Pub. 2 2013 Issue 2

28 San Diego Dealer Five or six years ago the potential of this new media, especially email and online marketing, was wide open. A dealership was going to be able to touch a customer almost instantaneously with a targeted message at the exact moment that customer needed a vehicle service or even a whole new vehicle. It was going to be great; a new age in automotivemarketing. The problemwith this newmode of advertising was that it never had the ability to engage but only the smallest fraction of the potential pool of customers in your PMA and more importantly, they all require a potential customer to perform an action, to actually do something. It does not matter if a customer must open an email (open rates for automotive related emails run at about 18%), find your website, go to your Facebook page (you’ve got 2,367 “Likes” – which translates incidentally into zero revenue), scan a QR Code, opt-in for text messaging or enter a PURL address. If a potential customer has to take any action at all to point them in the direction of your dealership, the odds are heavily in favor of no action ever being taken. It’s not to say that any of these media are bad business practices as long as you can source the business generated from them and they provide an acceptable ROI, but they will never fill your service drive or showroom with customers. They just do not have the horsepower to do so. The automotive industry is fortunate in the fact that most consumers own vehicles, need them repaired on occasion and will eventually purchase new ones. The trick is locating the maximum amount of “qualified” customers in your PMA and reliably placing your message directly into their hands without your customer doing a darn thing – except maybe opening their mail box and reaching for the mail. Yes direct mail is the red-headed stepchild of advertising, but it’s probably the best suited and most powerful of the advertising tools T here is one thing the economic down- turn was able to firmly establish - email, search engine optimization, social media and online marketing alone were never going to fill your service drive or show- roomwith customers. As sales and service revenues tanked, managers skewed quickly to these new emergingmedia because they were considered to be a more cost effective way to advertise. But along with that change in marketing strategy came a sharp decline in both Sales and Service Department customer traffic. Allocating Your Dealership’s Marketing Budget The Fog Begins to Clear By Dale Becker, President of Westates Automotive Promotions available for automotive marketing. The fact that we know where a potential customer lives, what kind of vehicle they own, how old it is and whether they purchased it and have it serviced at your facility is some pretty useful information. The ability to reliably place in the hands of a potential customer, in a noninvasive manner, advertising that shows your facility, introduces your staff, provides competitive pricing, displays your location and hours and allows for ample branding opportunities is an extremely powerful tool. Unlike any of the other media, including radio, TV and newsprint, a direct mail promotion reaches its targeted customer household at least 96% of the time. In comparison with email penetration, the customer email acquisition rates for automotive dealers is 60% at best and com- bine that with an average open rate of 18%, you have only 11% of your customer base actually receiving your promotional message. To make matters worse because of anti-spam laws, email offers no opportunity for conquest marketing. Just howeffective is directmail marketing for the automotive industry? For service related marketing, the approximate monthly response rates taken from 27 dealerships over a two year period was at 16.5% for Active Customers (1-12 Months) and 2.5% for Conquest Marketing (+24 Months and Never). The reporting also revealed those Active Customers receiving a promotional mailer responded at a 2% higher rate on average monthly and spent anywhere from $10 to $20 more per ticket. Direct mail marketing is just as effective when called upon to create new vehicle sales and showroom traffic. Information is now widely