Elite Garages

BACKGROUND

Elite Garages have a 50 year track record of providing MOTs, vehicle servicing, tyres and free safety checks among others. Three generations have worked hand-in-hand making it a successful family business bringing quality, professionalism and convenience to 18 locations across the south and south-east of England. 

Elite started at a petrol station in High Wycombe all those years ago (before the internet and social media) and have grown to where they are now one of the leading fast-fit retailers in the country. Thanks to continued investment and dedication, as a member of Group Tyre, Elite Garages represents more than 15% of the total tyres sold in the UK.

The Objective:

Elite had its first website over 20 years ago and working with cam-systems.com (who provide Elite's Tyre ERP platform) and are a trusted partner of WSI during 2019 were looking to develop their 5th generation eCommerce website.  They also wanted to rely less on PPC to generate new customer leads and repeat business and develop new strategies to continue to grow their business and improve their return on investment..

New Website Audience & Mission:

There are two main audiences (new and existing customers) and two different types of customer, mainly retail (owners of private vehicles or self employed vehicle owners) but also businesses with fleets of vehicles.

The main purpose for engaging with these audiences is to educate (to a degree) as to what vehicle maintenance is required and when, both from a safety, legal requirement and cost efficiency perspective.

Then to also provide quick and easy access to the services those customers might need (tyres, vehicle servicing, free safety checks etc) 24 hours a day 7 days a week via the eCommerce website.  The Marketing Automation facility also ensures existing customers access the free reminder service that ensures they don’t break the law (vehicles over 3 years old have to pass a Ministry of Transport (MOT) Test annually. So Elite ensures all customers get reminders for this and the regular servicing that is required by the vehicle manufacturers to retain their vehicle’s warranty.

WSI's Solution:

WSI started by helping the management team map out a more tailored Digital Marketing Mix. Implemented elements included the new website launched August 2020, content marketing (in the form of new website content, regular blogs and videos) as well as social media marketing through significant investment in their 15 Google My Business listings including weekly posts and offers.  

As well as over a thousand 'company reviews' on Reviews.io across Elite's 14 sites they have another 1,382 reviews with an average star rating of 4.7 out of 5! (as at April 2021).

Finally, WSI also helped Elite implement more sophisticated Service and MOT reminder processes via the roll-out of Campaigns via Sharpspring (email) and Text Local (SMS) as well as outbound campaigns to support seasonal or brand specific offers.

THE RESULTS

One key enabler is Online reputation as it impacts conversion rates and ROI across the board including; PPC, Organic Traffic, traffic and leads to/from their Google My Business (GMB) listing, Social Media and even direct traffic.  We suggested using reviews.io to send daily, and now weekly, email review requests to customers. We manage this process for them and doing so also identified an issue with email address collection which has been addressed, resulting in email collection rates across their 14 depots to improve dramatically from below 60% to 81%, with some achieving as high as 97%. The 5 Star Ratings on Google were as low as 3.1 (average 3.7 across all depots) with only 19 reviews per depot when we first started, leaving them exposed and impacting their visible reputation even though we knew they did a constantly great job.  They now have 1,355 Google reviews across all depots (70+ on average) with an average 4.8 stars out of 5 and 2,363 reviews across all platforms (Reviews.io, Facebook, Yell etc) increasing by 150+ every single month.

Most customers call by phone to book a service, MOT or other maintenance rather than completing an online booking/reservation (although that is increasing month on month). So the best indicator of success of the various elements of the implemented Digital Marketing Strategy are inbound call enquiries, the tracking of which we helped set-up via Response Tap.  In Aug 2019 when we first started tracking calls across all sources there were 3,370 calls in total and whilst seasonality and COVID-19 has undoubtedly had it’s impact, as of March 2021 the calls were up to 4,563 (up 93% over the same period last year) with GMB up 41% (3,976 calls) PPC down slightly at 326 calls and Organic SEO up 467% (reflecting the more recent investment) at 261 calls.

There are many other metrics we track together on a monthly basis, in order to flex the campaigns and maximise ROI but the above are perhaps are the biggest indicators of success both as a result of the newly designed and implemented website and the way the Elite Management team work with WSI and it’s other trusted partners to achieve success.