Hitting Major Success Every Day

If you’ve wound up on the Mudd Blog, you’ve probably already passed the introduction point of Mudd Advertising. To be here, you’ve gone through our website or our social media so the likelihood of hearing the words “results” and “Mudd” together have occurred. Overseeing the marketing department here at Mudd, there is not a single day that goes by that you will not hear these words: Mudd, results, analytics, research, statistics and…. Excel. That’s just us, it’s what we do and it’s what we love.  A few months ago, there was another thought process that tied these all together. Our department is constantly studying and researching to build the stories behind our clients. It’s enough to drive you to succeed each and every day. But, what about Mudd? In any given week, I probably receive 50-75 emailed performance reports from direct marketing promotions and service.  Now, it’s only about 60% of campaigns, but some dealerships don’t want to run the free reports or get their ROI. (Strange, but – ok?) Now, sometimes I see decent results. Sometimes I see amazing results. Every now and then, I see a flop.  So I started thinking – we want everyone to succeed. Everyone. So what’s up with these random flops? Was it where they were geographically? Was it a campaign that didn’t run during the right time of year? Did the list not make sense? Did the message get altered? Why did it happen? I don’t want it to happen anymore. How can we fix it? And so it began. For those clients that allow us, after their promotion is complete, we go back into their systems and cross reference our efforts to pull a report of the campaign’s overall performance. The Brandcasting analytics will tell us how many mail pieces, emails and web banners were used, and either how many cars were sold or how many service orders were made because of the campaign. It allows us to show full ROI to our clients. Setting the Bar High The first step was to attempt a benchmark. Let’s say on a scale from 1-10, I set it at an 8 to count as success for my study.  And the variable is this – I don’t have an exact number average of what a dealership profits off a vehicle. Between what it took for the car to be “lot ready” to what they commissioned their sales force and took in off the trade – I can’t say every dealer makes “X” on a car.  Now, I do believe that after setting it, I may have set it too high. But again, at Mudd, it’s our DNA to make clients succeed so we want it to be a firework every time. So I set it high with the blessing of our automotive expert,Chad Wauters. By putting these together, setting the benchmark and grading a pass or fail study – we entered every possible component of a campaign into a spreadsheet. Location, drop dates, campaign type, leads generated. Ahhh, Excel. From February through June 2011 – five months – we have some great results for Mudd to share.  We’ve collectively entered more than 1,000 campaigns. (If only all customers would allow us to do so – it would be so much higher!) Service: The WOW Factor! 82% of our customers who participated in a service promotion with Mudd saw success. That is a minimum of 6x the return on their investment! Four out of five dealers.  Mudd has helped our dealers generate more than $4.4 million dollars in RO’s in five months time. How amazing is that? So after that, I am ecstatic! I want more. More results! More details. We have been able to pinpoint the very best campaigns, messages and time of year to launch them. Of course, many of our TMs, VPs and AEs already knew all of this from their years of expertise, but now we are validating them with numbers. We’ve decided on a couple list vendors that don’t cut it and pushing toward using the ones that do. In just over 750 sale promotions, Mudd has helped dealers sell more than 7,850 vehicles! The very best dealership we studied experienced 19x return on their investment! We are still compiling and researching, as we in marketing do. And the stories and results will continue, especially through this blog. The big point I want to make here is that by being a part of Mudd – you can believe in what you do. You can stay passionate about why you’re here and that you truly are helping people. We are helping our team know our results and we are helping our customers hit major success in their business every day. That is definitely something to be proud of. We love it when you succeed!