What if a small tweak could transform your customer retention game? 

In the premiere episode of Back for More, Amy LaVange and JP Scoville reveal how Oilstop, a quick lube and car wash brand, boosted midweek traffic by 28% in just 24 hours. With creative segmentation, smart automation, and Cinch’s powerful tools, they turned data into action and drove meaningful results without disrupting their weekend business. 

From personalized email strategies to an oil change calculator that builds trust, this episode unpacks every detail behind Oilstop’s success. Learn how to engage your existing customers, clean up your data, and create campaigns that deliver real-time impact. 

🎧 Tune in now to discover actionable strategies and start transforming your customer retention efforts today! 

What if I told you that a simple shift in your marketing strategy could boost customer retention by 28%? It's not just possible. It's exactly what Oilstop accomplished with their latest campaign.

And in this episode of Back for More, we are breaking it all down.

I'm JP Scoville, VP of Customer Success, and I'm here with Amy Lavange, our VP of Marketing. To unpack how Oilstop, a thriving quick lube and car wash business, went from stagnant retention rates to explosive midweek growth.

We'll go behind the scenes of Oilstop's approach, from game changing email strategies to the power of automation. Plus, we'll, we'll share lessons that you can use to supercharge your own retention efforts. Starting today.

This isn't just theory. It's practical strategies, real results, and insights from a team that's mastered the art of staying connected with their customers.

Listen to Back for More on your favorite podcast platform and discover how you can take your customer attention to the next level. Hi, J.P. hey, Amy.

Today we're gonna be digging into a fantastic case study that we have done with one of our favorite customers, Oilstop Drive Thru Oil Change and Happy's Car Wash. You've worked with them. When you think about them, what stands out to you the most?

What stands out the most? Wow. They have a lot going on.

So I think probably one of the standouts that I'd bring up is that Jay is a really creative marketer and he's brought a lot to the table as he's tried to deliver solid results for the organization. Some of the strategies that he's deployed have really changed and impacted the business in solid ways.

Yeah. It wasn't just luck. It was strategic and creative on his part. He was saw a problem, he figured out how to fix it.

And that's what we're going to dig into with our conversation today. So, about Oilstop, can you give us some context around some of the challenges that they were facing as they started working with us?

Yeah, so Oilstop's been with us for, for a little while now, and they've been growing their brand pretty significantly. I think they're up to 30 locations now, plus six car wash locations, so starting to get a much larger customer base.

One of the things that comes with that is the challenge to understand and engage with them in smarter ways.

And so as they, as they started to think that through, one of the things that Jay surfaced was that he wanted to drive retention at specific locations that were struggling midweek. And so how, how Did. How did he want to go about that?

He took the time to think it through and he came up with the campaign idea to really target communications at that location and started that communication later in the afternoon.

That did a bunch of experimentation around this, but ended up targeting that communication later during the day, midweek, so that could drive specific results. And he got results really quickly. Within 24 hours, he was able to see a 20, 28% bump in traffic at his stores based off of that, that communication.

And it can continue to grow over the next two or three days, which was awesome.

Yeah, I heard up to 72 hours. I think he had 28% boost the first day and then 26 and then 24 all the way up through the weekend.

And notably, something that he was especially proud of was that they did not have a higher number of unsubscribes to their emails as they were sending out these. And as a marketer, I know that that is something that you're always worried about.

You send out an email and just cross your fingers and hope that you're not going to have a bunch of people unsubscribe, usually because it's not very targeted to you, which is another thing that we can go into.

But the other thing that was notable was that while they did increase the midweek traffic, solving their problems, it did not decrease their weekend traffic.

Right.

Which I imagine if I were Jay, I would have been concerned about that, trading off days.

Right, right. Definitely don't want to cannibalize that weekend traffic.

Right, right. So before Jay came to Cinch and started using Cinch, he was using a couple of other solutions to communicate with his customers.

He was using a product called Throttle, which is very commonly used in the automotive industry, as you know. And I think he was using it to send out postcards and on a limited basis, send out some email campaigns.

And then he also using Klaviyo, which is really a great E commerce product, but he found that it wasn't giving him exactly what he needed in his business. Do you have any insight for us about what it was that he wasn't loving about Throttle and Klaviyo and what brought him to Cinch in the first place?

I think some of the challenges that he came across with Throttle specifically were around email content and being able to publish and send email when he needed to and wanted to. Their infrastructure is built in a way that you need help to be able to do that rather than going in and doing it yourself.

And so some of the turnaround times were a little slower than he was hoping for. Klaviyo solved that problem.

He was able to go in and really jump in and send email, create email content, do everything he wanted to from a creative standpoint within the platform. The challenge he ran across within Klaviyo was really in the way that data was built and managed.

He wanted to be able to send communications around a vehicle. If you've got multiple vehicles in a household. He wanted to be able to target the vehicle that was coming due for an oil change.

And, and he couldn't do that with Klaviyo. It was customer record that he was speaking to.

And so the challenge came when he was trying to get a little bit deeper into the data and target those communications.

From what he told us, he really liked that Cinch could be customized to his industry. And I think that that's. It's worth mentioning that that is one of the real strengths of Cinch as a customer data platform.

It makes it possible for you to pull in any data point that you're collecting in your system. So his point of sale was, of course, collecting the vehicle data. It was his possession.

And Cinch allowed him to use that data to personalize his outreach and be a lot more flexible in the way that he was able to communicate with his customers. Is that right?

Yeah.

So as he's solving for some of these problems, we know that he's having not just this midweek dip in traffic, but trying to get better at engaging his customer base. What role does automation and segmentation play in his strategy?

I mean, it's, it's key. It's the foundation of what he's trying to build with his customers. Right.

As far as driving customer experience, you have to have the right segmentation to be able to communicate at the right time with those customers. And in this case, speaking of vehicles, previously to the right customer vehicle in the, in the communication.

And so without that segmentation, it would. You would be missing things. Automation is also key to what he was trying to do.

As you build out campaigns, rather than sending large broadcast campaigns out to customers, one of the things that Cinch drives for is the ability to target our communications to, to a customer when they need that communication.

And so we've built a proprietary oil change calculator so that we can calculate specifically when a customer needs to receive the communication, when their car is due. And that's one of the key elements to the relationship you have with your customer.

You want to make sure that you're building trust with those customers. Some of Our competition in the past has always targeted it around time.

So it's always around the 90 day mark that a customer would receive a communication as to when their vehicle was due, but the vehicle itself was telling them that they weren't due yet and they weren't due for another three, four, five months. And so there was a lack of trust in that relationship with the customer.

And that's what we've really tried to do with our oil change calculator is target the communications and build segments specifically to when that customer is due so that we have the right timing associated with it to build that trust.

Another real value of collecting all that customer data and then being able to use it.

I think the strategy for his midweek email was that he was able to spot a problem quickly, get creative and go in and find a solution by deploying this midweek campaign that had such great results. He didn't have to sit around and wait for anybody and is able to pull in the customer data.

I would argue that segmentation was a key part of that.

When he spotted the problem at a location, he needed to build a segment specific to the location and specifically for the right parameters around that. So a customer potentially that was due for an oil change, but hadn't yet come in to come in for that oil change or a different service.

And so segmentation to me is really one of the foundational elements to any automated or comm or campaign, automated journey or campaign to make sure that we are getting the right customers. The messaging, according to Jay, the marketer. Right. Jay's going in and he's going to figure out exactly who he wants in that, in that communication.

2017 Toyota Camry is due for an oil change. Coming due for an oil change or however he chooses to phrase it in his campaign.

And that's something you wouldn't be able to do with a different system that doesn't have that data in it. So.

Yeah, yeah.

And something else I've noticed is I've gone to oil change places before who, as is very common for an oil change place, send me an email, send me a coupon, try to get me to come back in.

But so often it's either long past when I needed it to be done, so I've already gone somewhere else, or they send me the same email three different times. One with my name, one with my son's name, one with my name spelled incorrectly.

And, you know, as another little plug or note about Cinch, Cinch is really good as a CDP about cleaning up that customer data. So I'm only in the system once, I'm only to get the email once, and it's going to have a lot better of an impact.

And I imagine that's probably something that supports the lack of unsubscribes because people are just getting the message that's right for them. And this is Marketing Automation 101. Right.

But a lot of systems don't allow you to personalize to this level, especially for local businesses that are connected to a point of sale that have so much data. You know, as a B2B marketer, I have a lot of information, all the people in my CRM.

But as a local business, your point of sale holds all that info and it's often just inaccessible to you. You can't just decide to use it in a campaign. So I think as a, as a CDP, it's one of the values 100%.

As I look at customer data, as customers come into the, into the singe platform, one of the things that we do is look at how many customer records they have in the system, total customer records, and then how many we're actually marketing to and what that delta is. And I find that we can be anywhere between 10 and 40% invariance. Right.

There's that much duplicity in the data where customers have been added multiple times with the same phone number, same email address, slightly different name or the same name. But the cd, the platform that they're using doesn't match the customer data in a way that reduces or dedupes that data to make it streamlined.

And that's why you're going to get three emails for the same communication, because the platform didn't, didn't minimize or dedupe that data.

Right, right. And that dreaded unsubscribe. I mean, it's a really good reason to not send the same email three times, but it's not necessarily a cost.

And I'm deviating a little bit from the story with J. But other communications that you're sending to your customers might cost. Your text messages probably cost regardless of how you're sending them.

Postcards, postcards certainly cost Definitely cost.

And if you're sending the same postcard, three postcards to one household and let's just say you're only doing it to 25% of your customer base, that's still an incredible increase in the cost that you're spending to try to get that customer back in the door.

Yeah.

One of the strategies that I've seen around cost and managing cost within our journeys is to pick and choose when we use different channels so we can look at the data and say, you know what, I've got a phone number, I want to use SMS for this customer or I've got a phone number and an email.

Let's use both channels to communicate with this customer and then save the higher cost elements like a post postcard specifically for when you don't have those other channels available. And so you can choose to send a postcard when you don't have an email or a phone number, but you do have a good solid address.

And so that really will minimize your cost but still get provide the ability for you to communicate with that customer when they're due for their, their next service.

Postcard would go straight into my garbage can anyway so the system could tell the oil change place that I go to, hey, don't bother wasting your money on a postcard for her.

We do find that postcards drive a pretty decent return.

Oh, so there are a lot of customers who on that long walk, walk back from the mailbox, they're looking at that postcard and deciding whether or not there's enough value there to come back into the shop.

I guess that probably is true for me too. But if I'm taking the long walk back to my house, it's not that, not that long for me.

But if I'm walking back into the house and I see it, even if it gets stashed to the side and thrown away, if they've also emailed me, then I can just pull it up and use that instead. It's still just a trigger, a brand touch.

It's the brand touch. It's exactly right.

But still, we don't need three brand touches. Just one postcard will do.

You know what, I think that this story with Jay really proves that when you combine the right strategy with the right tools, the results speak for themselves.

They do.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's get in some rapid fire takeaways for our listeners here. Okay, jb, you had to pick one trick from Oil Stops Playbook. What would it be?

Don't always think big picture. Don't always think all customers think at the location level. Think about how you can drive value for a specific store and target the communication.

So if you, if you find that you've got low peak times or low car count at specific hours of the day, start figuring out how you can target a campaign to address that problem. And Cinch is capable of delivering solid results there.

Very cool.

What lessons here do you think most businesses overlook when it comes to retention?

I think the thing that Jay's story has taught me and can teach a lot of local businesses or service based businesses, businesses who have that same repeatable motion where they're collecting their customer data is that when you have a problem needing more business midweek or whatever your problem might be, a lot of local businesses look to driving new business. Let's create a new ad.

Let's put somebody on this on the street with a sign to just get new cars into our base instead of looking at this gold mine that they have right there within their system. As long as they can access the data, of course. Like I keep singing, it's the same song I've been singing this whole podcast.

So often we waste money trying to get new business when even though we know as marketers and business owners, it's a lot cheaper and a lot easier to just activate the customer base that I already have. And in Jay's situation, he didn't get that creative. He just had to get creative.

He had to spot the need, think it through, and have a tool that made it possible for him to be.

Able to solve the problem, to segue on that. I think that the creative part was actually finding the problem.

Oh yeah.

And so once he found the problem, I don't know that it was really, it was just addressing it to come up with the solution and then using the tools that he had at hand to solve for it.

So for a business that's new to retention campaigns, maybe customer marketing is not something that they've done up to this point. Where should they start?

I don't know that it matters where they start. It's just that they do start. They really just need to start something.

There's lots of different ways to run this, but you could look at a group of customers, a segment of customers that's just lost, hasn't come back in 24 months or a year, and just start some sort of communication path associated with that. It's really just start, just do something.

One of the great things about retention and this customer base is there are a lot of ways, a lot of different ways that you can communicate with these customers. And the beauty in the Cinch platform is that we've created the ability to experiment a lot with these, with these campaigns.

And so you can go in and A, B, C, whatever, whatever number of tests you'd like to run, you can test all the time with your campaigns. Especially with a lost customer group. There's so much that you can do.

Different subject lines, different offers, different, different, different, different. Right. There's so many different things that you can test to see what drives results.

And so you just need to start, find a segment, start and then test.

You know, something that I've learned as a marketer is that the best way to find a result and see what's working is to make sure before you run the campaign, before you launch the test, you've already decided how you're going to track and see whether or not it's going to work.

So many times in my career I've launched a campaign and then a few days later thought, oh, I didn't use the right tracking or I'm not using a tool that's going to really allow me to see that impact. So then you're just kind of crossing your fingers and using anecdotal. Well, I think we had more cars in our bays this week.

Something that's cool about the way that Jay is using Cinch is that Jay has real time results about how his campaigns are working. He's able to spot those numbers.

He didn't just decide to send out a blast in the middle of the week to all of his customers and then hope cars were going to come in. He saw the results, he saw the 28%, 26%, 24%. He saw that the weekend traffic stayed up. He was paying attention to those numbers.

And I think all local businesses could learn a lesson from Jay in that sense. Pay attention, pay attention to the data and let that drive your decisions.

And with a real time integration into his point of sale. And he sees that those results immediately. Right.

So next day, during that 24 hour period, when he saw the 28% increase, he saw the car count coming in. And so it was really satisfying for him to know that the results of his campaign were achieved next day.

Oh yeah, I bet his boss was pretty happy about it too.

Yeah, we have several customers that run campaigns along these lines and all the time they're talking to me about how quickly they can see the results and the value.

I feel like as a marketer you're constantly having to prove yourself and prove that, hey, all this thing all these things that I'm doing during the day is actually having real results. So being able to have a report that you can show your boss.

In fact, I think, I hope I'm not wrong, but I think in the conversation we had with him, his boss, the CEO would say, oh, hey, our numbers are down. Go, go. Click that easy button. And that's what Jay, that's what Jay was calling the campaign he did.

He called Cinch the easy button he would push when they needed a boost in car count. And it started with this midweek campaign.

But he's done it for a lot of other things rather than just the once a month blast to everybody that he was sending before. He's very dynamic with the campaigns he runs.

Now he runs holiday promotions on top of the automated campaigns that he has going that just naturally reach out to people when they're coming due for their oil change, which he's also all the time running. Correct.

Correct.

Amy, what's a tactical takeaway that we could pull from this campaign or from the business strategy that Jay deployed that you could use across another industry?

First, pay attention to the data. And we've talked about this already.

I know, but the tactical takeaway from this exact campaign that he ran is that he was looking at the numbers, he, he spotted a problem and he decided to solve that problem.

Yeah.

So that's tactical takeaway number one. And it might seem like a no brainer, but I've been shocked at how many people are not doing this.

They're just running their campaigns and hoping they work. That's number one.

Number two, is that something I noticed when we spoke to Jay is that he really paid attention to what his customers wanted and what would make them happy. And I think that he's done some of that with some of the coupon strategies he' had and how they're offering discounts in other campaigns.

But in this particular campaign, something people want is their weekends free. And he mentioned that people who don't want to go on the weekends and use their weekend, they're just going to go wherever is close.

And he solved that for them. Now you can still spend your weekends with your family, but you can come right here where you've been before.

You know us, you know you're, we're going to do a good job and hey, here's a little bit of a discount to come in the next 24 hours. Paid attention to what they wanted. And he actually said those words. It wasn't just fluff, he meant them.

That's great. Great insight.

Before we wrap this up, let's give a little bit of love to the team and the tools that made this possible for Jay.

Let me just highlight how I appreciate the way Jay thinks about problems. One of the problems that Jay solved was how to take care of customers when they've had to wait longer than expected.

He's built in Cinch the ability to see wait times for customers and if it goes longer than what he would like, what he's designed for his customers, then he's created the ability to communicate directly with those customers with a message from their CEO apologizing for the extended wait time and giving them an offer for a return visit.

And he's doing that before they leave a negative review somewhere and complain about it.

Spot on. But he's, but, but before that, I don't think he's doing it to avoid a negative review.

He's doing it to make sure he's driving a great customer experience. Experience for his, for his guests.

Things like that have happened to me where I get a message from the CEO if I have a bad experience, but only if I make a fuss about it.

Right.

So being a business that is just genuinely prioritizing your experience. Ah, that's refreshing.

It is.

One of the coolest parts about this case study is how tailored Cinch was for Jay for his particular industry. In his case, quick lube for Oilstop.

What stands out to you about the benefit of being able to tailor the system and to the industry that you're in and the use case that you have?

You were talking earlier about how the vehicle information could be brought into email templates. And it triggered a thought for me because it's not just vehicle information that's available in Cinch. There's a lot of data that's easily accessible.

So we have one customer that's leveraging a full invoice to show up in a post transaction email to a customer. It's got every line item in there. It's got the vehicle information associated with it. It's sent personally to the guests.

And at the very bottom of it, we layer another element into it, which is, which would be the recommended services that the manufacturer has got and the mileage driven by that vehicle. So it's, it's really slick how you can pull in multiple layers of data to really customize the communication.

The fact is, when, especially when you're running marketing for a lot of locations like Jay is. You only have so many hours in the day and there's a lot of problems to solve. So it's so admirable that he spotted the problem and he solved it.

But one of the things that he mentioned is that Cinch is saving him time. Are there other ways that he is having time, experiencing time savings with the strategies he's deploying?

I mean, foundationally, the automation itself is saving him time. Right. He's built a strong foundation of journeys that just run in the background and do most of his communication for him.

That really frees up the ability for him to focus on other problems. Sometimes it's a location level, sometimes higher. In this case, I would say that it was location level driven.

He was seeing a problem at a location, wanted to target the campaign to that location, but it's easily repurposed. It's not a problem that's isolated to that location. It's going to come up somewhere else.

And so he can repurpose that campaign campaign, adjust the segmentation, and then run the same play over and over again as it. As it rears its head at a different location.

Right.

And because he has freed up his time and he's not writing and sending emails or coming up with new campaigns every time he has the time to spot that data.

Because I've learned that sometimes you're so deep in execution and trying to deploy your campaigns, you miss the results or you miss spotting the problems. And there's always. There's always another problem to solve. Thanks for joining us on our Back for More podcast.

Be sure to download our win-back campaign toolkit. It has templates and email sequences that you can get going with right away to amp up your own retention efforts.