Car-wash company shines up with email

INDIANAPOLIS, US: Mike’s Express Carwash, a chain of 37 carwashes located across Indiana and Ohio, announced that its email marketing program boosted online sales in June more than 60 percent over June 2008 totals.

Powered by on-demand email and one-to-one marketing provider ExactTarget, the Father’s Day email promotion boosted online sales of discount carwash books and prompted the car care company to launch a back to school campaign Aug. 9 to offer customers a free carwash in exchange for completing an online customer satisfaction survey and subscribing to its email marketing program, it explains in a press note.

The 10-day back to school campaign concludes Monday and has already added more than 40,000 new customers to the company’s email subscriber list.

“Email gives us a way to reward our loyal customers and to hear about their Mike’s experience directly,” said Sally Grant, marketing director of Mike’s Express Carwash. “We’ve also been able to build a great list of highly-engaged customers and send them special offers and discounts to thank them for their loyalty and drive increased sales.”

Customers are invited to participate in the email campaign when they purchase a car wash. Every receipt includes a unique offer code and provides a link to the survey site. Customers log on to the Website, enter the unique receipt code and their email address and then complete a two-question survey. Once the survey is submitted, the data is immediately sent to ExactTarget’s Application Program Interface (API) and automatically triggers an email to the customer that includes a bar-coded coupon for a free car wash. To prevent multiple uses of the same coupon, the company uses ExactTarget’s Live Content feature to automatically generate a new bar-code for every coupon. Data from each coupon barcode is automatically uploaded to Mike’s Express’ point of sale system to ensure the code is only recognized once.

Mike’s Express plans to build on its email marketing success with the addition of a Facebook promotion and a holiday campaign aimed at doubling online sales of its discount carwash books in November and December.