access to important customer data, such as the journey they took to get to his website and the ability to connect that data with the recorded sales call.
One of Richardson’s favorite aspects of the dashboard is the online appointment feature.
“It’s a simple system to use,” he says. “You can interact with a customer and confirm an appointment with the click of a button.”
By gathering all of this information about the customer, Richardson is able to analyze patterns and figure out where he’s losing customers and what the best method for reaching his customers is.
Website Management
Along with getting new customers to the shop and providing analytics, Kukui also manages South Street Auto Care’s website. Kukui provides a marketing specialist to help clients through the process. The marketing specialist can provide guidance for clients that might not know what to do with their websites. Richardson says he talks to his representative on a regular basis and that the team at Kukui will make any changes that he wants to the website within a few days. He says that the team is willing to be as active as he is and that the staff is very responsive.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing through Google AdWords
Richardson says that for him, AdWords has been the most trackable feature that Kukui has. Through pay-per-click marketing, Kukui tracks the amount of customers that are clicking on a specific ad and then tracks how many of those are being converted into customers. Kukui’s pricing includes the full use of the platform including website and Adwords management, marketing analytics and a customer retention program, and they also offer flexible pricing for the Adwords themselves, depending on what makes sense for the surrounding market.
In the beginning, Richardson was paying $200 per month for Google Adwords. After he saw positive results, Richardson kept increasing his Adwords budget until he set it to purchase all of the traffic that Google can provide. “I said, don’t put a cap on me. I want as many leads generated as I can possibly get within a given time frame,” Richardson says.
Since the change to an unlimited budget, Richardson says that he’s generating an additional $930 per month in immediate net profit, in addition to the long term value of having new clients who will likely come back and spend more at his shop in the future.
“There have been months where I’ve made $4,000 in net profit exclusively through AdWords,” Richardson says.
Tracking Analytics
Richardson says you can see how many of your customers came in through direct mail, Adwords, organic searches, Yelp, etc. That information allows him to see the origin of his leads.
A feature that Richardson particularly likes is that Kukui tracks all of the phone calls at South Street Auto Care. Richardson makes a habit of going through the phone calls of customers that didn’t come in and trying to identify something that may have been missed the first time that might have brought them in.
“For example, we listened to a phone call with a woman that mentioned that she had a couple of kids,” Richardson says. “It wasn’t caught the first time, but when we listened back we recognized this as an obstacle for her bringing her car in. We called her back and offered a loaner car to her.”
Richardson estimates that he’s picked up thousands of dollars by listening back to phone calls.
The shop also tracks lead conversion and offers its service advisors bonuses if they meet their goals. A few months ago, all of his service advisors got a $150 bonus for hitting their goals. This was all tracked through Kukui’s analytics.
