Articles

 OBJECTIVE

Hattiesburg Cycles is a family run business with a passion for the powersports industry that has turned them into the Mississippi Gulf’s largest dealer.  Like most successful dealerships, they mix cutting edge Sales & Marketing best practices with a healthy dose of playful enthusiasm and shared experiences. One of their objectives is to continue pushing those best practices to grow their business and their customers while maintaining that charming southern family feel. Marketing Manager, Robert McMorrow, knows that people buy from folks that they know, like and trust and that the best way to continue that relationship to communicate with their customers on a regular basis about things they want to know.

SOLUTION

Robert uses the Firestorm Email and Firestorm Onboarding products to communicate with his customer list on a regular basis.  In fact, in the past month, Robert’s sent five (5) different email messages to his customers. He uses a combination of the easy-to-use themed templates for his newsletters and then custom creates different types of messages in the blank template option as well. The flexibility and killer designs inside Firestorm Email make it super simple for Robert to reach his customers as often as he’d like with messages that make them respond.

RESULTS

While the ease of use, and hundreds of powersports-themed templates make using Firestorm Email system a great option, the powerful connection to the Firestorm Onboarding component really sets Robert’s marketing efforts apart from those of his competitors. 

For the past 2 weeks alone, the Hattiesburg Cycle emails have generated a 9% - 15% click through rate, meaning Robert has driven an additional 244 website visitors to www.hattiesburgcycles.com just from his email marketing campaigns. 

Plus, through the proprietary Firestorm Onboarding system, once someone clicks on an email, that’s when the real magic happens. Robert can now identify his previously anonymous website visitors.  He knows not only how many people where on his site, he can see what inventory pages they were looking at and even better – he can see their contact information to follow-up with a message to that specific customer.

Through Firestorm Email and Firestorm Onboarding, Hattiesburg Cycles is able to see the name and contact information of the 18 customers who were on their website looking at New & Used inventory pages in the past 2 weeks. Those are some extremely valuable leads for the sales team to follow up with. Talk about ROI for email marketing…Wow!

Does your email marketing program generate those kind of lead generating results If not, give us a call today to see how Firestorm email can make a huge impact in your website traffic and online leads: 877-242-4472.

Dealership: 

Hawkeye Motorworks is a Honda Powerhouse Dealer located in Davenport, IA. Honda Powerhouse Dealers provide the most complete inventory of Honda Motorcycles, ATV’s & SxS’s available. Hawkeye invites customers in to ‘Feel the power. Honda Powerhouse. All Honda. All the Time.’

Solution: 

For their first Sharp Shooter Event, they decided to market to 1,250 past customers and 1,250 conquest prospects who ride what they sell, live in their backyard but hadn’t bought from them, yet. Using a nice mix of active, inactive and prospect customers, they knew they could reactivate customers who hadn’t spent money with them in the previous year, drive some new blood through the door and increase frequency of visits of their existing customers to increase the number of customers spending money with them and the amount they spend in 2017.

Since the loneliest number in marketing is one, we used up to 12 direct marketing touches. 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.

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 demo rides), 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 motorcycle’ 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 can’t help themselves but to spend more money. 

With so much marketing going out the doors, it’s important to have it hit customers at just the right time to really 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 survey site (to generate leads for every department) almost every day leading up to event day.

 Results:

You might think, ‘Eric that’s too good to be true’, but it’s not. We’ve used this. Kayla Pitchford, Marketing and F&I Manager, said their first campaign was great! They ended up rolling 6 or 7 units on the day of the event, counter sales in all departments were up, traffic was awesome and it was one of the busiest Saturday’s they’ve had in months! Most importantly, she said they saw a lot of customers that they hadn’t seen in a long time and that was super cool!

Executing on all four pillars of the Sharp Shooter Program - Right Audience, Right Media, Right Message & Right Timing, really paid off. The program generated 147 completed surveys including 56 sales opportunities in Clothing, P&A and Service, PLUS 27 responses for a new or used unit! 

What's next?

September is better than Christmas for powersports enthusiasts because it is officially New Model Season! Arguably the most important event you’re going to hold all year long. If you don’t have a New Model Open House planned in September, call us today to make sure you’re showing off all the new good stuff from your OEM(s). Check out the inserts for some killer campaign options for September and for more information on how the Sharp Shooter Program can help you achieve your marketing goals in 20017, call me on my direct line 877-242-4472 ext: 112. Happy selling.

 There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this you’ll remember the old “You’ve got mail!” quote from AOL years ago. That was back when email was new and exciting. When you opened AOL and heard that, you got a little excited… I mean only players got email back then.

Fast forward to today and email is an old hat. We’ve all figured out that the guy from Nigerian isn’t really royalty and isn’t going to make us a multi-millionaire. 

Fool me once…

Anyway, the internet is an interesting place, and sometimes it’s easy to get lost chasing the latest thing and losing sight of what is the most effective thing. And, there’s a big difference between the two.

As a dealer, it can be really easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of a well-meaning Marketing Manager who thinks that you’ll be able to rule your market with Snapchat, Instagram, or some other newly developed way of connecting with people on the internet. The truth is, the numbers don’t lie, and while it’s certainly okay to test the waters of new technologies, it’s important to invest heavily in time and energy on what we know has a track record of performance.

At Powersports Marketing, we talk about the importance of new customer acquisition (increasing market share) and retention (repeat business from customers) pretty extensively because they are foundational elements of something else we talk about a lot – predictable growth.

We’ve proven over and over in dealerships across the country that focused efforts using proven methods, allows dealers to take control of their business and grow, even when others are not. That’s big.

Email is easily the biggest hammer in that toolbox. This past year, Emarys & WBR Digital released a report on digital tactics that drive customer acquisition and retention in SMBs, and the results are very interesting. 

According to those surveyed, 81% replied that email marketing was the best way for customer acquisition, and 80% advised that it was the best tool for retention. 

For comparison, those same respondents ranked organic search at 62% and paid search at 59% for acquisition. Social media ranked 44% for retention.

This makes email the #1 way to acquire and retain customers. Combine that data with the hundreds of studies that show email has the highest ROI of any other marketing method, and all of a sudden what was old is new again.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m sitting in the driver’s seat at a dealership, there would be a whole lot of emails going out.

That said, shot gunning out emails non-stop can backfire. What’s important is to send timely messages using an email program that helps you by starting with a look and feel that is relevant to your audience and contains tools that allow you to personalize, segment, and schedule your efforts so that the recipients are more motivated to respond.

Well, call it a shameless plug, but so be it. Firestorm Email is the culmination of years of research and software development, and I can proudly say that if you are in the powersports industry and aren’t using it, you’re settling for less than the best.

Firestorm Email was designed by motorcycle enthusiasts, for motorcycle enthusiasts, and has pre-built themes and elements that are powersports specific – not generic graphics that are “cute” and clumsy across lots of business models.

Pre-built themes and elements also means that you don’t have to spend time trying to create or steal other graphics to create your email. It’s a quick click-and-go, which saves a ton of time.

Also, with the recent addition of Firestorm Onboarding to our arsenal, it’s possible to identify individual visitors to your website to see what they were most interested in, to follow up, and close deals. Oh, and we’ve also got the hook up on a new website platform.  It’s pretty amazing, too.

If you aren’t currently doing a lot of emailing, you need to be. If you struggle to come up with what to say, or how to make your emails visually engaging, please let us know. We have what just might be the perfect solution for you – and sending emails is really a non-negotiable. We can make it easy.

One last thing. As I said a couple of months ago, the digital landscape has really changed, and if you want to see what is happening, as well as new best practices given the latest developments, you need to sign up for our Fall Marketing Boot Camp. 

Everything is changing, and we have a new curriculum as well as a new speaker or two, so if you’ve never been – come, and if you’ve been before – come again. It’s gonna be great. 

Talk soon,

Brad

 Before we began working on the Firestorm Website platform, we started with a simple question: What is the main purpose of a website?

I’ve asked hundreds of dealers this question over the years at OEM trade shows, our Marketing Boot Camps and in one-on-one meetings. The answers I’ve received include: digital brochure; virtual showroom; online/silent sales person; the new yellow pages; map, hours and contact info; branding – to help get my name out there & more.

While your website may at some level serve all the above points, none of them are the ‘main’ purpose. Here’s why. If the main purpose of your website is to be an online brochure or virtual showroom, you’re done. You can put a check beside it. There’s nothing to improve. 

But that’s not the case. The fact is that the main purpose of your website is to Generate Leads & Identify its Visitors. All other functions are secondary.  

From the foundation, we’ve specifically developed the Firestorm Website platform to generate more web leads & identify more anonymous website visitors each month. We are revolutionizing the way web leads are received, and our conversion-point is second to none. 

We’ve heard dealer after dealer speak about their frustration with the quality of the web leads they receive. Sales people and sales managers often have a sense of apathy/indifference with internet leads because most only want your “best price out the door.” 

It doesn’t have to be that way… Firestorm Websites generate better quality leads. Imagine your salespeople being excited to follow-up with prospects again because they’re not expecting a discount every time.

Our Lead Manager enables a quick and easy way to qualify leads; log calls, notes & store visits; set follow-up tasks; and track the progress of the sale. When it comes to internet leads, it’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow.

Plus, when Firestorm Websites are combined with Firestorm Onboarding, we identify anonymous visitors who are looking at inventory each day. We send your team a daily report of those customers that viewed inventory the day before, and we train your staff how to follow-up with them. This produces a quantifiable increase in unit sales – guaranteed. 

In terms of Inventory Management, we integrate with the major DMS platforms and automatically add your inventory to the website for you. This means that after a new or pre-owned unit is entered in to your DMS it’s automatically added to your website’s inventory!  

Then, our VIN Decoding feature adds all of the specifications and an image of each unit without you having to click a mouse or touch a keyboard. Boom goes the dynamite!

If that’s not enough to make you want to see a demo, every Firestorm Website client has access to our Back Office Mobile App where they can take live pictures of inventory and instantly add it to your website while standing on your showroom floor. No more downloading images from your camera, sorting through them, renaming them, only to have to login and upload them to each unit on your website. If you load 20 images to the inventory page of each in-stock unit, your staff is wasting hours every week. There’s a much more efficient way.

Every Firestorm Website has a fully responsive design that gives visitors a consistent experience with the same content on all devices. Our coding and site engineering are the most up-to-date technology that’s prescribed by Google and other search engines. Our client’s websites rank higher because of this.

All Firestorm Websites feature an SSL Security Certificate for additional security. SSL Certificates also boost Page Rank, and Google favors secure sites over those that aren’t. 

There’s plenty more to show you in a demo, but I’ll mention one last benefit. Our clients have full, open access to all controls, settings and design in the Firestorm Website control panel. If you’d rather not DIY, our Client Success team are here to get it done for you – fast!

For a quick demo of these features and more, call 1-877-242-4472 or go to: 

www.powersportsmarketing.com/firestorm-websites 

- Tory

 Here in Georgia the kids went back to school in early August. That’s always a bit of a glad and sad combo platter for me. Glad because it’s good to get back into a routine with structure and working to be better, smarter, more prepared etc. But, sad because I hate to see the fun and freedom of summer winding down. And I really don’t care to see my sweet little 8-year-old special needs daughter get on that yellow banana without her mom and dad or brother and sisters. Anyway, here we are and school is back in session, and none of us are too old or too young to do some learning. So, like I do every year about this time, we’re going to get our learn on.

Back to School Lesson Number One: 

THE PRO’s ALWAYS DO THEIR HOMEWORK. Look at the greatest athletes, celebrities, and business folks of all time and you’ll see one thing in common, they all do their homework. In today’s market one of the most important areas of your studies should be online reputation management. Here’s why. Regardless of what media you choose, most prospects are going to research your dealership and products online prior to calling or visiting your store. If you’re getting hammered online with negative reviews, or if your local competitors just have a boatload more positive reviews than you, then you need to study up, because this is costing you business. Big time. 

Back to School Lesson Number Two:

If you’re marketing isn’t INTERESTING and the ad copy isn’t communicating the BENEFITS, it’s likely a waste of your time and money.

W.I.I.F.M. is a popular acronym for What’s In It For Me.

If your ad messages are consistently ‘Sterile Offers’ only trying to ‘SELL’ with finance offers and, “Hey you! Wanna buy a bike today?” messages then you’re not going to be INTERESTING for very long.  If your ad copy doesn’t clearly state the BENEFITS to your recipients then your customers will feel like you’re wasting their time.  This is why we love parties and events. 

As the Professor of Harsh Reality once told me – Get Over You. Get into THEM.

Speaking of only trying to ‘SELL’ to those currently in the market – This is a great lead into our next BIG lesson.

Back to School Lesson Number Three:

Your Advertising should be designed to not only capitalize on those in the market to buy now, but to also establish the desire for purchase for those NOT currently in the market and/or generate leads for other profit centers in the dealership like parts, accessories and service. 

Most Dealer (and OEM) advertising and marketing has a serious flaw. The ad is built under the assumption that the person is already committed to, or is currently shopping for a new vehicle.  Thus, the advertising assumes the decision to buy and focuses on product, place, and price. Few back up one very important step to first establish the desire, thus your time and money is wasted. It’s the equivalent of trying to sell burgers to an audience with no appetite. 

Our Sharp Shooter Predictable Growth System not only accomplishes the critical objective of backing up one step to establish the desire for new and used units, but does it for P &A and Service, too - all in one integrated ‘done for you’ campaign. If you’re not familiar with our Predictable Growth system then study up, this thing is exactly what we’ve used ourselves to grow double digits year over year for a decade and earn our way onto the Inc.5000 list of fastest growing companies twice. 

Back to School Lesson Number Four:

It pays to work “on it” not just “in it.” If you’re busy doing it day in and day out, month after month, and year after year, without taking the time to meet with like-minded people, learn and study from the pros, and compare notes, then you’re stepping over quarters to pick up nickels.

Here’s the deal.

Getting up early to make the donuts is admirable, but any warm body can make donuts. The difference between Dunkin’ Donuts and the thousands of donut shops that have come and gone is the MARKETING and SELLING of the Donuts. Just like motorcycles, donuts don’t sell themselves! 

The bell has rung and it’s time to get to class. Stop stalling and go now to 

www.powersportsmarketing.com/bootcamp 

and register or our upcoming Fall Marketing Boot Camp so you can discover proven best practices to help you sell more bikes and make more money. 

See ya in Atlanta, 

Rod

OBJECTIVE

Twigg Cycles, in Hagerstown, Maryland, is in the northwest corner of the state and has been serving Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia and Pennsylvania for 85 years. They pride themselves on being the one-stop-shop for all things powersports related in the Four-State area. Lauren Winnings, Director of Marketing and Promotions, knows that customer service is one of the strengths of this family-owned business and the reason for their continued success over the years.  She wanted to find a way to leverage all those happy customers into a strong marketing asset to help earn the trust of prospective new customers to continue growing sales and market share in their area.

SOLUTION

In addition to the many powerful marketing automation components within the Local Web Dominator (LWD), the one feature that would help Lauren and her amazing team generate an ROI on the incredible customer service they offer is the Reputation Management solution.  The LWD program automatically emails customers after their transaction to ask about their experience with the Twigg Cycles team. After leaving a 4 or 5 star review on a custom review site (www.twiggcyclesreviews.com), those happy customers are asked to share their experience on Google. In addition, Lauren and her team are able to sort those reviews on their review site by department and employee to see where they are trending highest in customer satisfaction and which employees are really shining. 

RESULTS

This Reputation Management system helped catapult Twigg Cycles light years in front of all their local competitors with their Google reviews, making them the obvious choice for anyone looking to buy a metric or Indian motorcycle in the four-state area.  In just a few short months, Twigg Cycles garnered 346 authentic customer reviews on their review site and their Google listing skyrocketed from 81 reviews with a 4.5 star rating to 163 reviews with a 4.6 star rating.  That’s 82 new reviews on Google, and the number is steadily climbing.  The LWD program has helped automate the review process for a great team of folks who are offering outstanding customer service.  By doing so, they are attracting even more new clients from their local and surrounding markets. Positive social proof is a powerful marketing tool.

Does your email marketing program generate that kind of quantifiable ROI? If not, give us a call today to see how Firestorm email can make a huge impact in your website traffic and online leads: 877-242-4472.

Dealership: 

Insert your dealership here.

Solution:

After working with over 1,000 dealerships, the reason our clients continue to market with us each and every month is because we implement a System for Predictable Growth. There’s really two types of dealers out there…there are market driven dealers and then there are marketing driven dealers. 

A market driven dealer makes reactive advertising decisions and pays for image enhancing, branding, “get your name out there” billboard, radio, TV, and newspaper campaigns because they know they should be advertising. No one says you can’t grow the business with poor advertising, but a lot of the growth dealerships experience comes from well-timed weather, an improving market and economy, or a focus on sales process and training. Customers are solar powered, when the suns out they’re out. When the market is up, business is up; when it’s down, business is down. 

A marketing driven dealer has a pro-active, integrated, direct marketing plan designed to touch their buying base 52 to 104 times per year that is quantifiable. Barring natural disaster, a marketing driven dealer experiences predictable growth. Here’s how we put more control into our clients’ hands.

1) We Grow Your Active Customers, defined by folks who’ve spent money with your dealership in the last 12 months. We do this by reactivating lost customers (those who haven’t spent money with you in the last 12 months) and by driving new customers through the door (these are competitor’s customers and orphan owners that ride what you sell, live in your backyard but have never bought from you). If we can increase the number of customers who do business with you each year, your business will grow.

2) The second way we create a System for Predictable Growth is by increasing your Annual, Average Customer Value by increasing the frequency of visits to your dealership. Let’s face it, when your customers walk through your doors, they are kids in a candy store…they can’t help themselves but to purchase stuff. If we can simply increase the amount of times they visit your dealership each year, they will buy more parts, more accessories, more gear, they’ll service their unit more often and they’ll shorten their trade cycle. We know past customers who are loyal, like know and trust you so your closing ratios go through the roof along with your margin because they’re less likely to haggle over price.

Put another way, a marketing driven dealer understands this simple formula. Annual increase in active customers + annual increase in customer value (or the same) = Annual Growth. If we can get more riders to walk through your door, more often over the next 12 months, you will grow your business in a very predictable way.

The Math:

Curious what your numbers are? Take your 2016 revenue and divide it by the number of customers who spent money with you to find your Average (Annual) Customer Value. If you are an integrated client of ours, call your Account Executive and they can walk you through this math. If you are Talon dealer, run a customer report, export to Excel and sort ‘Previous Years Sales’ by ‘A to Z’, highlight the column for your total revenue last year and scroll to the bottom of that column to see how many active customers you had who spent money with you last year. Or, call us at 877-242-4472 and we’ll run these numbers for you! If you’re a Lightspeed Dealer, we can integrate with your DMS and pull these numbers for you as well.

The goal of the Sharp Shooter Program over time is to grow your Number of Active Customers & your dealership’s Average (Annual) Customer Value by a conservative 10%. Below are two examples of what that would mean:

As you can see, a 10% bump in both metrics for the $4 Million Store above equates to over $839,000 in growth. For the $14 Million Store, it bumps their revenue by almost $3,000,000! 

The Results:

You might think, ‘Eric that’s too good to be true’, but it’s not. We’ve used this exact system to help grow many of our clients’ businesses like Wolverine H-D. Over the years we’ve been working with them, they’ve grown from 600 units, $11 million to over 1,200 units and $32 million. When we first started working together, they had 3,400 active customers with an average customer value of $3235. Today, they’ve grown their active customers to 9,000 and their Average Customer Value (ACV) to $3555 resulting in $21 million in growth! I know that over time with consistency, the Sharp Shooter Program can do the exact same for your dealership.

What's next?

The next step is to call us so we can pull your numbers and show you the opportunity that exists in your database to grow your business predictably. The average dealership has only 30% of their customer base actively spending money with them with an average customer value that can grow tremendously. We can kick off your Annual Predictable Growth System in August with a Soak Up Summer campaign, Back to School Event or Dog Days of Summer Party. There are many more options where those came from and with just five short months to go in the year, it’s more important now than ever to drive as much traffic through the doors and generate as many leads as possible this summer! For more information on how the Sharp Shooter Program can help you achieve your marketing goals in 2017, call me on my direct line 877-242-4472 ext: 112. Happy selling.