Direct Mail & Email: The Wave of the Future?

Last week Ad-Ology, a research firm that studies marketing and advertising trends across a variety of industries, released a report on the types of marketing likely to be increasing in 2010.

The findings might surprise you.  Yes, there was plenty of mention of Social Media & Internet marketing.  Obviously both sectors continue to grow rapidly.  However, the report found that when companies are looking to earn new customers the top two forms of marketing to be used in 2010 are email (84.6% of responders) and direct mail (70.4%).

On LinkedIn and other social networking sites there have been a lot of discussions lately about "dying" media formats.  Direct Mail and print tend to get thrown to the top of that list from time to time.  I'm a firm believer in a broad marketing mix that allows consumers to be touched by your message in a variety of formats.  Some forms are easier to track than others, but there is an added synergy in a good media mix that is nearly impossible to count.

Quickly though - why is it that email & direct mail would be the most popular forms of new customer acquisition?

• They are personal, one on one messages.  Email and mail is always more effective when addressed to the person by name.  One could argue the only other media that could enter the personal space of a consumer like these two is texting.  All three deliver messages specifically to one person with their undivided attention, well, at least for a minute.  
• Everyone checks their mail and email.  Not everyone watches Television commercials (Andy & I are a prime example, the only TV we watch live is sporting events), many people don't have a newspaper subscription, and with Satellite/XM radio and IPod integration in most new vehicles even traditional radio is slowing.  
• Finally, timing.  The Post Office is still a government run agency - and thus not a science, but it's still pretty easy to determine when mail will end up in homes.  Email is obviously super easy to control.  With one message sent at a very specific time these methods can drive immediate results to a dealership.  Which is one of many reasons why they should both include timely calls to action.  You can't control when your customer to be will listen to your commercial on the radio, but you can control when your message is hand delivered to them. 

What forms of marketing are you looking to use this year when trying to gain new customers?

New Marketvision Reports - Purchase Timeframe

Purchase Timeframe

The kiosk asks the customers as they come in when they are in the market to buy. This is a multiple choice question. We find that when a machine does the "asking" the answers are often more honest than if a sales person asks. Dealerships use this information in different ways, depending on their sales process. A large complaint with using gifts on a mailer is that it brings in all "prize seekers" now that we have a way to track this we are looking forward to being able to improve these stats as we identify what products are bringing in more buyers. In the meantime this report helps you realize who is a customer now and who could be a customer in the future.


The second part of this question is prompted if the customer says they are in the market at all. It will then ask "Are you looking for a new or used vehicle?" This data is also then reported and can be used when working with each individual customer, to create additional targeted mailing lists and to determine which of your messages are driving which kind of buyers.

As always if you'd like to talk further about these new Marketvision developments, or the new ROI tools in the hopper please give me a call or shoot us an email!

New Marketvision Reports - Service Analysis

Service Analysis

The second new report on the Marketvision kiosk is a survey asking about Service.  It asks "Where do you currently service your vehicle?" and provides the multiple choice answers below.  We will soon be removing the "other" field as an option because it appears the other choices would cover all our bases.  This does a couple of things for you - it provides a quick snapshot of your market to see where the service customers are going, allows you to collect emails from all of these people so you can email service offers out in the future, and finally you will be able to build specific mailing lists from this data for future marketing.