Data drives the most expensive part of your marketing…
Let me say that again slightly differently:
The least expensive part of your direct mail campaign ~ the Data ~ drives the success for the most expensive part of your campaign – the Print and Postage.
Consider the Following:
- Print and Postage is 20X the cost of data (If not more!) – That means the Data portion of the campaign has an immense amount of leverage to determine the results.
- Without careful consideration of the data that you are mailing, you are wasting significant money. Expenses go up, responses go down, and conversions go down.
- Does your data company provide you recommendations based on their expertise? Or is their goal to only sell you as many records as possible?
Here are some additional ideas and NEW SELECTS for your campaigns (If you are only concerned with quantity – stop reading now, otherwise, read on… )
Campaigns typically consist of Prospect Data, Dealer Data, or both, and if your focus is to truly increase the results and ROI of a campaign, then we have several ideas. In this post, we focus on selecting Prospect Data.
1. Review and update your selections for prospect data.
You know this is true if your campaigns are not producing the sales you are expecting. When did you last spend some time and effort reviewing how to determine the targets for your campaigns? What worked 3 years ago, and even last year, is not necessarily relevant today.
Are you making more intelligent selections?
2. Pay attention to the location of your dealerships.
This can be critical. Different areas of the country will have different buying preferences. For example, in CO, WA, and OR, the most popular vehicle is the Subaru Outback, NY and CT favor the Nissan Rogue, and the Ford F150 is most popular in many states such as SC, TX and GA. Spending time at the front end to consider the geographical nuances of a marketing area can pay major dividends.
What are some options?
3. Don’t pull the same make/model/years for all of your dealers.
Let’s look at a specific example for a small Kia dealer on the west coast of Florida. After some analysis, we pulled the makes and models that are listed below from the primary market area. A few of these may be standard for a Kia dealer, but many were not. This also results in marketing to people that have not received a similar mail piece previously! The sales match report showed this campaign sold 21 vehicles (14 new and 7 used) for a very low cost per sale.
Toyota Corolla, Toyota Camry, Chevy Cavalier, Chevy Malibu, Chevy Cobalt, Honda Civic, Ford Taurus, Ford Focus, Ford Escort, Nissan Sentra, Chrysler Sebring, Chrysler PT Cruiser, Mitsubishi Galant, Mitsubishi Eclipse, Jeep Liberty
You may already have new ideas from this post to improve your campaign results, but if need additional insight you can always contact our team.