Articles

Dealership: 

Fort Fremont Marine was established in 1969 by Dave & John Thomson, and the Thomson Family along with the help of their tenured staff is still taking care of business. Located right on the Wolf River, allows their customers every opportunity to test just about anything they sell on the water. Initially concentrating on waterskiing, high-performance boats and Crest Pontoon Boats (one of the oldest Crest Dealers in WI), they have since grown to add Polaris, FLOE, Hewitt, Mercury, Moomba, Supra & Tuffy Boats.

Solution: 

Fort Fremont has been experiencing the benefits of our Firestorm Website and Local Web Dominator Solutions for some time, but had not tried a Sharp Shooter Event yet. For their 50th Anniversary in business, they wanted to go all out with a campaign to make sure their party went off with a bang! For this event, they decided to market to 2,000 past customers and 2,000 conquest prospects who own what they sell, live in their backyard but hadn’t bought from them. Using a nice mix of active, inactive and conquest prospects, they knew they could reactivate customers who hadn’t spent money with them in the previous year and drive some new blood through the door. The ultimate goal is to increase the number of customers spending money with them over the next year and increase how much the spend, by getting them all to walk through the door more often. 

The Sharp Shooter Program uses up to 12 direct marketing touches to guarantee the marketing isn’t getting delivered just once, but multiple times. By giving customers more opportunities to respond to the marketing, we increase the amount of traffic on event day and the number of leads being generated. Bigger picture, we’ve learned Powersports Dealers need to touch their Buying Base a minimum of 52-104 times per year to increase retention and grow market share. The more you touch your customer base, the more responsive they become and over the course of the year, more of them walk through the dealership’s doors more often and the business grows.

Many marketers believe in order to sell something, you have to have ‘A Sale’. We don’t buy into that. The message we utilize is focused on inviting customers to a party. By focusing on what the customer wants (things like food, drinks, door prizes and demos), the dealership gets more of what they want (more P&A, service and gear sales and a few more units out the door). The reverse is also true; focus on the sale and you will alienate the 99.99% of customers who don’t have ‘buy a unit’ on their list of things to do this weekend. Long-term, customers never get tired of being invited to a party so they end up walking through the doors more often and when they’re there, they’re like kids in a candy store…they can’t help themselves but to spend more money. 

Timing is critical with so much marketing going out the doors, so it’s extremely important to have it hit customers at just the right time to maximize the response from each media. Our marketing begins hitting customers roughly 10 days before the event and gives them a different opportunity to respond to the Custom URL (to generate leads for every department) almost every day leading up to event day.

Results:

Executing on all four pillars of the Sharp Shooter Program - Right Audience, Right Media, Right Message & Right Timing, really paid off. The program generated 228 responses including 208 sales opportunities in Clothing, P&A and Service, PLUS 63 responses for a new or used unit! 

Looking Forward:

The arrival of June means the arrival of Summer and the prime riding season! For most dealers, they have a few short months to sell 80%+ of units they need to in order to hit their goal. June means the kickoff of summer - one of the best reasons all year to market to your buying base. Don’t miss out on this chance to drive traffic through your doors, generate hundreds of leads and sell more units and make more money this summer! Check out the inserts for some killer campaign options and for more information on how the Sharp Shooter Program can help you achieve your growth goals in 2019, call me on my direct line 877-242-4472 ext: 112.

Happy selling.