By: Steve Lausch, Director of Product Marketing

In our first post of the Revving up Fixed Ops blog series, we considered just how much business is available to automotive dealers in fixed operations. The potential revenue is no small opportunity.

Perhaps the smartest action is to investigate a comprehensive marketing strategy for fixed operations. The key here is “comprehensive.” It means reaching:

• all available consumers — current, lost soul, or conquest; independent of the dealer’s Primary Marketing Area (PMA), through
• all available marketing channels (not just those marked with OEM co-op), with the
• full value of the dealer’s unique brand.

For years, dealers have sought to generate additional service business by sharing compelling offers in both direct mail and email — two key media for reaching current, lost, and conquest customers. The efforts, however, are not always as successful as they could be.

Consider the following dealer success stories from our 2016 custom campaigns and how they performed to drive serious revenues and profits.

The Mailbox

When dealers think about driving fixed ops revenue, they often think of “service mailers” though few programs consistently translate into this level of success.

One 2016 campaign to lost souls on behalf of a Baltimore-area dealership drove well over $41k of revenue, bringing in over 130 lost souls, some who hadn’t seen the dealership in over a year.

Dealers should expect such success from a campaign targeting their own databases, but what about a conquest service program?

The mailer below was crafted to target conquest customers in Houston, TX. It achieved a 5.3% response rate — more than 5x the standard response rate for prospect campaigns (1.0%, DMA Response Report). In doing so, it scored over 120 service visits and more than $87k in revenue.

A Ford dealer, in a notably less urban setting, enjoyed similar results with a campaign to 4,800 prospects. It drove over $64k in revenue with an average RO of $401.53. That’s the result of custom design and strong data at work together.

Again, these mailers are a supplement to co-opped OEM marketing programs. Yet, in contrast to basic OEM programs, dealers can enjoy custom creative designs and hyper-targeted messaging, all personally coordinated by a Dominion Marketing Manager and offered at a competitive price.

Discover how Dominion Digital Marketing can put you on the fastest route to higher fixed ops revenue!

But let’s not stop with direct mail. It’s sibling channel of email marketing awaits with similar results.

The Inbox

“Doesn’t just about every vendor do email marketing?” The answer: “Not like this.”

Last year, Dominion sent 12.2M custom service campaign emails, resulting in over 440k service visits, generating $137.8M for dealers who were serious about investing in their fixed operations. Through these efforts, we helped them generate $7.2M from over 34k first-time service customers and $12.5M from over 26k lost soul customers.

Perhaps one reason is the fact that our custom campaigns perform well above the national average for both open rate (19% vs. 15-20%) and click rate (7% vs. 1-2%).

The email below targeted 10,156 consumers who opened a Labor Day email, but had not clicked through. This level of strategy, attention to detail, and follow-through achieved 184 closed ROs at more than $51k in gross profit from the campaign.

Initial and follow up versions of custom, responsive design emails.

And if there was ever a reason to consider our unique approach to service marketing, here’s one success story that will blow you away! One of our Georgia dealers was advised by their dedicated Marketing Manager to run a large scale campaign to over 28k prospects, featuring the custom design below.

The campaign yielded over 1,200 unique service visits driving a massive $306,935 in service revenue. Over 10% of the responding customers were lost souls, contributing over $50k to the campaign.

Better Together

A significant contributor to successful fixed op marketing is targeting everyone in the dealer’s database (and beyond for conquest efforts). Since no dealer captures 100% of their customers’ email addresses, employ both direct mail and email marketing to achieve full coverage of the available targets.

Of course, direct mail and email are only two of the many channels available to your dealership with Dominion. Stay tuned for Part III of this blog series, where we’ll dive into the exciting world of fixed ops marketing on search and social.

Call 877.421.1040 to start planning your custom route to fixed ops success today!