The New Way to Bring In Customers

It’s a busy world, and taking time to go to your store is a luxury for some.

So MusicarNW started to conduct some of its in-store consults in a new way… by email.  It worked so well that now the majority of its sales are initiated by email.

Musicar is a higher end boutique shop located in Portland, OR.  Its close rate on email is 90 percent, about the same as in the shop.

“We were noticing it was getting more and more difficult for some of our clients to come into the store, so instead of losing the opportunity, we wanted to find a way to capture that,” said Musicar’s Nick Akin who led a seminar on converting email inquiries to customers at KnowledgeFest this month.

Musicar caters to BMW, Porsche and European car owners,  many of whom are busy professionals.  “Sometimes we have clients that are only in the country for 5 days out of the month.  They work so much… and if every store they call tells them to come in, they can’t,” Akin said.

The average time the shop spends on a client who comes in for a consult is 60 to 90 minutes. So selling by email can save time, although for some jobs, it can take longer, say if you are talking about a DSP processor.  But that email conversation can be stored and you may use it again for the next customer.

So here’s how Musicar does it.

Like any selling, you have to build a rapport first.   When an email comes in, “If I send a canned response it only gets a 50 percent return. So ask them a few questions. Initiate a conversation.  Ask why they are getting a backup camera.  Ask questions about their car,” said Akin.

The email should look professional, use complete sentences and punctuation.  And it should be formatted so you have sections with their own headlines so it’s easy to read.  The shop uses Flickr to shrink pictures so they load quickly.  Photos help keep the reader engaged. “When big corporations try to sell you stuff by email it’s never just text,” he said.

He uses a tracking program (Streak, but there are others) to see if the emails have been opened, at what time, and how many times.

And he breaks down quotes into an itemized bill that he puts into a Numbers (or Excel) chart that gets pasted into the email.

He doesn’t want 100 percent of the sale process to be in email.  If he sees that the customer hasn’t opened the email for a while (sometimes customers will open it up every day for days) he’ll give the customer a call and try to get him in the store.

Email also offers other opportunities for upselling. “I used to send out a canned email on backup cameras. Then I started offering front camera options.  If you don’t propose it, they will never ask for it.  Every sound system I propose, I add acoustic treatment [sound dampening] as an option at the bottom,” said Akin. Since he’s been including front cameras in the proposals he’s had a 100 percent attachment rate to his backup camera sales.

Another benefit of email, is if a price for a system is high you get a chance to explain it.

But, “you’ve gotta be good with written words.  I wasn’t when I started.  But if you are passionate about what you do and put that in your emails, it will come through,” he said.

“Customers are busier than they’ve ever been. They don’t want to go into the store until they have to.  So communicating with them the way they want to be communicated with is worth some of the inherent problems with email,” he added.