What Are Customer Sources and How Can They Be Used?

Depending on your Point Of Sale System we may be able to read the "Source" or "Marketing Source" of your Customers in Retention Pro

What Is a Source?

A source is also known as a Customer Source or Marketing Source and is a way for you to label how a customer may have found out about or been referred to your shop.  In your Point of Sale System you will either assign this on the customer profile or the customer's repair order. 

These will commonly be used for things like "AAA", "Google", or "Customer Referral". If you want to keep track of certain marketing streams or customers who come in for a specific purpose it can be a good idea to use the Source labeling.

Which Point of Sale System Can Use Source?

We are currently able to read customer sources from the following Point of Sale systems:

  • Mitchell1 - We can read the Source on the Customer Profile and the Repair Order
  • Tekmetric - We can read the Source on the Repair Order
  • Protractor - We can read the Source on the Customer Profile
  • RO Writer (2.0 and up) - We can read the Source on the Customer Profile and the Repair Order
  • NapaTracs Enterprise - We can read the Source on the Customer Profile
  • MaxxTraxx - We can read the Source on the Customer Profile
  • FastTrak - We can read the Source on the Repair Order
  • TireShop by Freedomsoft - We can read the Source on the Customer Profile
  • ShopBoss Pro - We can read the Source on the Customer Profile and the Repair Order

What Can I Do With a Customer Source?

There are a couple of things that you can do with a Source in Retention Pro.  First it can be utilized in reports to see where your customers are coming from.  Secondly, you can also use Source when creating campaigns if you wish to target customers that have come in through a particular referral point.

Reporting - For reports you can use the Customers By Source report under Analytics to see Income, Customer Count, and Spending totals based on the source. See Customer Reports for where to find the Customer By Source report. We also have the Marketing Sources report which shows Customer Count and Repair Order Count totals for your sources.  See Marketing Sources Report for more information on that report.

Campaigns - If you wanted to use the source in a campaign you would utilize the "Source" option in the Additional Filters area of a campaign.  It is important to note that if you use a Source on a campaign the campaign will only  send to customers who are labeled with that source.  

Example: If you have customers who are labelled as "AAA" in the source and you wanted to send a text campaign to incentivize those customers to come back into the shop by offering a discounted oil change, you would create the text campaign and then select the source of "AAA" under Additional Filters to send it to only those customers. 

For more information on using Additional Filters on a campaign please see Text Message Campaign Basic and Additional Filters or  Email Campaign Basic and Additional Filters