How car wash promotion drives loyalty

With car wash and valeting programs attracting growing attention – driven by improved volumes and strong margins – loyalty and engagement initiatives are increasingly central to how operators retain customers and differentiate from local competitors.

As highlighted at the recent Forecourt Trader Summit operators are seeking improved revenue streams due to the many pressures added to forecourt operator revenues in recent years. Car wash and valeting has emerged as a key area of focus, with over half of all forecourt users taking advantage of these services.

Car wash is widely recognised as a high-margin product and the significant drop in competition in this space, due to reductions in hand car wash competition, has contributed to increased volumes – and profits – for forecourt car wash and valeting programs.

The shift towards digital platforms

PSD Codax keypads are already a familiar sight on UK forecourts, However, the company has responded to enquiries about modernisation and information on consumer behaviour with the release of a digital platform to deliver wash service codes, in association with one of its sister companies – Digital Mosaic – compatible with most existing Codax keypads.

Drivers are very familiar with the problem of having a thousand apps for parking and retail loyalty, so ensuring that the application is simple and easy to use is important to avoid any additional friction that might prevent consumer take-up. Fortunately, the Mosaic app is designed with clean and intuitive visual messaging.

“There are a lot of apps out there that, when you open them up, have 4,000 things going on. Mosaic has laid it out so well that people download it, and they’re washing their car in minutes, no questions about it,” says Bobby Willis, CEO at Cool Wave Car Wash.

The customers’ private-label app currently has 5 stars in the Apple App Store and the customer is firmly where they want to be, harvesting technological insights and efficiencies to drive success.

“Mosaic’s data is going to help us steer our business in different directions… and, at the end of the day, make more money,” adds Willis.

Since adopting the cloud-based Mosaic platform, another customer saw subscription sign-ups explode. At one point, they recorded 600 subscriptions in one month and that’s just at one location. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the results,” Mike Black, owner at Valet Car Was. “It has exceeded my expectations. At some of our sites, the revenue is 90% from subscriptions,” he adds. 

Even better than the revenue stability that comes from adopting a subscription model is the fact that it all happens without much employee intervention.

“It’s one of the best decisions I ever made,” says Black.

Of course, high subscription rates aren’t the only way to achieving great revenue and returning profit on an investment in car wash. Traditional promotional tools like offering a free service after several purchases via a stamp card are very popular for driving sales volumes, but these often fail to collect purchase statistics, so an early benefit has been discovering so called ‘super users’ and their purchasing habits to target less frequent and new users with discounts.

One of the unexpected benefits noted by one operator was being able to remove the code generator from its shop completely, freeing up some much-needed space behind the tills for extra storage. Its POS provider requests car wash codes for both brush wash and jet wash over an API call to the same platform, so all the data is available in one easy-to-use online tool.

Another key advantage of an app-first approach has been to deal with the biggest unpredictable factor in the car wash industry: inclement weather. “We want to drive demand when the weather is bad. We can only wash 10-15 cars an hour per bay, so when it’s nice out, we’re at capacity,” says Nate Kessler, COO at Xtreme Clean.

This desire for flexibility around customer demand has encouraged the company to experiment with promotions and dynamic pricing based on the insights they’ve gained from the Mosaic app. “With the ability to send out push notifications, we can communicate with our customers and direct demand by offering time and weather discounts, in real time,” explains Kessler.

With The Mosaic platform removing the Codax Embedded Terminal from the shop, some operators expressed concern about falling footfall in the shop with other routes to purchase a car wash service. This can be addressed with a truly digitally connected forecourt experience for consumers, looking beyond traditional activation systems, with the benefit that operators can extract every data point around car wash purchases habits.

Why behaviour analysis leads to smarter promotions

The added benefits in behaviour analysis can not be understated, as no operator wants to give away margin on their otherwise profit-driving products to customers who would have purchased them anyway.

As discussed at the Forecourt Trader Summit, food and drink can bring high margins to operators, so offering discounts for coffee or breakfast deal purchases to be taken inside are a great way to boost per visit revenue and profit per customer, driving footfall through payment at the wash entry rather than eroding it.

Cross-promoting services on a digital forecourt requires a smart device capable of reacting to consumer data. PSD Codax have been working with an award-winning independent retailer to offer these features with the Auto Sentry Petro, but this is also available with the entry model SmartStart Pro, adding data points like equipment uptime and time of activation data to produce utilisation statistics.

Supported by the car wash business management platform WashConnect, which is popular with multi-site car wash businesses worldwide, it’s the type of product that enables the entire wash estate to be managed centrally and efficiently 24/7.

PSD Codax also reveals that its most forward-thinking customers use these modern payment systems to tie promotions to select wash services, such as top wash service only, restrict some of them to certain times of day or even – only for qualifying loyalty members – scanning their loyalty app-generated barcode. ANPR can be used to run these passively in the same way as subscription models, but most forecourt operators prefer to collect some personal information via their store loyalty platform to enable them to contact the consumer with one-time-use unique promotions.

The digitisation and cross-promotion at every consumer touchpoint, be it POS in the shop, pay at pump or at the car wash, ensures consumers are well informed about the services available and reduces friction in the decision-making process. This ensures promotions that boost revenue and don’t erode per visit spend.

Discover how to improve your car wash services: psdcodax.com