How AMSOIL Grows Online & Offline With Mozenda Data Scraping Software.

We love speaking with Mozenda customers about how they’re using our technology to hunt for data and answer important questions at their organizations. Whatever their use case, whether a BD, sales, marketing, strategic planning or analytical problem or opportunity, it’s also fascinating to have detailed real-world feedback. Today, our feedback is from Dewey Asbach of AMSOIL, one of Northwest Wisconsin’s biggest entrepreneurial successes.

Mozenda: Thanks for joining us Dewey. For those who don’t who AMSOIL is, who is AMSOIL?

AMSOIL was the first to bring a synthetic passenger car motor oil to market. Our founder Al Amatuzio was a fighter pilot and knew that the engines in fighter jets used synthetic oils. He thought the high-temperature benefits of synthetic oil should be available to the general public. We opened for business in 1972 and are recognized as the pioneers of synthetic lubrication. While our products are sold in more than 50 countries, we’re still headquartered in Superior, Wisconsin.

How are AMSOIL’s products sold?

You can buy them through our dealer network, which includes retail stores as well as independent sellers. We also sell online.

What’s your role at AMSOIL?

I’m the Internet Services Manager.

What’s the role of data at AMSOIL?

We want to remain a leader in a highly competitive industry. Data is everything to us when we sell motor oil online. It’s also extremely valuable for offline sales, as well.

How do you use data in your job?

One of my chief functions is to provide accurate and clean data so that the user’s experience at AMSOIL is convenient, and they can make purchasing decisions wherever they plan to buy. It’s critical that the right data is available to customers at the right point in their purchase journey, whether it’s an in-person purchase or e-commerce sale.  

What are the challenges of getting the data you need?

Unfortunately, the data we need is not in a central and convenient location. We can’t just buy a database from a broker. There are many different endpoints that we need to access to build the customer sales tools that we provide and new ones we want to build.

We have original manufacturer data that isn’t necessarily publicly available in one easy place. Location data is also critical for us because providing retail and dealer locations often helps customers decide how and where to buy. We use Mozenda technology to gather all of these different types in an accurate and easily available format.

What about data integrity?

After gathering raw data, we need to clean it and make sure that it is active, current and nothing has changed since the last time we looked at it. If it has changed, we need to identify the updates. All of our data is constantly being monitored for these reasons.

How do you use Mozenda?

Data has been and remains a game changer for us. Finding the right tools to manage our data is a key part of what I do at AMSOIL and a major priority for the company. As I like to say, “you don’t buy oil just to have oil, oil is going somewhere.” It’s going into small engine equipment or a vehicle.

I mentioned customer sales tools earlier; a hugely successful one for us has been Look Up Guides. To help people make their purchasing decision, we provide Guides by vehicle or equipment type, and are one of the only companies doing Guides to the degree online that we do. We led the way with the automotive light truck Look Up Guide and we were also the first in many power sports categories. Mozenda helps us gather the data for all of our Guides, including the initial research when we’re developing a new one.

How does Mozenda help you?

In multiple ways. In addition to the Guides, we use Mozenda for retail recommendations by validating location data so we can direct customers for an in-store purchase.

Next, we use Mozenda data for retail distribution planning. This consists of mapping retail and quick lube style locations around the country, kind of like taking a 1000-foot view of who’s out there and who’s already purchasing the product. If we find new locations, they may be potential new retail opportunities to which we can send one of our dealers or team members for an AMSOIL introduction.

A fourth use is competitive pricing research online. Knowing what our principal and secondary competitors are doing obviously helps us understand the market at a granular level, product categories and competitors’ price points on products that are similar to our SKUs.

Are there any operational benefits from using Mozenda?

We get a lot more done with fewer people. We can tune the tool and get the data we need without having to do manual research that might require four or five people working on different data segments.

By making this work autonomous, we’re faster. We can then make more decisions using an agile work process. And we can turn things around quicker so that the executive leadership can see that what we are planning on doing is going to deliver the results we expect. With the power that Mozenda brings to the table, we can do things a lot faster, complete entire projects and then move onto the next one.

Any final tips for readers?

Having the correct data at the right point in the customer journey is absolutely mission critical to us, and should be for your readers. When we find a tool that helps us lead and helps us innovate and gives us a competitive advantage we almost always decide that it’s worth adding to our toolbox. We discovered Mozenda several years ago and it’s proven to be a hugely successful addition for us.