By Mark Besten
Ahhhh, Spring! It's a time of rebirth and renewal. The winter doldrums give way to the excitement of a new season and the travel bug starts to bite. It's a time when many customers start dreaming about hitting the open road and great outdoors in their shiny new RVs.
It's also a great time for dealers to boost monthly sales volume through cost-effective, direct mail driven promotional sales events. Some dealers find these events so successful they utilize them over and over again throughout the year to triple or quadruple monthly sales volume.
A successful promotional sales event begins by partnering with a good direct marketing firm. Their staff will develop a direct mail campaign targeting people within a specific geographic area who are most likely to be qualified RV buyers.
The direct mail piece often refers to an upcoming "special savings event" at the dealership and stresses the importance of coming in on a specific day to participate. Usually some type of additional incentive such as a contest or premium item is mentioned in the direct mail piece as a means of enticing the most promising to the event.
Misconceptions about promotional sales events -such as how and why they work- have discouraged many RV dealers from holding such promotions on a regular basis and reaping the benefits.
J&L Marketing, Inc., is a Louisville-based direct marketing firm formed in 1991. Their car, truck and RV dealership clients throughout the country have enjoyed tremendous success with the firm's promotions and benefited from the company's sophisticated results reporting techniques.
Scott Joseph, founder of J&L Marketing and its current president, said he's not surprised by the high level of confusion and misunderstanding held by many RV dealers.
"Unfortunately, our industry has not always done a particularly good job of educating dealers about what we have to offer them and why it works," said Joseph. "Dealers have a general idea about targeted promotional sales events, but there are some widely held misconceptions about these events.
Frequent promotional events can help compensate for and/or strengthen a weak dealership sales team.
Joseph noted that even the best direct marketing firm would not be so bold as to do the actual selling at the promotional sales event. The firm's key function in the promotion is to attract qualified buyers to the dealer's showroom. Once buyers have arrived and been qualified, the direct marketing firm should do all it can to facilitate sales, short of having its own staff do the actual selling.
Generally, the firm's most time-intensive and difficult work is accomplished in the week leading up to the event. Its staff is busy preparing the dealership's management and sales team for the event and ensuring that everyone has the correct answers to potential customer's questions.
A successful promotion might give the initial appearance of having improved a weak sales team only because more RVs were sold at that event than on any other day that month. Or, perhaps, individual members of the sales team are weak when it comes to converting casual window-shoppers, but tend to do much better when the promotion puts qualified buyers in front of them. In either case, Joseph noted, the sales team deserves credit (or blame) for the results of the sale. The direct marketing firm, on the other hand, deserves the same for its ability to populate a showroom with qualified buyers.
Most direct mail pieces end up in the wastebasket.
and
Most people who show up at the dealership are just there for the premium item or contest.
Joseph agreed that Misconception #2 is absolutely true - as far as it goes. However, in order to make the statement completely accurate, he would add, "Most strategically planned and well-written direct mail pieces end up in the wastebasket... after they have been opened and read."
According to Joseph, the direct marketing firm should make sure the solicitation it sends in advance of the sales event is opened and read by the target audience. Why? Because the population of qualified RV buyers is so small at any one time.
Consequently, if most of the direct mail pieces go unopened; a dealership can't appeal to a large percentage of potential buyers. The irony here, said Joseph, is that because the number of qualified RV buyers is so small at any given time, the popular alternative of advertising in the mass media is the equivalent of performing delicate microsurgery with a pair of ice tongs.
Fortunately, an experienced direct marketing firm has a number of ways to ensure its piece is opened and read. For starters, it secures proven databases with few, if any misspelled names. It doesn't send direct mail to "Occupant," "Resident" or even to "Valued Dealership Customer." On the other hand, if customers sense that a mail piece written expressly for them, they'll open the envelope and results will skyrocket.
According to Joseph, a good direct marketing firm will make its mail look convincingly like something else that routinely gets opened by customer, such as a refund check, insurance premium notice or personal letter. And the direct marketing firm is not outsmarted by those who know that a check or personal letter would not arrive via bulk mail, so it uses first class postage. The return address on the envelope is purposefully vague. It might have a street address but no company name. Sometimes the envelope bears a banner headline that gives a deadline for opening the piece.
The mail piece does get opened, and then thrown in the wastebasket - by everyone not in the market to by an RV, that is. This idea is at the core of Joseph's misconception #3, which holds that everyone who comes to a promotion is there for the free gift.
If readers open the mail piece, see the word RV and do not read on, then they are neither qualified prospects nor buyers. And if they are not likely to buy, why would they read on?
The mail piece should talk about nothing but saving money on RVs in the first few paragraphs. Then by paragraph four or five, there should be mention of a contest or premium item. Any prizes serve the purpose of keeping qualified buyers focused on the event.
Of all the people the direct marketing firm mails to -say 10,000- as little as 200 of them, sometimes more, will be shopping for an RV or will be open to the idea of saving money on an RV. These people will come to the dealership on the appointed day.
If the offer, combined with a contest or giveaway, doesn't get them into the dealership, then nothing will- short of sending them a set of keys and telling them to pick up their free RV. The same mechanism that gets these people in -the letter containing a simple offer - also keeps nearly everyone else away, prize or no prize. If they are not interested in saving on an RV, chances are they will not finish the letter and will stay at home instead.
One corollary benefit is that even though a potential buyer might throw the letter away this time, the dealership has planted the idea of RV ownership in the buyer's mind, which may bear fruit the next time he or she receives an invitation.
"Tremendous success"
"Populate a showroom
with qualified buyers"
"Results will skyrocket"
"The mail piece
does get opened"