Customer mailings etc.

[RPMGeorge]

What does your DMS provide on Customer Mailings, Reminders and CSi? Which actions did work for you and what would be not so good?

[TC]

George, I have read your other posts and you have asked several questions on the aspects of the basic marketing services that are performed, most often outsource, in the service department.

Persistency, consistency and quantifiable are the order of the day!

The biggest factor is the current conditions in your dealership. What brands do they sell, what type of market are you in and what is the direction and influence from upper management. The last part of the puzzle that also needs to be taken into consideration is past successes and failures you or the dealership has experienced.

Please send me e-mail, as I may be able to help. I will try not to put on a full court sales press. I have been dealing with fixed operations managers since 1985 and currently am a sales director for an OBM (Owner Base Management) company. We do everything from service reminders; CSI calls to UPS programs and add source tracking.

Your bio does not include an e-mail address or I would have e-mailed this message rather than posting it.

TC


------------------
TC

[sallen1]

We've used our ADP system for those items. Mostly for service reminders since appointment dates are set and no-show lists are generated. We generate and mail about 50 service reminders every day and get pretty healthy response.

For general mailings, party invites, etc. we down load names and addresses to a PC and print from there, saves the ADP click charge.

For large mass mailings (10,000+) we use a mail-house.

[Ted@ADP]

A few points to add to sallen1's response.
I agree strongly with the 50 reminders a day.
Much better to have a steady flow of reminders out, for a steady flow of customers in, rather than a huge single monthly mailing, that overwhelms everyone in the service department, and results in customers being turned away.
Also, downloading names from the ADP system to Excel, and then to a mail merge in Word, not only saves click charges, but it adds some extra functionality. You can add bitmaps, (dealership logo etc.,)change fonts and design great looking coupons. But even more exciting, you can use Word's mail merge to merge to e-mail rather than paper. Of course, you do have to collect e-mail addresses.

[Gerry Laughlin]

To expand on Ted and Sallen's posts. We have also used our in house ADP system for service reminder mailings, about 700 a week, for the last 2 years. We have pretty much stayed weekly so we can use the bulk mailing permit. I submit for reimbursement from GM on the postage and "Letterhead" that we print them on. Our letterhead is set up to meet the standards to quailfy for reimbursement. Like Ted stated we run the service mailing as a normal run, then when it comes time to print them instead of having the ADP system generate the actual letter we have it just print out the "fields" that will be in the mailer. From there it is printed to a file that is parsed by a third party program that puts it into a excel spreadsheet format, which is easily opened via a "mail merge" in Microsoft publisher, where the actual body of the mailer is stored. It sounds complicated but it isn't. The only wish I have is that ADP would include Service Mailers in there Enhanced Laser program so we could eliminate the merge's and print directly to an ADP laser (Ted, hint, hint). Anyway, we do consider the whole program to be a success.
Thanks,
Gerry Laughlin