Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/410969
www.PowersportsBusiness.com SOLUTIONS Powersports Business • November 3, 2014 • 35 Source: CDK Global Recreation Still sending post- cards? Handwriting the address? Licking stamps? Putting them in tomorrow's mail? Waiting for the mail- man to come? And can't fig- ure out why you have special order parts sitting for weeks, waiting for the customer to come in, pay the balance and get it off your shelf? So at 30 days you pulled it, packed it, and sent it back to the supplier. Of course, the cus- tomer came in the next morning, looking for his special order. He was told that it had been returned. And he stomped out. Mad. Or, your best sales guy in new units has called and left five messages for that family on a four-unit deal. They are set up, serviced out, on the trailer, and just waiting for them to show up, pay the balance and pull out with happy stickers all over the back side of their new toys. But not so. Calls not answered. Now, not even sure if you have a good phone number. Bummer. And in service, that big engine overhaul on a Gold Wing has been done for over 30 days. You made call after call, but never got anyone to answer. After a month, you pushed the bike outside, where it is now covered with dirt and grime. But you know that if you have to throw a mechanic's lien on it and sell it, it will prob- ably go, because several birds have already made deposits on it. Hard. Hard to keep up with it all. Calls take a lot of time, and we soon give up. And we haven't even mentioned service schedul- ing, pickup appointments, rental notices and all the other reasons you need to have contact with your customers. If you are still using the U.S. mail and Ma Bell, sorry. It is not cutting it with today's young custom- ers. They use their phones in ways that are totally different since when my home phone number was two longs and a short, and the phone line was draped on fence posts all the way from the general store in town out to our ranch by the Bear River (True store here: Sheridan, Calif. Population 231 at the time. General store is still there. And if you under- stand that reference to two longs and a short, you are probably as far behind the times as you can get.) A NEWFOUND EFFICIENCY So what are we talking about here? Step into an Apple store. Buy something, and watch what happens. You are looking for the line at a cash register. The young salesperson sees the move, smiles and simply says, "Here. Let me see your card. I can take care of it right here." You hand him your card, he slides it through the square on his phone, scans the box, asks for your email address, types in the first part then just hits a button with "@gmail.com" on the end. He asks if you would like the receipt sent to your email address, taps a button, hands you the box and says "Thanks!" Notice that he didn't have to ask your name for the invoice. The program got it off the card. You're done. Fini. And out the door with your new toy. Email makes it all possible. I have looked at our industry and have identified over 50 dif- ferent actions that could be handled by email, rather than phone calls or postcards. Over 50! Yet how many of us are using it? Look at Chart A. I analyzed more than 2,000 dealers with 3.6 million unique customers. I was curious just how many email addresses had been collected from those 3.6 million folks. What would you think? Maybe half? Dream on. If the dealers had a loyalty program or a Customer Experience Management program in place ("CEM"), the best I saw was 34 per- cent in the marine market. It goes down from there. It's 28 percent in V-twin. It's about the same in metric and Canadian dealers. And just 22 percent for the RV folks. And, if there is no loyalty or CEM in place, the numbers drop even lower. From 20 percent collection down to 1 out of 10 customers. What are we thinkin'? The world is made up of three basic types of people: People who make things happen; People who things happen to; and People who wonder "What happened?" The world has gone digital, and too many of us are in that "What happened?" group. Look at Chart B. Seven percent of metric dealers have not yet gathered a single email address. The other markets run about half of that. These are the "What happened?" group. THE TOP EMAIL PERFORMERS Now, to be fair, there are a few dealers who have fully embraced the email idea. In the marine industry, one dealer was at 95 percent collection. Metric had one dealer at 91 percent, and the other markets followed between 81 percent down to 65 percent for the highest col- lecting dealer in each market (Chart C). When you expand that to the top 10 percent of deal- ers in each market, the numbers run from 83 percent down to 50 percent (Chart D). That was the top 10 percent of collecting dealers. Let's chop this pie up and look at it from another angle. I divided all dealers in each market group into two groups. First group were those deal- ers with the highest percentage of email col- lection, and second group were those with the lowest percentage of email collection. Equal number of dealers in each group. In V-twin, the top group collected 260,000 addresses among them, getting about 35 percent penetration. The dealers on the bottom group col- lected just 62,000 addresses among them and had only an 11 percent penetration. Worst performance here were the metric dealers who gathered more than 1 million addresses from the top group of dealers, while the lower half entered only 102,000 among them. That was just a 9 percent penetration for the low guys — 1 out of 10 customers. Pathetic. Remember. The same number of dealers in each market group, but worlds apart in the results obtained. I mentioned more than 50 ways to use email in the dealership. I can't go through them all here, but think about these few: In service: Reminder of appointment. Notice of completed RO. Request for change to estimate. Notice of storage charges starting. In parts: Electronic counter invoice. Spe- cial order notices (arrived, back-ordered, can- celed). Notice of new accessories for owners of affected models. In sales: Electronic credit application (send, receive). Notice of unit ready for pickup. Reminder of salesperson appointment. General store: Birthday greetings. Coupons. Newsletter. Accounts receivable statement. Rental: Reminder of pickup and return dates and times. Notice of requested unit available. And many more. Apple just sold 10 million new cell phones over this past weekend (as I write this). Do you honestly think that 10 million people lined up and waited to pay at the cash register in their retail stores around the world? I don't think so. No. They put an iPhone cash register in each salesperson's hand, let them slide the card and tap in a few keystrokes on the sales floor, and happy people were checking out and gone in 30 seconds. The invoice is at your house, sitting in your inbox. That works. Checkout lines at the parts counter don't. Get with it. Collect email addresses, and use them. Your customers will be happy. And happy customers come back. PSB Hal Ethington has been associated with the powersports industry for more than 40 years. Ethington is a senior analyst at CDK Global Recreation. Contact him at Harold.Ethington@ cdk.com. Using email to reach customers? Ya oughta be! HAL ETHINGTON DOLLARS & SENSE 34% 28% 26% 25% 22% 20% 20% 18% 15% 10% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% Marine V-twin Metric Canada RV Dealers with Loyalty or CEM in place Without Loyalty or CEM 2.5% 6.6% 2% 3.1% 1.4% 0% 1% 2% 3% 4% 5% 6% 7% Marine Metric Canada RV V-twin 95% 91% 81% 69% 65% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Marine Metric Canada RV V-twin 83% 66% 62% 52% 50% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% Marine Metric Canada RV V-twin PERCENT OF CUSTOMERS WITH EMAIL ADDRESS ON FILE FOR DEALERS WITH LOYALTY OR CEM IN PLACE V. DEALERS WITHOUT LOYALTY OR CEM DEALERSHIPS WITH NO CUSTOMER EMAIL ADDRESS RATE OF EMAIL COLLECTION BY HIGHEST PERFORMING SINGLE DEALER RATE OF EMAIL COLLECTION FOR TOP PERFORMING 10% OF DEALERS Chart A Chart B Chart C Chart D