Successful Promotions

[thunder8671]

Hey guys,

Im trying to think of a way to drum up more business at our dealership through the internet department and Im trying to think of a promotion that would bring people in. What promotions have been successful for you guys?

 

[ewalraven]

What do you have the authority to do and/or how much to spend? For example, can you get them to authorize giving away gift cards? So say ..

"Come in and test drive and we'll give you a $50 gift card."

No doubt that will generate some foot traffic. We did that to the extent if we could tell a buyer was interested, but needed that last little push to come in that night we would say ..

"Come in the next 24 hours and we'll give you a $50 Target gift card"

We had them leftover from some other promotion. So it worked out for the best. Honestly the more money and/or bigger the prize/gift the better. We once gave away a bunch of LCD TV's. Generated a heck of alot of calls and traffic -- Though not one person actually bought a car from us lol (that was the GM's idea).

Oh, another cool one we did was .. "Find the Sonic". We drove the Sonic around to different places in the area and snapped pictures of it and posted it to Facebook. The person who was the first to respond with the location got the prize. Kind of cool, but nobody actually purchased anything from it .. that we know of :\

 

[Beth Hoover]

Hey guys,

Im trying to think of a way to drum up more business at our dealership through the internet department and Im trying to think of a promotion that would bring people in. What promotions have been successful for you guys?

Rather than trying to drum up business through promotions that might lead to giving away freebees to people who never planned to buy, are you mining your database? Do you have someone focusing on equity (alerts if you use them)? Is there one person solely dedicated to lease returns or if applicable, pull aheads?

OR, reach out into the community somehow by working with the local chamber for their next event, maybe you're doing this already but getting the local kids football or basketball teams to friend you on Facebook and have the parents submit recent game pics and you pick one kid a week to write about. This could be a flyer that goes home with them if the school approves or the coaches. Just some thoughts.

 

[Kelly Wilson]

Eric's idea on gift cards could be expanded to hit in market shoppers with tools like hooklogic so you are offering money to people who want to buy, not just the gift gobblers.

The same tools (If I understand correctly) can also be used with Beth's suggestions of mining your CRM.

For some feel good community outreach, even if they aren't in market shoppers, you could get with a local (highschool) group and have a test drive event. We did this as a dealer wide event, but I can see an easy transition to a social/digital based event.

What we did: 2 piece tickets w/a Qr (to a landing page), a phone number, directions. On the other side a note about the fundraiser, space for the students to write their name, apt time, or any other info. On the other half all the data the students can gather, both halves with disclaimers. We did this with the local cheer/dance team. I think they got $25 per testdrive or $5 per complete/valid ticket (they had to enter their own people into the CRM too). - We now have a great community outreach marketing list, had plenty of interest and even more good word of mouth advertisement - we even sold a few.

 

[thunder8671]

Thank you guys for the great ideas. I really appreciate it.