Driving Retail Sales

Challenge

How do we increase truck parts sales utilizing our existing sales and marketing infrastructure?

 

Solution

A multi-pronged, persistent campaign that meets the customer where they are.

 

Result

A more than 40% increase in the sales volume of the promoted parts, with a post-promotion tail that continued at 20% over baseline. All in this campaign contributed millions of dollars per year in additional sales, and continues to be successfully utilized.

 

Trucking is an old-school, trust based industry, with customers still preferring physical flyers and firm handshakes over the newest bells and whistles. So we made a 4-page flyer as the central prong of this campaign. This was filled to the brim with special parts offers - pictures, pricing, and details - but at only 4 pages was limited enough to not overwhelm the customer. These were produced bimonthly, always bringing new, seasonally relevant parts to the customer's attention. And since it was hand-delivered, it gave the salesperson something to lead the customer through, and something to leave behind that the customer had a reason to keep.

 

Each 4-pager's deals were valid for two months, and that leads us to the next prong: email blasts. Three times a week we would choose a part from the 4-pager and make it the focal point of that day's promotions. The email blast highlighting just that part went out to over 15,000 customers. With all of the deals finalized in a central document, it was easy to build out the whole month's part's promotion calendar - and keep the familiar specials in front of customers constantly.

 

Prong Three: everything else. Alongside each day's email blast, we posted Facebook/Meta and Instagram posts promoting the same parts. The internal TVs inside the dealerships ran ads highlighting those parts, and employees received individual flyers promoting one part at a time to use as needed. Every employee knew what we were running specials on, making it easy to upsell when the specials were relevant.

 

To track the impact of all this marketing, we measured the sales of the listed parts before they were promoted, during, and after, each in 2 month windows. What we saw surpassed our expectations - marketed parts moved in huge numbers, often exceeding 40% boosts, and in the two months following the promotions the sales volume still remained strong, averaging around 20% over baseline as the specials lingered in customer's minds and buying habits shifted away from our competitors.