Case Study: Rossiter's Harley-Davidson®
Rossiter’s Harley-Davidson has been owned and operated by Rick Rossiter for over 25 years. They encourage you to stop in with attractions for everyone! From unique art sculptures to the owner’s personal collection of early model motorcycles and a super friendly staff.
Two of the biggest challenges in marketing for a Powersports Dealership is finding the right target audience and then actually getting a message delivered to them. Many dealerships rely strictly on Social Media and Email Marketing only to accomplish this. Here’s why this is a challenge:
Facebook: Without boosting your post, only about 5% of customers will see it. So if your page has 5,000 followers, you’re talking about only reaching 250 people.
Email: The average dealership collects 25% emails at the point of purchase. An excellent email open rate is 15%. So for example, a dealership with 10,000 customers in their database will roughly have 2,500 emails. If they are able to achieve a 15% open rate, that means they’ll reach 375 people.
This is the biggest reason the average dealership has roughly 70% of their database not actively spending money with them; they simply aren’t hearing from them. When customers stop hearing from you (regardless of your effort), they develop a sense of apathy and stop coming around.
To combat this, the Sharp Shooter Program focuses on a three-part data strategy. 1st, we focus on your Active Customers, people who’ve spent money with you in the past 12 months. Our job is to keep them active and increase the number of times they visit your dealership this year so they spend more money. The 2nd group we target are your Inactive Customers. This is the single biggest opportunity dealers have to grow their business. As I mentioned above, the average dealership has less than 30% of their customer base actively spending money with them. We know the average customer in the powersports industry spends $750 per year in Parts, Accessories & Service…which means, if they didn’t spend it with you, there’s probably a good chance they spent it with someone else. Our job is to reactivate them so they begin spending money with you again. Lastly, we go after Conquest prospects. These are people who ride what you sell, live in your backyard, but have never bought from you. Essentially, these are your competitor’s customers and other orphan owners in your market area. Stop and think about this... between these three groups of people, they should really make up the majority of the proven riders in your backyard and ultimately the majority of your sales over the next 12 months.
Once we identify the right target audience, we put a 12-month marketing plan to touch your buying base 52-104 times per year. We know at that frequency, we increase the number of visits to your dealership they’ll make each year, therefore increasing their Annual Customer Value. We’ll also reactivate those customers who haven’t spent money with you in the last 12 months and drive new blood through the door. We use up to 12 different, direct marketing strategies to guarantee your message isn’t getting delivered once, but multiple times per campaign. By simply giving customers more opportunities to respond, we drastically increase response. Each media channel incentivizes folks to complete a survey to tell us who they are and what they want to buy from you…generating leads for every department in the dealership. As long as your message focuses on what’s in it for the customer and you commit to the process, you will absolutely own this group of customers and make them immune to other offers from other dealers.
There were 211 surveys completed, which created a total of 201 in P&A, Service, and MotorClothes, PLUS 50 responses for a new or used bike.