Articles

Dealership: 

Ron and Sue Higgins began Higgins Powersports in 1985 selling Polaris ATVs and snowmobiles. Since then the business has thrived with sales of Polaris, Kawasaki, Ski-Doo snowmobiles, CanAm, Spyder, and Victory motorcycles. They have the largest demo truck in New England and during the prime riding season, Ron can be found leading the way to popular cruise night locations for an evening of good food and great fun.

Solution:

Higgins has been using the Sharp Shooter Program for their Annual Snowmobile Open House for years. This year they targeted 3,000 past customers. The short-term goal of the program is to drive a lot of traffic and generate a pipeline of leads so our clients can take a weekend event and turn it into a month-long sales process. Long-term, the goal is to reactivate lost customers and increase frequency of visits from active customers to get them to spend more money over the course of a year.

We target customers through direct mail, email, phone calls and several other media strategies to ensure the message isn’t getting delivered once, but multiple times. By giving customers more opportunities to respond, we increase response. Over the course of a year, we’ll touch a dealer’s buying base 52-104 times which increases the number of active customers spending money and on average, how much they spend because they visit the dealership so many more times throughout the year.

Utilizing the right message is critical to the success of this campaign. Most marketers think they need to have a ‘Sale’ in order to drive sales. We’ve proven through executing thousands of campaigns, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Focusing on the sale simply alienates the 99%+ of people who aren’t in the immediate market to buy a unit. By focusing on the party, you will still get the handful of people who were going to buy a unit that weekend no matter what, but you’ll also get hundreds of more riders to respond and make impulse purchases in all departments. Plus, who doesn’t love getting invited to a party, right? 

Results:

The program generated 160 completed surveys, which included a total of 95 sales opportunities in Service, P&A, and riding gear. Below is a snapshot of those results, which included 58 responses interested in getting a unit! 

Kristin Lapierre, marketing manager for Higgins said, “Thank you for all your help! It was a great success for us this year with the best results that anyone can remember! We sold 9 machines, 2 snow blowers and (have) many great leads! Looking forward to working with you again soon!”

Check out our Sample Campaigns online at www.psmmarketing.com for some killer campaign options for January and for more information on how the Sharp Shooter Program can help you to start the new year off right, call me on my direct line 877-242-4472 ext: 112. Happy selling.