CASE STUDY: Ostler Group
The Ostler Group Uses SurveyTown’s White-Label Function to Gather Valuable Data and Drive Revenue
The Ostler Group Uses SurveyTown’s White Label features to Gather Data for Its Customers and Drive Revenue
The Ostler Group is a full-service marketing agency that works primarily for owners and franchisees in the fast lube industry. When asked by a client if they could provide a better customer survey solution to gain insights on customer satisfaction, the Ostler group jumped at the chance to gather valuable data for their client and create a new service for themselves by white-labeling SurveyTown.
It was important to The Ostler Group to find a survey software that had white-label functionality so that they could impress their clients and boost their brand. We spoke with Shane Kump, a digital marketing manager at The Ostler Group to learn about how his company is using SurveyTown’s features to help its clients–see what he had to say.
[In the interest of confidentiality – the name of Ostler Group’s major client has been obfuscated and replaced with the title “MAJOR CLIENT”. The MAJOR CLIENT that is talked about below runs a group of franchises that offers Oil and Lube services]What is your company and who does it serve? What is your role at the company?
My name is Shane Kump and I am a digital marketing manager at The Ostler Group. The Ostler Group has 10 employees mainly serving fast lube industry owners and franchisees across the country. We serve about 30 different franchise owners for whom we run full-service digital advertising as well as print and radio marketing.
Why did you decide to start running surveys on behalf of your customers?
It started with a customer request. They had a survey platform that they were using–it just wasn’t customizable. It was too canned. We were asked by MAJOR CLIENT if we could help them create a better, more customizable survey program.
Our client initially wanted to gather feedback from their customers, but the different marketing opportunities that custom surveys would open up made this an extra exciting project. One of the questions we ask on behalf of MAJOR CLIENT is what services would their customers allow MAJOR CLIENT to perform on their car. We can use this data to run marketing campaigns for different audience segments.
We decided to white-label SurveyTown and we call the product TOG surveys. We have our own custom login domain and also when customers take surveys they go to a custom survey domain.
How and when do you ask MAJOR CLIENT’s customers to take surveys?
Surveys go out to customers the day after service via an email generated by Constant Contact. The process looks like this.
We log in to each owners’ back office and create a report of everyone that came in the previous day–including their first name, email address, and service location. When we send the email via Constant Contact, we customize the link in the email so that the location they had their service is pre-selected for the customer.
The customers click on these links and take the survey. Right now we log in and send three different emails but we are working on more customizations that will allow for the process of sending emails to be even more automated.
How do you know who is taking each survey?
We ask a required email address question in the survey which we can also use to create future marketing campaigns.
Do you use incentives to get customers to take the survey? What is your response rate?
We send the emails after their service and give them an $8 coupon for their next service automatically, then offer $12 off their next service if they take the survey. For one franchise group we are sending around 143 emails and get 3 responses a day and for another, we are sending 300 emails a day and get 5 or 6 responses per day.
We use SurveyTown’s ability to forward respondents to a webpage when the survey is complete to send the customer to the MAJOR CLIENT’s website for their coupon.
How are you monitoring results and delivering them to your client?
First, we email owners using SurveyTown’s automated notifications when a survey is completed. So a response comes in, and we have set up SurveyTown to notify the franchise owners of the response–we put all the data from the response into the email itself so they can quickly read it right there.
The manager wants to know what is the average store rating is, so we set up a dashboard. Every Monday morning, we email the manager with the results, which they actually print out and tack to a board so everyone can see it. We have also created our own custom dashboard to pull data from SurveyTown’s API so that managers and owners can keep track of satisfaction levels in real time and see them by location and by district.
How did you find SurveyTown? What other options did you consider
We were looking for a survey white-label functionality and found SurveyTown via a Google search. We also considered SurveyMonkey but their service did not feel like a true white-label service because you would still see the SurveyMonkey brand in places. Being able to customize the domain where the customers take the survey was also very important to us.
How do you make money from survey services?
We charge a per-location fee for the franchises. We work off of a retainer fee from our clients, so this is an additional service we can provide for the retainer fee.