About 90 days ago, we ran a LivingSocial promotion. Read about our early lessons learned to see the history of this experiment.
Some quick stats:

• We sold 340 deals, and have seen about 150 redeemed. Of those 150 who’ve used their deal, we have seen 3 or 4 $1500 upsells where our customers have needed more work than just an oil change.

• About 90% of customers only needed an oil change, so there was no opportunity to try to upsell them.

So while it’s too early to call this campaign a profitable one, we have learned a few things that we’ll share with you. Thanks to our fantastic retail manager Vince Ferrara for taking the time to share these lessons with us so we can share them with you.
4 More Lessons We Learned from LivingSocial
1) You get a lot of new customers – We are seeing a lot of folks we’ve never seen before in our garages. This can’t be a bad thing, even if we lose 100% on these oil change. And we’re not losing 100%.
2) It’s best to do a promotion like this in the fall – August – October are often slower months. Doing this in the fall means our shops stay busy and that’s a very good thing.
3) We weren’t set up to do this in our garages – We aren’t an oil change center, and we never will be. Though clients didn’t see or feel this inefficiency, our employees did. That being said, we could reconfigure our garage to make this a little easier for our guys to do things faster.
4) We have to be very watchful that folks follow our deal the way we structured it – Some customers overlooked the fact we said 3 times, same customer, same car, and tried to get multiple cars done. We had to remind these folks of the deal, and most left when we pointed this out to them.
After 90 days, we’re feeling pretty good about our investment. We’ll update you again in about 90 more days. By then, we’ll know whether or not this was a profitable experiment, or if it was just inexpensive advertising for us. Hopefully this case study helps you decide whether or not LivingSocial is for your business or not.
Got questions? Got a suggestion to make this even more useful? Drop a note to Captain Reman and if we use your question or suggestion in a future edition, we’ll send you a free Reman University t-shirt. How cool is that?
Get More Connected with Reman University
Live events: We’re taking Reman University on the road by attending a ton of trade shows this fall, and we’d LOVE to see you at some of them! We do a bunch of cool stuff at our booths, like life sized Jenga games, live video broadcasts, and much more. Check out this picture of some folks at our booth at a recent show.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Online coolness: Check out the ETE REMAN Facebook fan page for some of the past trade shows we’ve attended, and to see what’s coming next. We frequently post automotive tips you can use (and share with your customers), and we offer even more tips on how to improve your sales, marketing, customer service and management. And we’ve even got some video from some recent trade events, and are starting to broadcast live from our booth. Check us out!