5 Steps to Creating a Great Service Special

Drive a more revenue to your service department using Specials Campaign Manager and Experience Optimization.

With Specials Campaign Manager, you can easily publish Coupons and Slideshow Assets promoting your Service Specials across your Digital Storefront in just a few clicks, right from your Dealer.com ControlCenter. Now, due to a new enhancement to our award-winning personalization technology, Experience Optimization, you can strategically place Service Specials in front of consumers in-market for fixed operations.

Experience Optimization subscribers who want to take advantage of Fixed-ops Personalization, a feature we’ll be talking about at NADA and throughout 2020, first need to be sure their Parts and Service Specials are up to date on the website. Luckily, that’s where Specials Campaign Manager can help create great looking specials in seconds.

To get started, simply login to ControlCenter, click on Promotions and Media tab, select Specials Campaigns and Create. Then follow these easy steps.

Step 1: Create Your Service Special

First, select the type of special you want. Dealers can choose from five categories: Vehicle, Model Offer, Service, Parts, and Event/Other. Let’s start with a Service Special.

Step 2. Determine what type of service you want to promote.

You can select from cash discount, percent discount, fixed price, or no discount / price. For this example, let’s say you want to promote Winter Tire packages for 20% off. You’ll enter 20 as the discount value, then fill in the special heading, description, and disclaimer describing the details of the offer.

Below the main group of fields, you’ll notice a Tags field. You can choose from a list of Tags to identify the type of service offer. In this case you might select ‘Tires’. 

Note: You can choose to skip Tags, or you can select multiple ones, whichever you prefer. Tags can be used to help display specific service coupons on your website. For example, if you had a custom page telling customers all about winter tires and which types of tires you offer, you could include all of your ‘Tire’ coupons on the page as well.

Once you have entered all your info, click Next.

Step 3. Select the background image.

You can upload your own custom image, select from the library provided, or even skip it entirely. The system will automatically focus on the center of the image to responsively add visual interest for both Slideshow assets and Coupons shown on your website. Note: The background image should not include text, as it is the image that will be displayed behind the text you entered on the previous screen.

Specials Campaign Manager Step 2- Create Background
You’re almost done! Click Next.

Step 4. Set the Call to Action Label and Destinations

By default, Service Specials will open a form where shoppers can choose to print the offer or complete a form to request more information. You can also link to any page on your site, such as your Service Center or Service Scheduler. In the example shown, we have selected custom Call to Action text ‘Schedule Now’, and have entered the destination of a Service Schedule form.

Lastly, check the boxes of the locations on your site where you would like your special to appear, as well as the applicable start and end dates for this sale.

(Note: For Experience Optimization Package subscribers, we can now serve your service & parts specials slides to vehicle owners who return to your website looking for service.)

Specials Campaign Manager Step 2- Location Select
If you have your own custom assets, you can leverage those by clicking “Customize” below each display location. When a special is customized with your own creative, we will not display a background image or overlay the content you added on the previous screen for that specific display location. If you subscribe to our Managed Content and Creative Service, we can create and upload custom assets for you.

Finally, create your campaign! It’s that simple!

Specials Campaign Manager will render your specials in HTML5 using responsive styling that matches your website design and aligns with your brand.

Below you can see how the example service special we created would show as a slide and as a coupon.

Slideshow Example:

Specials Campaign Manager Step 5 - Homepage Display
Coupon/Special Example:

Specials Campaign Manager helps you create consistent specials across your Digital Storefront, and gets you closer to achieving your sales goals with very little heavy lifting. Whether you want to quickly leverage a new OEM incentive, move those final few models from last year, publicize a Brake Service special or promote a dealership charity event, we’ve got you covered.

As always, if you have any questions about using Specials Campaign Manager, reach out to your Performance Consultant or Digital Strategist.