M&S COLLISION
In 1983, Mongkol Auto Body Shop was open. With the combination of old world quality and new world technology, Mongkol and his family has continued to provide the highest level of service and craftsmanship to the Bay Area.
Today as M & S Collision (Mongkol and Sons), look to continue the family tradition of providing a great value along with unsurpassed quality. They’ve recently opened a new location in Bay area to expand their services. Staff are professionally trained craftsmen who will do a quality job of restoring your vehicle at a fair price while maintaining a family atmosphere.
But, thanks to the power of the internet, M & S Collision also has customers throughout the California. He launched the company’s website in 2011, and since then has reached to a wide range of customers interested in repairing and rebuilding their automobiles.
The Challenge
Monghal said, it was time to take a look at the brand to see how it had evolved and grown in the form of a brand redesign.
“We looked at our brand and what we noticed was it was really hard to tell a succinct story,” she said. “We looked like separate brands; we didn't even really appear that we were under one umbrella. So, it could appear like we had a separate Repairing brand and a separate Auto-body brand, for instance.”
“We might have had some clients who fixed Automobile from us but had no idea that we offer a branding capability or BodyShop repair services capability. So, our challenge was really to tell one succinct, clear story that would allow our associates and our clients to better understand who we were,” he said.
The marketing team spent sometime doing quantitative and qualitative research, interviewing associates and some clients as well “to really see how people perceived us,” she said.
“Our website was one of our main challenges. We wanted to quickly grab that user’s attention and let them grasp who we are, why we do what we do and what we offer,” she said.
What We Did
Even before finishing the re brand, the marketing team did a lot of research into the current website, why it wasn’t working and why it’s performance metrics weren’t what they wanted them to be.
“Immediately, we noticed we didn't have proper analytics set up,” Monghal said. “We needed to better understand who's coming to our site, how many people are coming to our site and what they are doing when they get to our site.”
The team decided to move to an inbound marketing strategy to get the foot traffic on the site to boost metrics and truly answer those questions.
Step #1. Keep website design simple and intuitive
“We try to make it really simple,” Monghal said. “If you, as a user, come to our site and want to find something, we want you to find it. We don’t want it to be buried or confusing, and obviously, we also want it to be very aesthetically pleasing.”
The previous navigation made it difficult for visitors to get to the information they needed. Some options in the original menus were worded strangely, and it was poorly organized, overall.
“We create great spaces with beautiful work environments, so our website also had to reflect that as well. It needed to look very creative, forward-thinking and be visually pleasing. So, it was a balance; it really was a balance of that great user experience and, at the same time, really showcasing who we are as a brand and why we do what we do,” he said.
The website, in an effort to be a better representation of the brand as well as aesthetically pleasing, also integrated these new elements:
A dynamic background video
A responsive page header and menu
Full-screen navigation overlay
Interactive images and links
Featured content
‘Continental Cares’ statistics
Upcoming event announcements
The brand’s tone on the website also became more informal as well. The team wanted to strike a conversational, yet still professional, tone,Monghal said.
“We've made an effort to be more conversational in tone and to be very approachable — because we're in this together. We want our clients to have a great experience — a great memorable experience — and we want to build those long-lasting relationships,” she said.
Another element that Monghal and her team incorporated this year was a pop-up, or lightbox, that appears to users the first time they visit the site and promotes new content like the brand magazine or a case study.
“You're always worried that you're going to annoy somebody coming to your site with a pop-up or a form to fill out, but I haven't found that to be the case,” he said.
Adding the pop-up has been worth the risk, she added, because they have gotten a lot of leads from it.
“You can always change it … we've learned a lot just by testing. Everybody has different customers, and you just need to understand what is going to resonate with your customers.”
If, through testing, the team realizes that a website element is not working, they try to understand why it’s not working and fix it before simply abandoning it.
“It may not be that it's a bad idea; maybe we're just not going about it in the right way,” he said. “Everything we do is a test since all of it is pretty new to our organization. We're constantly just looking at what's working and what's not working for us.”
Step #2. Set up the customer journey
Previously, the team had no way of tracking and scoring prospects. With this overhaul of the website, they decided to integrate lead scoring capabilities. The team set up a series of actions that would, combined with metrics, quantify a marketing qualified lead.
“I went in and manually assigned point values to different things that people do. So, whether that is opening in an email or clicking on a social link or downloading a piece of content, those are things we assign positive numbers [point values] to. Now if somebody unsubscribes from our blog or something like that, we'll assign a negative number,” Monghal said.
That way, the team could go into the contact database, see that a person has a score of 30 and understand that they are a marketing qualified lead. Whereas someone who has a score of eight, for example, is clearly not ready to be passed on to the sales team.
“We really worked hard to identify [these prospects]. That was something new for us … But so far this year, we have identified more than 600 marketing qualified leads. So, what that tells us is that people are engaging on the site,” she said.
Part of ranking up points as a marketing qualified lead is following along the consumer journey. Within each email campaign, Monghal said, there are downloadable content offers as well as nurturing emails.
Alternately, if someone downloads a piece of content from the website, the team has their email address. That person will get a follow-up email a day or so after that download to thank them as well as offer them another piece of relevant content.
“For instance, they could download, let's just say, a white paper. Well, they're at that far end of the journey where the next step might be to do a follow-up email with, ‘Hey, here's a great checklist,’ and that checklist takes them further into their buyer journey,” she said.
Adding in this nurturing aspect was incredibly important, she said, especially understanding the right time to turn that prospect over to the sales team for follow up.
Step #4. Create experiences for customers — online and offline
M&S Collision has decided to expand its customer experience beyond just the website, Monghal said.
Headquarters is in Santa Clara, CA, but the company is getting ready to create a third location downtown.
“Again, it ties back to the brand. We can digitally show you all these great photographs, but we're also going to build out a space that's really modern and creative with a very design-focused feel, so that our clients can come in and they can experience it too,” she said.
The whole goal is to create a complete and cohesive brand experience for clients, she added, from website to an in-person studio visit.
“We want to be a destination where they can come in, check it out, get to know us and even drop in to work from our location,” she said. “That's how we work, and we want to help our clients work in that environment as well.”
What We Achieved
The old website was fine at the time, she said, but it wasn’t built around telling that whole story while understanding the customer journey.
“In creating that great user experience, you have to stay relevant with what people are looking for and then build your website around that, which I believe is what we did and has allowed us to have these successful results,” she said.
The results of getting to know customers and building a website around that information were:
A traffic increase by 103% year-over-year
Net-new contacts increasing by 645%
“Even though we had such great results last year, it's already up — the number of new contacts is up over 80% from last year already. And I can't lie; I keep waiting for these numbers to kind of plateau, but fortunately for us, the results just keep trending in a positive way,” she said.
The first couple of years of this journey was about getting people to the website and then engaging with it. Last year and this year, they’ve focused on the sales and marketing alignment.
“We call it ‘smarketing,’” she said. “That's defining those marketing-qualified leads — or MQLs — and then the sales-qualified leads — SQL. So, that's the process we're at right now.”
Right now, she said, the marketing content is doing “a great job at getting people interested and engaged with us, [and] really helping them with their decision-making process — to ultimately help them achieve their goals with their organizations.”
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