This is a brief case study of a marketing campaign to “lost customers” and “conquest opportunities” at Brown’s Toyota in Glen Burnie, Maryland (just south of Baltimore) to drive sales, service, and market-share leveraging the SOAR (Service Opportunity Access for Retention) data found on the Toyota Dealer Daily Portal. This data is a great resource for sales and service opportunities for Toyota dealers as it identifies rich targets in the dealers primary market area.
- For the purposes of this case study we excluded any respondent during the campaign that were not “Lost” or “Conquest”:
1) LOST, are customers that hadn’t had a transaction in over 365 days;
2) CONQUEST, are targets that never had a transaction with the dealership
In April of this year John Stefero, General Manager at Brown’s Toyota, along with other Brown’s Auto Group executives worked with PureInfluencer, LLC to formulate a campaign to re-activate Toyota customers within their market that had either never been in the dealership (conquest) and customers that hadn’t been in the dealership in over 1 year (lost). The lost segment was customers that had been receiving dealership communications (reminders, emails, etc.) yet had stopped using the dealership for service or sales in over 365 days. The campaign generated over $150K in gross revenues with an ROI of over 400% in just 2 and 1/2 months, additionally over the past 6 months Brown’s Toyota has increased their market share 2.1 points.
The campaign objective was simple: drive sales and service RO’s from those two segments in the Brown’s Toyota PMA. The source of the segments was Toyota’s SOAR list. That list is available to Toyota dealers via the Toyota Dealer Daily Portal. Figure 1 below is a screenshot of where a Toyota Dealer manager would find that data for her dealership.
Figure 1.
The tactic employed was to enhance the existing customer communication strategy with a new tactic called Targeted User/Browser Display. It differs from today’s online re-targeting in that it is a proactive display strategy intended to leverage the fact that more and more customers are online in-front of their web browsers on PC’s, tablets, and mobile phones. The display banners were targeted to specific Google user ID’s and their respective physical IP addresses derived from a technology that obtains matches via data with the SOAR targets. This tactic doesn’t depend on targets taking some sort of action, it’s proactive and engages the targets early and often. In many ways similar to sending a single piece of direct mail, but in this case 25 display banners throughout the month at a fraction of the cost of a single direct mail piece. The campaign also leveraged dynamic variable display images and messaging which delivered unique highly relevant images and messages specific to the vehicle that the targets were driving according to the SOAR data. Figure 2 is an example of a dynamic “make, model, message” banner that was used in the campaign. In this case the target in the SOAR list was identified as having an older model Rav4 LE and was subsequently served this unique display banner 25 times in the month through the course of the campaign.
Figure 2.
As you review the campaign summary data in the tables below you’ll notice that the campaign assisted in driving sales and service transactions from both of the segments, “lost” and “conquest.” It’s important to point out too that in marketing, no one particular tactic can nor should claim full attribution for a sales or service transaction yet in this instance these two segments had either been ignoring the existing communication strategies for over a year (Lost) and, or had never received direct communication from the dealership (Conquest).
Over the course of 2 and 1/2 months (June, July, and half of August) the total gross revenues of the lost and conquest segments for Brown’s Toyota was $161,996.07 against a total campaign cost of $27,117 for an ROI of 497%. Again these were targets that had either never been in the dealership or hadn’t been in the dealership for 356 days or more. All respondents that had a transaction date of 364 days or less were excluded from the campaign and the reporting.
The summary result for the SOAR campaign is as follows (click to enlarge):
(Click to enlarge)
The monthly continued success of the campaign speaks to the efficacy of “targeted browser/user display” tactics in the strategy along with the robust opportunity inside of the Toyota SOAR list. We recommend that Toyota dealers review the opportunities in their respective SOAR lists and implement a strategy and tactics to leverage those rich opportunities.
For more details on this campaign and strategy reach us at www.pureinfluencer.com and/or email me directly at ronmorrison@pureinfluencer.net