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A 47-Year Old Iconic Brand Becomes Formidable Online

Moving into the 2017 calendar year, Jiffy Lube® Ontario and tbk Creative’s goal was to build on the success and momentum that was achieved across Jiffy Lube’s network of stores. To understand the momentum and achievements of 2017 in their fullness, what follows is a brief overview of what was accomplished in 2016 and 2015.

Want to learn how tbk Creative and Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s collaboration began? Read our original case study.

1. Web Enhancements

  • Brought all 59 Jiffy Lube® Ontario stores under one domain (jiffylubeontario.com) allowing all 59 stores to act in unison with each other on Google.
  • Implemented microsites for all 59 locations, allowing freedom for franchisees to update their own store-specific information.
  • Initiated an SEO-centric project to roll out unique content across each location website.

Humanizing and differentiating these microsites contributed to a 112.5% increase in organic sessions landing directly on franchisee store microsites in a 5-month period (year-to-year comparison).

  • We introduced a services module, with the services available varying and dynamically changing based on the store location’s service offering, allowing the user to stay on their local Jiffy Lube® microsite vs. being redirected to corporate.

On average, Organic Search traffic increased by 80.7% when looking at a year over year comparable.

2. Custom Promotions Manager 

  • Created “promotional boxes” that allow franchisees to showcase corporate offers on their local site.
  • Gave franchisees the freedom to market to their local audience by implementing functionality to override the corporate offer, giving them the ability to tailor their site with location-specific offers and promotions without having to contact corporate.

3. Online Sweepstakes

  • We ran four (4) online sweepstakes, launched strategically during typically lower-revenue months in the year.
  • Strategic landing page execution (UI / UX considerations, no navigation to distract, limited copy, etc.).
  • Rewarded everyone – Every user who participated received a coupon, which created extra goodwill in the market place for the brand.

All four campaigns generated over 6 million impressions through digital advertising, with an on-page conversion rate of an astounding 41.7%.

4. Digital Advertising

Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s media budget was utilized across Google AdWords Search, Google AdWords Display Network (Remarketing / InMarket / Topic Targeting / Keyword Targeting), Twitter, and the new addition of Instagram advertising which was added based on Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s desire to attract a younger demographic to its stores to introduce the brand to new customers.

The campaign generated over 73.5 million impressions, almost 200,000 website visits, at a cost-per acquisition (CPA) of $7.45.

5. Programmatic Ads

  • 2016 had fluctuating weather conditions during the winter season. Based on search trend data, we knew that cold and snowy weather increased the interest in winter services.
  • We implemented a script that dynamically switched between two types of creative, depending on the weather conditions, on a city-by-city basis in Ontario.
  • When the weather was mild, the creative and messaging focused on the user being proactive and not being caught unprepared.

The campaign efforts generated over 2 million impressions over three months.

6. Email Marketing

  • We distributed an email campaign monthly, focusing on promoting the company’s service offering.
  • We educated subscribers on Jiffy Lube® Ontario’s philanthropic efforts, newly published blog articles and offers.

The email program generated 1,491 coupon conversions from 4,143 sessions by 2,177 users, at a whopping 68.5% conversion rate, making it the highest-performing channel for the brand for costumer acquisition.

“It’s not just about a website, although we wanted a website that was modern, responsive and would work on the multiple devices that consumers use to find your company. tbk Creative helped us map out a strategy, vision and objectives of our project. Our website as they described was the ‘wheel’ and the digital tactics that we will use to connect to consumers are the ‘spokes,’ which simplified our focus and gave us confidence that our online presence would be what we were looking for.” – Dianne Hinds, Marketing Director, QLO Management Inc. (Jiffy Lube® Ontario)

Our 2017 Game Plan

We moved mountains in 2016 by building a strong online following for Jiffy Lube®, improving Google Search Ranking, increasing website traffic, enhancing user experience, generating more coupon downloads and ultimately increasing car counts and revenue across the store network. In order to continue this momentum, these are the goals we settled on:

1.

Increase Coupon Conversions – One of our goals was to continue to introduce new customers to Jiffy Lube® via advertising coupons. We had achieved much success in last year’s work in this area, and wanted to progress this important brand goal further in 2017.

2.

Promote More Services – Jiffy Lube® is widely known for their oil change service, so an additional goal was to place more emphasis on other Jiffy Lube® services so people can start to think of Jiffy Lube® as their year-round vehicle maintenance provider.

3.

Increase Organic Search Traffic – Last year’s data proved that there was a correlation between an increase in qualified website traffic and an increase in revenue for the brand. Although this was an instrumental piece of last year’s goals, an additional goal was to put more focus on it to see how far we could really push the brand.

4.

Optimize Media Spend – A final major goal was to look at each Jiffy Lube® location as a separate entity, with separate carved out objectives and key performance indicators. From our 2016 data, we discovered that each Jiffy Lube® store location had its own “niche” when it came to what users in the given local market were searching for. Our goal was to further decrease our CPA of these consumers by delving deeper into the individual store marketplace data, and allot budget, creative (e.g., changing service offerings, or not showing tire rotation ads on days its not snowing through a programmatic script we built, etc.) and ad products accordingly.

What We Did

Digital Advertising

The data collected in 2016 served us well in planning the digital advertising implementation in 2017. We analyzed the effectiveness of each digital advertising channel by store location, and came up with media spend allocation priorities on an individual location basis (basically, a matrix with 59 different data sets) instead of using a set budget across all locations.

Digital Advertising Results:

  • We spent 6% less budget while increasing our overall conversions by 22%.
  • We reduced the overall Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) by 22.9%.
  • Search Advertising was the most successful channel for CPA this year.
  • We improved Instagram’s cost per acquisition from $19.44 in 2016 down to $15.99 in 2017.
  • We improved Display Advertising’s CPA from $56.85 down to $29.86 in 2017.
  • An interesting observation was, on a location-by-location basis, the CPA was often better on Instagram than on other digital media platforms we had activated.

Email Marketing

A monthly email marketing program we had established in a previous term produced a healthy community of Jiffy Lube® subscribers and garnered engagement through unique and creatively engaging brand content and promotional offers, allowing us to build an online customer subscriber base that largely see value in the Jiffy Lube® content and product offering.

Once we established a steady flow of content and promotions to our subscriber base, our goal was to see what results we would get by increasing the frequency of the email campaigns from one to two campaigns each month (heavily monitoring data in this experimental project).

This would mean that twice as much content and offers would be delivered to our subscriber-base, which can be a delicate balance when it comes to email marketing. In order to officiate this change in frequency, we A/B tested the increase and heavily monitored KPIs such as open rate, delivery rate, conversion rate, click through rate, and unsubscribe rates.

We also knew that in order to acquire and retain a loyal customer base, we had to offer unique and original content to keep the list active. We decided to offer an incentive to join our email list – which is a VIP incentive; including offers only available when you are on the exclusive mailing list, sneak peaks at new content, and Jiffy Lube® maintenance tips to take advantage of.

Email Marketing Results (2017 vs. 2016)

  • Sessions: Increased from 7,991 to 10,125 in 2017 (UP 26.7%)
  • Conversions: Increased from 2,647 to 5,174 in 2017 (UP 95.5%)
  • List Size: Increased from 12,537 to 15,697 in 2017 (UP 25.2%)

Twitter Management

Over the years, there has been a concerted effort spent developing a public presence for the Jiffy Lube® brand online, and a lot of that development has gone into the Twitter channel specifically. Our goal was for Jiffy Lube® to be more than just a business to their consumers, so we positioned the brand as a loyal industry professional service that provides value to consumer’s lives.

To further improve our engagement strategy, we dedicated one tweet each week to a campaign we previously created called #JiffyLoot, which historically has a track record of impressive engagement.

The #JiffyLoot contest is an easy way for consumers to engage directly, 1-on-1 with Jiffy Lube® on Twitter. Each week, a #JiffyLoot tweet is posted by tbk Creative, and consumers are encouraged to engage with the tweet’s content for a chance to win a $50 gift card, with new winners drawn weekly.

We also had access to several larger-scale prizes, such as Lady Gaga and John Legend concert tickets which increased the excitement around this contest series with the marketplace.

#JiffyLoot Tweet Examples:

Twitter Management Results (2016 vs 2017)

  • Impressions: Increased from 191,866 to 351,030 in 2017 (UP 83%)
  • Engagement: Increased from 4,518 to 15,572 in 2017 (UP 244%)
  • Engagement Rate: Increased from 2.5% to 3.3% in 2017 (UP 32.8%)

Organic Search Traffic (SEO)

As a result of SEO efforts in previous years, Jiffy Lube® Ontario ranked well province-wide for “oil change” type services. In 2017, our goal was to focus the SEO strategy on producing greater Organic Search traffic from consumer keywords that pertained to other car maintenance services that Jiffy Lube® offers that are in addition to oil changes. We paid specific attention to Jiffy Lube’s Drive Clean (a regulation-oriented service) service page and blog page, which is a financially well-performing service for the brand, generating over half of the Organic Search traffic on the site as of January 1st, 2017. In the spring, we also executed several actions in order to to improve the brand’s SEO performance:

1. We improved the integrity of the technical SEO that was implemented, laying a strong foundation to give the Jiffy Lube® content the best chance to rank for relevant keywords and phrases. For instance:

  • We used custom canonical URL handling to address potential issues around page duplication related to very similar pages for each of the locations.
  • We made changes around template features to improve the content-to-template ratio on key sections of the website.

2. We fixed potential issues with duplicate content and improved the overall landing page quality with an in depth UI / UX audit.

3. We continuously built and high-quality, credible links and citations for all Jiffy Lube® stores across the network.

Organic Search Traffic (SEO) Results:

  • Overall, our efforts generated a 71.9% increase in Organic Search traffic in a year-to-year comparison.
  • Coupon conversions generated from Organic Search traffic increased by 126.9% in a year-to-year comparison.
  • An ancillary service that was focused on this year, Drive Clean’s page, Organic Search traffic increased by 226.1% in a year-to-year comparison.

Online Campaigns

In an already saturated marketplace, Jiffy Lube® needed to provide value to the marketplace that competitors weren’t in order to stand out amongst the advertising noise. One of our goals was to continue to build the Jiffy Lube® customer database to remain consistent with building a relationship in the marketplace.

To accomplish this goal, we took advantage of an important milestone in Canada – Canada’s 150th year birthday. To celebrate this once in a country milestone, we ran a spring / summer online contest encouraging people to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, explore nature, go for a road trip – or simply enjoy our beautiful country.

We knew Canada’s Birthday presented the perfect opportunity for a strong campaign that would appeal to the brand’s core demographic, so we settled on a plan. We created a full suite online campaign called “See & Celebrate Canada”, including several moving parts:

Creative Elements (Facebook, Instagram & Twitter Ads):

Landing Page:

Prizes:

  1. 1x Gold Prize consisting of:
    $2,000 cash and 20,000 AIR MILES®† Reward Miles;
  2. 2x Silver Prizes, each consisting of:
    $1,000 cash and 10,000 AIR MILES®† Reward Miles;
  3. 150x Bronze Prizes, each consisting of:
    Jiffy Lube® oil change gift certificate (approximate retail value of each $80).

Contest Results (3 months after contest close):

  • Over 50% of people who entered the contest provided express consent to join the company’s e-newsletter.
  • Advertising efforts for the campaign generated over 4.4 million impressions.
  • There was 20,398 visits to the contest landing page
  • There was was a total of 5,318 contest entries
  • The contest yielded a notable conversion rate of 26.1%

Web Enhancements (including SEO)

Our Google Analytics data painted a picture for how we could improve our UI / UX on the Jiffy Lube® site in 2017.

Some of the actions we took as a result of this analysis was we added a map, the daily hours, services listing and our “Get Directions” module to the coupon page, which is a key call-to-action (CTA) page. We also added current coupons and offers to the service pages on location sites in order to make these offers easier to find for users.

In the above image, a map, contact information and “Get Directions” are prominently displayed.

Services Page:

9.6% of all “Get Direction” clicks per day are now happening on coupon pages, which is a major contributor to a 67.2% increase for the “Get Directions” conversion rate year over year. Jiffy Lube® users are successfully getting the coupons they need, and immediately getting directions to their nearest store.

Another effort we made was to increase the brand’s email subscriber list further, so we made the e-newsletter signup more prominent on the corporate and location areas of the website:

After making this change, we saw our location page e-newsletter sign up increase, with 35.2% of signups coming from individual location areas of the website.

In Closing

The road to success in 2017 was paved with adequate data analysis, making iterative and proactive improvements to the digital programs, forming new strategic partnerships that were mutually rewarding (e.g., AirMiles) and letting the brand be a bit more bold digitally than in past years (e.g., increasing the frequency of email campaigns, offering a nation celebratory campaign, giving away concert tickets etc.).

Driving results was the key outcome in the Jiffy Lube® Ontario digital marketing strategy. In 2017, we successfully increased coupon conversions, promoted a wider range of Jiffy Lube® services (outside its regular oil changes), increased Organic Search traffic substantially and spent media dollars more effectively to decrease the overall CPA for the brand.

What We Learned

  • Amanda Tadgell, Director of Digital Operations, tbk Creative

    With Jiffy Lube being one our oldest clients, we now have years of data to make an educated decision throughout the advertising campaigns. With all of this historical data, it has just reinforced the importance of always reviewing the data before making a strategic decision. From monitoring user behaviour before making a change on the website to seeing what advertising mediums work for each location. With digital marketing, everything is trackable and we never have to make blind decisions. Specifically, with Jiffy Lube, we cannot expect advertising mediums to perform the same in Sault Ste. Marie and in Toronto. We have the data to know which mediums convert for each marketing, making hyperlocal strategy effective for Jiffy Lube.

  • Kylie McConnell, Director of Accounts, tbk Creative

    One of the things I love most about working with Jiffy Lube is that we are always optimizing and enhancing our online marketing strategies based on the data we are seeing in front of us. At the end of 2016 we, knew we had enough data to start to optimize ad budgets in each location based on historical performance, and as a result, saw significant decreases in CPA and an increase in overall conversions for the majority of our ad products. However, a small handful of ad products and programs showed a decrease in performance metrics. This data provides a non-biased evaluation as to which marketing efforts provide the greatest business value and return, and therefore, we are able to make smarter decisions with our marketing dollars year after year.

  • Michael Ramsey, VP Digital, tbk Creative

    Working with Jiffy Lube has been very rewarding. They have a strong focus on data-driven improvements and their business model is a perfect opportunity for a digital marketer to iterate towards brand success. Thanks to their ongoing investment in their platform and digital campaigns I've had the pleasure of conducting very effective split testing and other conversion rate optimization efforts that have made a difference in the company's revenue growth.

  • Andrew Schiestel, President, tbk Creative

    tbk Creative has had the privilege of being Jiffy Lube® Ontario's digital marketing partner over three fiscal years now. Each year, the team has had a new challenge to grapple with. For instance, the challenge years ago when we first started working together was broader - at the time, it was about effectively launching a website and rolling out several results-oriented digital programs that were new for the client. The focus in 2017 became more granular than in past years: First, it was about driving marketing success for ancillary service offerings (basically, services in addition to oil changes), and second, a whole series of store-level digital advertising optimizations had to occur (across all 59 stores) so that Jiffy Lube® was maximizing its sales conversions against dollars spent. The team succeeded on both fronts along with achieving some other important goals. I'm proud of the digital force Jiffy Lube® Ontario has become today.

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