How do you improve service retention without sending more offers, giving away more margin or spending more on marketing?
That question was at the center of Inmar Automotive’s recent conversation on Ted Ings’ Fixed Ops Roundtable, a community that brings together dealership operators, retail leaders and automotive industry partners to exchange ideas shaping the future of fixed operations.
Inmar’s Jesse Forbes and Sleiman Serhan joined Ted Ings, Sarah Vantine and Aleks Keric, Platform Director at Murgado Automotive Group, to discuss a smarter approach to fixed ops marketing — one built around understanding which customers actually need to be influenced, what could change their behavior and whether the marketing ultimately made a difference.
Here are three key takeaways for dealers looking to strengthen service retention without simply increasing discounts or marketing spend.
1. Turn Dealership Data Into Retention Opportunities
Dealerships are already sitting on valuable customer intelligence.
Service history, repair orders, vehicle information, mileage, warranty status and declined services don’t just tell you who to market to next. Together, they can provide signals about where each customer relationship may be headed.
Instead of simply asking who is due for service or who should receive the next campaign, dealers can ask more valuable questions:
- Who’s likely to return without an incentive?
- Who’s showing signs of defection?
- Who could be influenced with the right intervention?
That shift matters.
Rather than starting each month by choosing one service offer and distributing it broadly, dealerships can use first-party data to make more individualized decisions about who receives a message, when they receive it, which channel to use and whether they need an incentive at all.
2. One Customer Database Doesn't Mean One Marketing Strategy
Not every customer needs a discount to come back.
Consider a loyal customer who has serviced consistently at your dealership for years. If that customer is already highly likely to return, a $50 incentive may not generate an incremental visit.
It may simply turn a repair order you were already going to receive into a repair order with $50 less margin.
Now consider a valuable customer whose behavior is changing. Maybe the time between visits is increasing. Maybe they declined recommended work during their last appointment.
For that customer, an incentive could play a very different role: changing a decision rather than subsidizing one they’ve already made.
During the Roundtable, Sleiman Serhan described this as “profit-first offer governance”: determining the minimum effective offer needed to influence behavior rather than defaulting to the same discount for everyone.
Aleks Keric contrasted that approach with the traditional “spray and pray” model of sending one campaign to an entire database. The alternative is effectively creating thousands of individualized campaigns based on thousands of individual customer relationships.
Personalization isn’t just about making the offer more personalized. It’s about determining whether the customer needs an offer in the first place.
3. Prove Your Marketing Is Making a Difference
A customer receives a service offer and completes a repair order the following week. Did the marketing work? Unclear.
Traditional attribution may credit that repair order to the campaign. But that doesn’t answer the more important question:
Would that customer have returned anyway?
The panel discussed how holdout testing can help dealerships get closer to the answer. A portion of eligible customers receives no marketing treatment, creating a baseline against which the behavior of marketed customers can be compared.
If customers who received marketing behave differently from comparable customers who didn’t, that difference provides a more credible view of the incremental impact created by the campaign.
For dealership leaders evaluating marketing performance, that distinction matters.
The goal shouldn’t simply be to maximize how much revenue a marketing platform can attribute to marketing. It should be to understand how much customer behavior the marketing actually changed.
Retention Is a Series of Decisions, Not a Campaign
Customer retention isn’t won or lost with one offer.
It’s the cumulative result of individual decisions made throughout the ownership lifecycle.
And defection often starts quietly.
Visits become less frequent. Recommended work gets declined. Service intervals stretch. Then, eventually, the customer disappears.
The earlier a dealership can recognize those signals, the more opportunity it has to influence the relationship while it is still winnable — rather than spending more later trying to bring a lost customer back.
That requires a different approach to service marketing:
- Understand the customer.
- Identify the risk or opportunity.
- Determine whether intervention is needed.
- Use the right message or incentive.
- Measure whether it actually changed behavior.
That’s where Inmar Automotive’s approach comes into the conversation: using dealership first-party data and predictive intelligence to help determine who to reach, when to reach them and what action is appropriate then measuring whether that intervention created an incremental result.
And these are only a few of the ideas covered during the Fixed Ops Roundtable. The full conversation also includes Aleks Keric’s perspective on putting this approach into practice across Murgado Automotive Group and the impact he has seen on retention.
Hear How Dealers Are Putting This Into Practice
Watch the full Fixed Ops Roundtable conversation to hear more from Ted Ings, Jesse Forbes, Sleiman Serhan, Sarah Vantine and Aleks Keric on individualized service marketing, customer retention, smarter incentive strategies and more credible measurement of marketing performance.