Articles

Dealership:

What began as a dream for two businessmen in 2001 is now 42,000 square feet of Harley-Davidson reality. Owner and Operator, George de la Nuez opened up the largest H-D dealership in Southeast Michigan less than ten months later. The two-story, red brick structure recalls the historic Milwaukee Motorcycle Factory with its limestone details, metal overhangs and large glass windows. Having experienced the culture of this amazing dealership first-hand, the only thing better than the facility is the staff. Spend 15 minutes in this dealership and you’ll leave feeling like family. That dedication to their customer base has paid off. Fast-forward to 2019, not only have they been awarded a Platinum Bar & Shield but they’ve also won the Powersports Dealer Locator National Dealer of the Year Award for the 5th straight year! 

Solution:

Wolverine Harley has consistently invited between 5,000-10,000 past customers into their dealership twice per month for a Sharp Shooter Event; rain or shine, 70 and sunny or two feet of snow on the ground, they haven’t waivered.

The goal of executing consistent Sharp Shooter Events is to:

1) Increase the number of active customers and

2) Increase average customer value by increasing frequency of visits.

The results have been incredible. When they first started marketing with us, they had 3,400 active customers. In 2018, they finished with just shy of 9,000! They have more than doubled motorcycle sales (from 500 to over 1200) and more than tripled revenue (because the average customer is visiting the dealership many more times per year and spending more money).  

The Sharp Shooter Program targets customers with up to 12 different, direct marketing strategies ensuring they receive the message multiple times. By increasing the number of times they get the message, we increase response to the survey site and traffic through the doors on event day. Big picture, this multi-touch approach makes it easy to touch their buying base 52-104 times over the course of the year which puts a fence around their herd and makes them immune to other offers from other dealers. Overtime, it helps increase the number of customers spending money with the dealership and on average, how much they spend annually leading to predictable growth for the store.

Focusing the message on the party elements of their event (food, drinks, door prizes, demo rides, etc.) not only attracted the small number of folks who were ready to buy but hundreds more customers who didn’t plan on buying anything that Saturday, resulting in tons of impulse purchases and pipeline for future sales.

Results:

Carla said, “We had a lot of fun at our New Year’s Bash Event and a great turnout. Hundreds of people showed up to see if they won the bike and we ended up having a great day in over the counter sales and even rolled 6 bikes with a few more working!” Despite the bitter cold, they even had a few brave souls go for demo rides resulting in bike deals. Carla said three of the deals came directly because of the chance to win the motorcycle and after not winning, they pulled the trigger on a new Harley.

Executing on all four pillars of the Sharp Shooter Program - Right Audience, Right Media, Right Message & Right Timing, really paid off. The program generated 128 people registering to win the Whistle Flashlight Keychain, for a total of 106 leads in Service, P&A and MotorClothes, including 22 people interested in a new or used unit! 

Back in August, we talked about email reputation, and that just like everything on the internet, it’s a continual evolution.

Internet service providers are the entities that make the digital world go ‘round, and they’re a lot like your OEMs. They make the rules. And just like the OEMs, if you want to play their game, you have to understand that it’s their ball, their court, their rules, and their referees. Whether or not any of us like it, that’s just how it is.

As I shared a few months ago, email reputation is a critical element for your overall email deliverability. There are a lot of factors that play into the quality of your reputation with ISPs (internet service providers), IP reputation, domain reputation, engagement metrics, bounces, spam reports, and overall list quality.

This month, I want to dive into one major component of email reputation that impacts all the others, and you have a great deal of control over. List quality.

Just like in the printed mail world, your list is the foundation of the success or failure of your marketing. If your list (audience) is bad, timing and message become a moot point.

So what makes for a good list?

For starters, I sincerely hope that by now everyone knows that you never buy an email list. Purchased email lists are garbage. Never buy one.

In a perfect world, we would all harvest our lists using double opt in. That’s where someone signs up to be on your mailing list online, and then gets sent an email at that address to confirm they really want to receive your emails and that there wasn’t a typo.

We don’t live in a perfect world, so it’s not always going to work like that. Most often in a dealership, we harvest email addresses looking eyeball to eyeball with someone because we ask for it at the parts or service counter and in the sales department. And that’s fine.

Now, in the same way that people change physical addresses, they change email addresses, too. The difference being that there is significantly less commitment to an email address than there is to a physical one. 

The numbers show that in a 12-month period, up to 30% of any given email list becomes invalid due to people changing accounts, providers, abandonment, or any number of other reasons. That’s a pretty astonishing number, actually. 

So what? Who cares? What’s the harm in sending those emails anyway?

With the daily volume of email worldwide, and the fact that there is more spam email than legitimate, ISPs have begun to tighten the screws when it comes to email. They have the ability to measure your engagement metrics. Things like hard and soft bounces, opens, clicks, and spam reports are measured for your account. If you have a high volume of hard bounces – and you keep sending to them – providers assume that you are completely inattentive to best practices and begin to throttle your delivery. If you continue to send emails to people who have reported you as spam your deliverability will tank. 

Hard bounces and spam reports are relatively easy to deal with. Any reputable email provider is going to pull those from your list for you, after all, it makes no sense to send an email to a closed mailbox or someone who reported you as someone they never want to hear from.

The trickier (and more emotional) part of the equation is when dealing with engagement metrics. Sending to people who NEVER open your emails (and subsequently never click in them) are people who aren’t engaged with you. Sending to unengaged (or as the ISPs say, uninterested) recipients is a party foul. The opinion of the ISPs is that you’re taking up resources for a DOA message and they don’t have time for that. As a result, you can see your deliverability suffer.

Sometimes this is a function of right message/audience/time and can be fixed with better content. Sometimes it’s inbox abandonment, disinterest, or some other factor that causes them to not engage. 

Here’s the part that’s hard to hear: To maintain the highest level of deliverability, with the best likelihood to get your message to the intended inbox, sometimes you have to let the bad ones go. I know, it’s tough. Especially when we have to work so hard to get our employees to collect email addresses in the first place, the last thing you want to do is draw a line through any of them. But the bad ones aren’t responding anyway, and only potentially bring down the good ones too.

So how does one go about handling this? Through a sunsetting policy. A successful sunsetting policy identifies customers who haven’t engaged in a given period of time, and sends emails specifically designed to re-engage them. Emails with subject lines like “Hey, haven’t heard from you in a while,” “Hope everything is okay,” or “Breaking up is hard to do.” The idea is to have a subject line that gets the email opened (engagement) and then ask them to click a link to confirm that they still wish to get your emails (deeper engagement). 

This ensures that they actually do still check that inbox, and that they want to receive your marketing. ISPs love it and you stay in their good graces. If after a few of these attempts you still get no engagement, pull them from your list. Emails sent to them will have proven to be a waste of time anyway, since they aren’t engaging with you. ISPs love it when you pull them from your list, and will have better delivery rates – not to mention much more accurate numbers when it comes to your actual email stats.

ISPs have one more tool in their toolbox when it comes to understanding how good a job you do at list hygiene. Spam traps. These are pretty insidious, but very clever.

There are two types of spam traps: pristine spam traps, and recycled spam traps. Spam traps are designed specifically to identify bad actors in two different ways.

Pristine traps are email addresses set up by ISPs that have never existed before. They belong to the ISP. There are only two ways an email can get into a pristine account. Either someone fat-fingered an address and it ended up there, or a spammer is carpet bombing email addresses and this one was caught in the blast. If fat-fingered, a proper sunsetting policy would remove the email address due to lack of engagement. No harm, no foul. A spammer will keep blasting the address. Someone with little to no active list hygiene will also keep sending. The ISP will begin to throttle the sender over time, and eventually completely blacklist the them.

Recycled spam traps were once legitimate email addresses, but at some point were abandoned or cancelled. ISPs will light these addresses back up and monitor what activity they get. It’s possible that they could receive emails from wherever the previous address owner was subscribed – but again, over time those emails should stop if the sender is using a good sunsetting policy. Spammers could have found these addresses any number of ways, but because they’re acting in bad faith will continue sending. Again, over time they all get throttled and eventually cut off.

There’s no question that email is one of the best possible ways to market to customers, even with the evolution it is undergoing. With a little bit of attention to detail staying within the guidelines of best practices isn’t really that hard. If you’d like help with that, give us a call: 877-242-4472.

Talk soon,

Brad

What do Santa, a Cleft Palate & a Barn have to do with my dealership?

I was recently reminded of a story about a self-development guru in the 1970’s, Glenn W. Turner, who was born in 1934 with a clef palate & a hair lip, which caused a speech impediment. He was born a sharecropper’s son and worked behind a mule as a boy. They were extremely poor, making Christmas time painful, especially because his cousins were far better off than he. 

Every year his cousins wrote letters to Santa, but Glenn couldn’t spell or write very well, so they’d let him copy their letters. The first cousin he copied wanted a bike. Glenn thought, “Wow… I want a bike too! If I had a bike I could ride to town and get a job after school.” So, he copied his cousin’s letter as best he could and asked Santa for a bicycle.

On Christmas day, his cousin got a shiny new bicycle. All he got was apples and oranges, socks and underwear. Afterwards, he said, “I went out behind the barn, sat there and cried and felt sorry for myself for an hour.”

The next year, one of his cousins wanted a baseball bat and glove. Glenn copied his letter. Christmas came, his cousin got a bat and a glove and Glenn got apples and oranges, socks and underwear. He went behind the barn and cried. This happened 4 years in a row until after one Christmas Glenn went out behind the barn, shook his fist at the sky and said, “Okay Santa, if that’s how you wanna play, I’ll be my own Santa Claus from now own!”

Glenn was a poor, uneducated hick from South Carolina (I can say hick, I’m from Georgia) who had a massive speech impediment. Yet at the height of his success in the 70’s, Glenn was worth over $300 million, owning businesses, castles, and even his own airplane.  Because he decided to believe in himself more than anything else.

While kids outgrow Santa, the sad truth is that most adults haven’t matured past the belief that somehow, someway, a person will appear and magically give them everything they’ve ever wanted. Or maybe an unknown rich uncle will leave his entire inheritance to them. Or maybe they’ll buy the winning lottery ticket. Most people are caught in the ongoing paradox that something big could magically happen to me tomorrow. This mystic hope keeps them going through the motions of a mundane life, unwilling to work to improve themselves. They don’t have to try and get better, “Santa” will be coming soon after all!

Decide now to be your own Santa. Be the maker and creator of your desires.  

If you want to sell more units and make more money, stop being the ‘doer’ of your business who’s working ‘in’ it all the time.  Nothing burns you out faster than only working ‘in’ it, and burnout leads to being uninspired, which leads to the mindset of waiting for someone to give you the magic pill that brings success and happiness. When you’re uninspired, your staff is as well. Culture flows from the top. 

Become the ‘marketer’ of your business and start working ‘on’ it. There is no more highly rewarded skill than the ability to make it rain customers. 

Speaking of making it rain customers, whether you need online or offline results, let PSM Marketing become your partner for 100% quantifiable marketing that generates an ROI. We implement direct response marketing for our clients that always fulfills the following:

1. Target the Right Audience – Prospects & customers most likely to respond and buy

2. Utilize the Right Media – Most likely to reach and be noticed by the Right Audience

3. Craft a Compelling Message – Include a call-to-action with a deadline that’s quantifiable

4. Right Time – Drip out media to better saturate the market 

We execute these 4 principals on all of our marketing, helping dealers across the country to sell more units and make more money. Don’t just wait for ‘Santa’ to bring you success.  Give us a call for more information at 1-877-242-4472 or visit www.PSMMarketing.com.

- Tory

Brian Tracy famously said, “Every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution; this gives you a 1000 percent return on energy!”  I tend to agree. A buddy of mine had a similar saying he called the 6-P Rule, “Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance!”

With 2019 knocking on the door, this raises the question of how do you and your team plan for the New Year? 

Personally, I still favor an old-fashioned paper calendar and a pen. My wife and I recently sat at the kitchen table, she with her trusty family calendar and me with my Franklin Covey paper planner going month by month January through December documenting my business meetings, the kids school breaks, activities, vacation, birthdays, etc. Upon completion it felt so good to have a plan and know what to expect. 

Here at the office, we have a much more elaborate planning system. With the help from a great book called Traction by Gino Wickman, our leadership team and I have created a big picture vision by setting a 10-year goal based on realistic sales history and previous year-over-year growth. 10 years is a long time and too far out to really be able to impact today. So, using the 10-year math as a projection, we roll it back and paint the picture for where we should be in 3 years. That’s still a long way out so we then roll it back again to a 1year goal. From here, we dial it back one more time to create quarterly goals. Now we live in a 90-day world whereby all of our goals are transparent with one another and reviewed together in a weekly meeting. We’ve also factored in our existing company core values, created a core purpose, and have a very specific marketing strategy. 

And at the foundation, our marketing strategy is tied to… you guessed it, a calendar.  In fact, we believe so much in the power of a calendar to help you plan your marketing we created a 2019 powersports specific one and sent it to you in the mail (If it didn’t make its way to your desk feel free to request one via email or phone and we’ll drop one in the mail for you).

A marketing planning calendar is beneficial for multiple reasons. For starters, to be an effective marketer you must always be living in the future. It takes time to create content, decide how you plan to deliver that content, and execute an effective marketing campaign at the right time to deliver maximum results. 

Each month our calendar provides you with proven choices for creative that is relevant, compelling, and best of all doesn’t just focus on PRICE.

With proper planning you can even merchandise your accessory area and other parts of the dealership to compliment your marketing. In January you can do a “Resolve to Ride” or a “Gear Up for the New Year” campaign. 

In February you can do “Cabin Fever Reliver” or “Valentines Day” as your focus. In March it’s “Time to Ride,” “St. Patrick’s Day,” and “Bike Week”. April can be “Perfect time to Ride” or “Smoking Spring and Burning Rubber.” May has “Memorial Day” and “Cinco de Mayo” - both proven winners. “Celebrating Dad for Father’s Day” in June is always solid. Patriotic campaigns are high performers with “Independence Day” in July. Heck sometimes we “Celebrate our Independence all Month Long” in July or even have “Christmas in July.”  In August we can try to “Beat the Heat” and in September celebrate “Labor Day” or have a “New Model Open House.” October gets spooks with “Halloween” and then we’re off to the races for “Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas and New Year’s” all are must-celebrates in the retail world. 

If you give your customers a reason, they will happily visit a toy store filled with fun where they can see it, feel it, touch it, smell it, and even try it on! You do have an advantage over the online retailers, but you must exploit it. 

If you don’t give them a reason, they might as well order it off the computer. Seems more convenient. You’ve worked too hard and invested too much to blow it by not executing a well-planned marketing calendar that could make 2019 your best year ever! And, we’d love to partner with you to make it happen.

For more information on our “done for you” Sharp Shooter campaigns contact us at 877-242-4472 or visit us at www.PSMMarketing.com/Sample-Campaigns.