This is a real story about resolving that last question (names are changed to protect the innocent)--it involves direct mail, but follow along because it applies to all dealer advertising:  The GSM at a dealer in a five-location dealer group challenged the direct mail results he was given on a new/pre-owned direct mail piece that he was forced to take as part of the group.  His store had been charged $9,995.00 for 12,000 pieces, and the inbound calls were handled by his staff and not a BDC.  Afterwards, he was told the results were 21 cars sold, and he was given the customer contact information for the sales that matched from the list of 12,000 addresses of the direct mail piece.

He thought about this and contacted me for a sourcing survey, and I arranged for an off-site BDC to make a call campaign (inexpensive) to the buyers of the 21 vehicles.  I had them use a very fair and simple BDC script to ask buying experience and sourcing, and of the 21 sold contacts attempted, 17 were reached. 

Of the 17 . . . only ONE person surveyed said it was the direct mail piece that brought them in!  Nobody else remembered getting it.  This survey was done, by the way, in the first 21 days after the month the direct mail piece was used.  As well, to be specific on sources here, 6 of the other 16 customers that the BDC reached chose some kind of “Internet” as their source, 4 were from TV/radio, 3 were previous customers, 1 was a referral, 1 was from signage, and 1 was from the newspaper. 

I don’t want to say that direct mail isn’t ever effective (that's a different topic/blog/discussion), but to me this story clearly questions defining direct mail success by matching a direct mail piece name+address with name+address of cars sold (or especially just address match to address).  If you send direct mail into an area that will contain buyers for you ANYWAY, how do you know the mail piece was really any part of the subsequent sales?

And, for that matter, the same applies to all advertising:  How do you know the truth of which advertising spending (Internet, TV, radio . . . okay, and print, too) leads to sales at your dealership?  The answer is to procure a sourcing survey for ALL of your sales and adjust your spending to reflect what advertising is actually providing those sales--a very cost-effective way to find out which advertising is really working for you!

The dealer I reference here just finished a much larger sourcing survey on all advertising.  I'll let you now what I can about how that turned out!

By Keith Shetterly, keithshetterly@gmail.com
Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved.