With so much reliance in online marketing technology, it’s
easy to forget that marketing tools such as direct mail are still around and
can be used getting a message to reach a target market. Direct mail marketing
is simply utilizing a mail service to deliver promotional or informational
materials to your intended audience.
Recent studies show that consumers actually spend more time considering
direct mail pieces compared to digital advertisements that they are exposed to.
In the automotive industry in particular, direct mail has been successful in
the past and it continues to be today. It can help a dealership keep the
current customers that they have while also generating new leads for other potential
customers. Let’s take a look at how the automotive industry uses direct mail
marketing.
Reaching an audience of buyers
The powerful part of direct
mail marketing is that you can be strategic in your research to select certain
individuals to send your direct mail to. This target group of people would need
to fit the profile of people who continually do business with you at your
dealership. Once you conduct the right amount of research, you can then tailor
your direct mail to only be sent to this group of individuals who will be more
likely to purchase a vehicle from your dealership.
Success can be
measured
When you put money into a marketing campaign, it’s important
to keep track of your success rate so you know whether the money you invested
was worth it or not. Direct mail can easily be kept track of if you go the
right way about it. There are a few different ways you can go about tracking
this including:
1. Small incentives
for customers if they visit the dealership
2. Inform them of a special promotion
3. A customer survey
These are a few ways that you will be able to capture
customer information along with being able to track if your campaign is
successful or not. When evaluating your success rate, you should ask yourself
some questions such as:
1. Did you get responses or not? If
so, how many?
2. What was the time frame it took
for you to get a response back?
3. What kind of feedback did you
receive from the customers who took action on the small incentives or possible
promotion that took place
Cost effective solution
As stated above, doing your research is vitally important to the success of your campaign. It also correlates directly to the cost of your direct marketing efforts also. Each piece of direct mail you send our will cost you a certain amount of money for postage to send. Therefore, if you don’t properly conduct research and send your direct mail to entire multiple zip codes, your campaign can cost you a lot. On the other hand, if you are careful in selecting the target audience to send your direct mail to, this will prove to be quite cost effective in relation to your success rate.
Even though it may seem as direct mail marketing is a thing
of the past by now considering the advances of technology, it can still be very
beneficial to your automotive dealership. With ample and careful research, you
will be able to construct a list of potential customers to target with your
direct mail that can drive traffic to your dealership.
