How Drive & Shine Car Wash retained over $400K in revenue using downsells

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Zach Beauchamp, Marketing Specialist at Drive & Shine Car Wash, shares how their downsell program—powered by The Car Wash CRM—has helped retain over $400,000 in revenue. By leveraging data and automation, Drive & Shine Car Wash optimized its downsell offers, boosting retention rates from 4% to 11% and adding an average of seven months to membership lifetimes.

About Drive & Shine Car Wash

Drive & Shine Car Wash operates 18 locations across northern Indiana and southern Michigan. They are committed to excellence, providing quality service to the community for over 25 years. Their dedication extends to sustainability, with initiatives like recycling water, using biodegradable chemicals, and repurposing used engine oil to minimize environmental impact.

Automating Membership Retention

Before adopting Rinsed, Drive & Shine Car Wash handled cancellations manually—either on-site, over the phone, or through email—on a case-by-case basis. Now, with The Car Wash CRM, they automate this process, as well as use it as an opportunity to offer downsells.

"Prior to Rinsed in general, every cancellation, every membership issue was either handled onsite on the spot, or over the phone or email. Rinsed and the automated features with downsells allows us to automate that process quite a lot.” - Zach Beauchamp

Driving Retention with Data-Driven Downsells

Downsells—or "retention offers" as Zach explains—are tailored offers designed to encourage customers to remain members rather than cancel. Initially, Drive & Shine Car Wash offered a standardized discount for 90 days. It was more of a “set it and forget it” approach. However, this year, they refined their approach.

"This year, we've made quite a heavy amount of changes to our downsell offers. We dug into the data, mainly focusing around wash usage by wash type. We came up with a variety of different arm plans … to provide to essentially all wash frequencies that's going to encourage them to retain their membership while not eating into our profitability.” - Zach Beauchamp

These changes brought immediate success.

"We made those changes live in January, and saw pretty much immediate success. We jumped from about a 4% retention rate up to an 11% retention rate, which was phenomenal." - Zach Beauchamp

Extending Membership Lifetime

The downsell strategy has not only improved retention, but also extended the lifetime of memberships.

"We've even added, on average, seven months of time to the lifetime of the average membership that would've canceled. Seven months is a pretty massive amount of time, especially when it comes to a monthly subscription." - Zach Beauchamp

Results That Speak for Themselves

Drive & Shine Car Wash’s partnership with Rinsed has made implementing and managing their downsell program easy. 

"Our downsell program has helped us retain over $400,000 in membership revenue." - Zach Beauchamp

Drive & Shine Car Wash operates at a fast pace, and the user-friendly capabilities of Rinsed enable them to make and implement changes quickly and efficiently.

"Our favorite feature about being able to use Rinsed is really just the usability—how user-friendly it is. If we come up with a new idea at the start of the day, we want it live by the end of the day. Being able to go in ourselves and make some of those changes or edits or creations through Rinsed on the spot is extremely valuable to us.” - Zach Beauchamp

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