Sears recently announced the closure of thousands of it’s stores becoming the latest casualty of failing to see ahead of the curve, and evolve accordingly with the fast-paced changes of our time.

Could dealerships suffer too?

Sears now joins the ranks of fallen-giants like:

-Blockbuster Video

-Circuit City

-Radio Shack

-Toys R Us

Netflix should have been “BlockFlix”. Redbox should have been “BlueBox”. They missed the boat big time. Blockbuster should have been paying close attention to the changes that were happening. They didn’t. Instead of having their finger on the waves of technological change, they sat on their high throne all fat and happy, thinking they had made it to the top and would rule there forever. I remember making it a Blockbuster night, maybe they underestimated how lazy people are or how fun convenience would be for us all. They were wrong – and they paid dearly.

Circuit city made a huge mistake by thinking people didn’t care about value and great customer service. They decided that being the lowest price was the key to more business and profit. Sound familiar? They got rid of all their knowledgeable staff in exchange for lower cost employees – which Best Buy subsequently snatched up for their Geek Squad – and decided to be the low price leader and cater to “lowest price” seeking customers.

Half of the plan worked, they attracted a ton of shoppers looking for the lowest price. There was only one problem, they didn’t actually have the lowest prices. Walmart and others still had them beat. So what happens when you are using the “lowest price” method to attract customers but you aren’t actually the lowest price?

Customers browse you, and then buy elsewhere. And they did. A lot. Down went another giant.

The mistakes Toys R Us made sharply contrasts what could happen to dealerships if they don’t tune-in quick.

Around 2008 Toy’s R Us didn’t see what was so special about the internet and didn’t foresee online shopping being as huge as it has become.

They offloaded all of their online toy sales to Amazon. Oops. This move basically trained people to go to Amazon for their online toy purchasing. When Toys R Us finally woke up and launched their website, they were already way behind on marketshare because people were already accustomed to going to Amazon.com for the same products. Such was the death of Toy R Us, and along with it, a piece of our childhood.

Sears was once a staple of America. It shaped America and transformed the way we shopped. Their mail order catalog broke the mold and was something people waited at the mailbox for. Many Americans didn’t live close enough to a big city and because of the lack of stores, still made their own clothing. The Sears catalog became the first time they could easily buy clothes.

They originally only sold watches, but soon the catalog grew and people purchased everything from buggys to houses from it,
earning Sears over 2 billion in sales by 1946.

They even invested to help build modern day malls. They were untouchable. For a while, anyway.

Failure to evolve with the times, modernize their stores & online presence as well as big box rivals beating them on price and convenience brought about their demise. They fought back by cutting back on advertising – bad move.

You can not SAVE your way into a profit. It just doesn’t work.

Sears learned that the hard way. They’ve lost nearly 12 billion since 2010.  This time, Goliath himself has fallen.

Many dealerships also thought that the internet was just a fad, and now most have large internet sales departments. Large parts of the ad budget are now going towards internet leads and digital marketing.

Lots of dealerships also cut back on spending when things are slow, or try to save into a profit.

And many miss getting on board with the technology changes that are shaping the future.

As Mail Ninjas, we pride ourselves on product development to ensure YOU don’t miss the boat.

 

In 2012 we launched Echo Video® which embeds a custom video message into our Direct Mail campaigns. That evolved into full on high-quality 30 second video spots for our clients – at a fraction of the price.

As 2013 hit we created PassChecks®, Smartphone integration of your direct mail offers. I know it sounds crazy, but at the time, most dealerships didn’t grasp how important getting on customers phones would be or how massive of a competitive-edge it would be to have push-notifications reminding customers of your dealership whenever they were nearby.

By 2015 PassChecks® put us on the map as one of the highest responding and revenue generating service products in the automotive industry.

Then came Ringless Voicemail Drops in 2017. We were all over it.

Early 2018 we developed Ninja Text® which is variable text response for your customers. Very cool. See it in action here.

You may notice a trend here. All of these features perfectly integrate with a customers smartphone.

There are now ways to purchase a car completely on your cell phone in a fraction of the time. If dealerships don’t get people used to interacting with them on their smartphones, they will interact with someone ELSE, from their smartphones.

Smartphones. You are glued to yours, I am glued to mine. We are all glued. This is the future. Engagement & interaction with customers on their smartphones.

The future is now, and our products embody it – and our products are at your disposal. Let our hard work and product development benefit you.

Times always change. They are changing faster now than ever. If you don’t jump on these changes you may get run over.

We know you have your hands full running dealerships and selling cars, but don’t worry, we are on the cutting-edge with all of these advances.

So if you want the latest and greatest and have a desire to keep your marketing and dealership relevant, we make it easy.

Connect with us today.

If 20-30 additional units per month or $10 back in new service revenue for every $1 invested sounds good to you, take a quick moment to drop us your info below and we will show you exactly how we can do that for you, too.

Manufacturer marketing or any cookie-cutter, templated, marketing, like manufacturer marketing is really bad at getting customers into your service department. Unfortunately, it IS great at another thing, making your dealership blend in with every dealership in your area. Which as you may know, is the kiss of death when it comes to effective marketing.

So Why is Manufacturer Marketing so Bad?

• Much of manufacturer marketing is untrackable. Not being able to track how a marketing effort is performing is almost as bad as not marketing at all. For all you know, you could just be blindly throwing money out the window and getting no real results. It’s shocking this still exists in a “what have you done for me lately” industry.

How can you improve next month if you have no idea of what’s working and what isn’t?  OP codes are only as accurate as the person entering them in. Which is how manufacturer marketing is tracked many times.

• Manufacturer marketing doesn’t differentiate your dealership. A huge problem with manufacturer’s marketing is that it’s cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all, boiler plate, or however you want to put it. The point is, your dealership’s marketing is going to look exactly like every single other dealership that sells your make of car. How is a customer supposed to notice you when you’re offering the exact same thing every other dealership is offering?

• Manufacturer marketing looks like junk mail. Quality with marketing is key; unfortunately most, if not all, of manufacturer’s marketing looks and feels like junk mail. This point dovetails in with the last one: if it looks and feels like junk mail, it’s going to blend in with the junk mail and most likely not even be noticed. By producing quality marketing, not only will it stick out to your customers, but it’s going to stick around.

What’s the Alternative to Manufacturer’s Marketing?

Sticking with the status quo, cookie cutter or manufacturer marketing is harming your service department’s performance – there’s no question about that. It’s for this reason that many dealerships are seeking out alternative methods for handling their marketing. Where are they finding these alternative methods and how do they know they will work? Independent automotive direct marketing companies (like us) can only survive if they effectively make their client’s dealership stand out from the rest of the market. Unlike the manufacturer marketing, their whole business model revolves around marketing successfully. To be frank, manufacturer’s bank on you taking the easy route and opting into their manufacturer marketing programs simply because it’s profitable for them.

Think about it, they’re force-feeding their entire distribution network the same canned crap over and over. It has to make them a mint, all while leaving you twisting in the wind.

Think I’m Blowing Smoke? Read This:

“In the past, we were using Ford’s manufacturer marketing and we actually paid quite a bit for it. It didn’t work for us, at best we’d see a 2% return. Their mail looked like junk mail and was very cookie cutter. There are 6 other Ford dealerships in our zone and our manufacturer marketing looked exactly like theirs, but the biggest problem was we couldn’t track the marketing. We switched to Pulse and from the first mail drop it was a huge success. We’re seeing anywhere from 8-15% response rate depending on the zip code. We see checks from their service checkbook program in here every day and our customers absolutely love them. From the moment I saw their checkbooks I knew it was a way to differentiate ourselves, the quality is incredible. I couldn’t be any happier with Pulse Mail Ninjas.” – Sharon Walker Greenway Ford, Orlando Florida.

You can hear it straight from her on video.

What is the True Cost of Not Creating a Buying Preference with Manufacturer Marketing?

The answer to this question can vary greatly dealership to dealership. The answer that holds true for every dealership though is that the cost of missing the mark with marketing and losing out on potential service customers in today’s market far outweighs the investment costs of unique marketing from a company like Pulse. Is there risk stepping outside of your comfort zone and ditching the cookie cutter manufacturer’s marketing? You bet there is, but there’s always risk involved with change. Ask yourself this? What’s riskier? Taking a chance on setting yourself apart from your competition in an effort to dominate your market… or continuing to do the same stuff your competition is doing and praying that fate will smile upon your dealership and deliver greater profitability? The answer to that question should be clear.

How The Pulse Mail Ninjas Faciliate Market Domination Using Checkbooks with PassChecks Technology

• 100% Trackable – It’s important that you’re able to track the success of any marketing campaign. With our barcode system, not only is tracking 100% accurate & pure it’s extremely simplified.

• High Quality Checkbooks – When a customer receives our checkbooks, it feels substantial, it feels like something worth keeping. It’s a lot more than a throwaway postcard. Not only that, but they’re durable and for good reason. You want your customers using these all year long… they need to be durable for that to happen.

• Digital & Physical Coupons – People forget things all the time, even substantial high-quality checkbooks for car service. It’s for this reason that our PassChecks® Technology allows for your customers to have all their checks in digital format on their smartphone. As people rarely forget their phone, this eliminates most situations in which your customer might skip an intended service because they left their checkbook at home. As with our physical checks, the digital checks are also 100% trackable.

• Automatic Push Notifications with PassChecks® – This is hands-down the coolest feature of our service retention program. Not only will your customer have their service offers loaded on their smartphone, but theres more.  Whenever they’re near your dealership, they’ll receive a Push Notification reminding them that they have VIP service offers to use with your service department. You really can’t market any more directly than that.

Successful Dealerships are Proactive, not Reactive

In this industry, your run-of-the-mill dealership is going to be very reactive. Late to the game on sales trends and what their competition is doing. That’s exactly what makes them run-of-the-mill and not a market leader. Where true success and market domination occurs is when dealerships decide to lead and not follow. Whether it’s with sales tactics, strategies, or most importantly, marketing.

If you only plan on just doing whatever it takes to keep up with your competition, follow is all you’ll ever be able to do.

However, if you have the desire to not use your competition as a frame of reference for your success, you’ll find that thinking outside the box and implementing unique marketing, will help you lead the pack. The second you have your competition reacting to what you’re doing, that’s the second you know you’ve become a leader in your market.

And isn’t that the goal of every dealership? I don’t know when the last time you jumped in front of a video camera to film a testimonial for a marketing company, but our clients do. You can see the testimonial videos sent to us from dealers just like you.

If you’d like to have a serious conversation about partnering with a company that is dedicated to your sales & service retention success, as well as making you stand out in your market without manufacturer marketing, simply fill out the form below.

—Originally Published in Fixed Ops Magazine For Customer Experience —

In the auto industry every market is slightly different and I’m also a firm believer that a prescription without an examination is malpractice. So – when I’m speaking with a prospective client, I always ask what’s currently being done for service and service retention and how it’s working. When asked, it would boggle your mind to know how often we hear dealers say: “It’s ok”, “horrible” or even worse, “No clue.” How do you know if you should continue a service campaign if you don’t know if it’s working? A service director once said the following about a campaign he was running for service retention:

“It’s the worst service retention campaign….we’ve been consistently running it for the past 2 years, and it doesn’t work.”

We speak to hundreds of dealership decision-makers a month. The focus of a majority of these conversations is service retention. We all know how important customer retention is for any business, however it continues to be a serious challenge for many dealerships. It’s a big problem because of how closely the manufacturers watch your service retention number. Service can be the lifeblood of a dealership. The best, most reliable service customers are the ones who stop by every three months for an oil change. Truth is, service carries every month, because not only does it generate revenue, but it’s also the richest source of sales customers. But, that’s only possible when service retention is top-notch.

If you want better customer retention, start with creating a better customer experience. Bring the customers in, treat them well, do the job right, and charge a fair price. When done properly and with sincerity, they will return to you as well as refer you repeatedly to friends and family. Sounds easy, right? Well, there’s a problem…

THE SERVICE RETENTION PROBLEM

You are contending with other dealerships AND independent service centers. Price, more than ever before in recent memory, is a serious concern for customers.  It’s tempting to try to compete with the little guys, but in a race-to-the-bottom, you can’t win. A tiny operation with generic supplies and one service will always be the ‘low-price leader’. Racing to the bottom results in cost-cutting shortcuts that can hurt the customer experience. A deep discount can only be a one-time teaser to woo a customer back. You cannot and should not play this game, (just ask Circuit City) even if you’re the rare company that can win it. The true sale must be made on the experience.

PRICE SHOULD ONLY BE A VARIABLE WHEN THERE ARE NO OTHER DIFFERENTIATING FACTORS

While you’re pushing hard to distinguish yourself from the Lightening Lube stores, stop and think like your own customer for a moment. Don’t make the same mistake that your customers make all the time, focusing entirely on price. If all marketing programs were created equal, price would be the only concern. They’re not. The true litmus test is the dollor-for-dollar ROI generated. A million-dollar price tag is a bargain, when the return is $20 million, just like $99/month is a ripoff when it fails to produce. A focus on cost, conceals value. Value is Benefit vs. Cost. Great quality service is cheap at twice the price. Keep that in mind, because at the end of the month nobody wants to say, “I know we didn’t hit our numbers, but we got a really great bargain on the marketing that failed us.”

THE SOLUTION:

My advice to dealers for their customers is the same thing I tell my dealerships as clients, and it’s boilerplate sales copy.  “Build the value for your customers. Create a great customer experience. Be distinct and market yourself distinctly.” Then, sell your service drive on it’s own, with amenities, services, and skills that no neighborhood Lube-mart can touch.

Craft a great service customer experience and they’ll happily pay full price for the next oil change or service interval.

If they have never been in your dealership before, do something above and beyond.  Something quick and easy like noticing that their headlights need restoration and take care of it for them at no charge. Let them know you handled it for them to keep them safe, and thank them for coming in. Things like this show that you care about the customers themselves, not just their pocketbooks. Get creative and empower all members of dealership staff to do whatever they can within reason to make customers feel comfortable and special. There are many ways to do this without spending money or losing profit.

Making them feel like a VIP is the best possible customer experience. With that customer experience, you are creating customers for life.

If a person has a truly winning experience, they will probably tell a few close friends. However, if they have a bad experience, or at least what they perceive as a bad experience, they will tell EVERYONE. Grocery checkout clerk, Walmart greeter, whoever. They’ll tell anyone who will listen.  A client of mine once mistakenly told a customer (who left angry) that a repair would not be covered by the warranty. Despite making immediate attempts to call the customer back to apologize and correct the oversight, the customer went on a 24-hour dealership review-site marathon slamming his store. The impact was tremendous.

Negativity spreads like wildfire… and your money is flammable.

On a handful of occasions, while looking for a dealership’s website, I’ve found hate-sites ranked higher than the client’s own webpage.

INDUSTRY ESPIONAGE

One of the valuable bells & whistles of our retention product is a custom video landing page. On the page we flat-out ask where customers used to service before coming back to your dealership and why. We call this “Industry Espionage” I read every one of these reasons personally. Most of it is simple stuff. It may surprise you how a few easy changes can drastically improve the customer experience and the way they feel about you. Simple things can increase the frequency at which they visit you. Replenishing the hot coffee, free doughnuts, shuttle service, WIFI that actually works and accurate wait times can do wonders for you. Kid’s play rooms and cafe’s are great, but nothing can compete with the real basics:

Simple courtesy, competence, realistic completion times and accurate job estimates can directly impact a positive customer experience.

GETTING THEM IN

Before you can show a customer some love with a positive customer experience, you have to first get them to come in. So how do we get new people in or get lost/inactive customers to come back? Marketing. Good marketing would be better, and unique marketing would be best. As we all know, there’s a lot of competition out there. Many other companies are fighting for these very same customers. No mystery there. Constant mobile banners, pop up’s on the computer, radio spots (most of which are horribly annoying) television commercials (equally annoying), costumed people dressed as livestock or superheroes spinning signs on every corner, and we all have Direct Mail pieces in our mailboxes multiple times per week.

THE PROBLEM

Most of these look exactly the same. There is usually very little difference between one dealership’s service coupons and another’s. Further, these are not much different than the after-market service center coupons either. With the exception of whoever put in the lowest price, they don’t give customers much of a buying preference. Price is only what you pay for something. The focus should be on the value you get, FOR that price. We have all paid more than we had previously anticipated for something because a buying preference was created based on value being built. Value needs to be added. Sending a message that doesn’t communicate the unique value the experience will just become a spending contest. Because when the message is the same, whoever puts the most pieces out there wins, whether print media, digital, or broadcast. The more unique, the more you stand out, the more objectively effective your efforts are, the less you have to spend for the same result. That’s value, not cost. I’ve seen 2000 pieces of unique direct mail outperform 10,000 pieces of run-of-the-mill stuff all day long.

Plus – and trust me on this – the customers who come in for value & experience are the customers you really want. If your marketing is only targeting the “lowest-price-shoppers” then you better make sure that you are ALWAYS the lowest price, or you will lose them as fast as you got them.

TRACK-ABILITY

Running a campaign within any medium of advertising needs to be easy to track. Whether this is done through OP Codes or another method (and I highly suggest another method because OP codes are only as good as the person entering them in) you should always be able to tell at a glance if a campaign is bringing in customers. But more importantly, whom it is bringing in (ie: current customer, lost customer, no-history customer), number of visits, the total ROI to date for the campaign as well as an exact total upon completion. If it worked well, keep running it.

But the bottom line is this: if you can’t tell at a glance how well the campaign is producing – with hard numbers – find another.

With the programs we run, if a customer isn’t standing in your dealership with our marketing in one hand, and handing you cash with the other hand, we don’t claim them.

We don’t just preach this stuff, we practice it too. We have over 90% retention with our strictly automotive clients. Many of whom have recorded video testimonials for our website.  When was the last time that your experience and results from a direct mail company prompted you make a video testimonial about them?  No one wants to to jump in front of a camera, and they certainly wouldn’t do it and lie.

Now that’s real value – and in this industry – its priceless.