By using it to communicate with the hundreds of people you have access to. Think of all the people you come in contact with each month. All the vehicles you repair. All the people you network with. The people you go to church with. The people you do business with every day. And the people your employees know.

Many, if not most, of these people have e-mail addresses and will give them out if asked. Inform these folks you have a complimentary car tip e-mail that is sent out monthly for the purpose of educating and informing them. Enter their addresses in your database or simply enter their addresses on a floppy disk. Next, create a document that has valuable car care tips.

An easy way to get started is to recall the complaints most often heard. Invite your employees to brainstorm with you in putting together valuable tips for consumers. Your employees will appreciate the opportunity to participate in a strategy that demonstrates their commitment to improving the company’s value. (Who knows the positive effects this could have on retaining and attracting high-quality technicians.)

Let’s consider the possible results of sending these e-mails:

• It’s possible someone might not care to get your e-mails. That isn’t very likely if it contains helpful information and tips.
• It’s quite possible the recipient will be more likely to remember your shop for future use.
• It’s even possible the recipient will forward your e-mail on to one or more friends. And its possible those friends may even pass it along to their friends. People love to forward interesting information along to their friends.

Think for yourself the number of e-mails that get forwarded from your friends. How much time would be involved in e-mailing? If you have a database designed for e-mailing it would take only a few minutes to activate the e-mail process and allow it to do the e-mailing on its own. Even if you copied (the e-mail addresses from a floppy or from a file) and pasted, you could e-mail out to 100 people in less than 20 minutes.