“One of the things that’s vital—and different—about what we’re doing is we’re in the business of marketing as a science, not as an art,” Nelson says. “We’re not a bunch of people sitting around a table trying to figure out what wild and crazy thing we can do to sell more cars. We’re using hard data to determine exactly which people will respond to specific sales messages.”
Visible Customer’s software might look at several variables—when people purchased their cars, when service is due, the customers’ average number of days between service, whether they have service contracts—to create a target group at the intersection of several subsets, then send a marketing message relevant to only that group. “We rely on science and statistics,” Nelson adds. “And all our results feed back, so the process is more accurate every single time.”
Greg Jensen, chief operating officer of the five-dealership Ballweg Automotive Group based in Middleton, Wisconsin, has been a customer of Visible Customer for about two years. At one of his stores, he says by e-mail, advertising expenses went down 30.5 percent year over year (including his Visible Customer fees), and gross profit stayed level—“meaning in the very challenging market we are in, [Visible Customer] allowed our marketing dollars to work smarter and harder for us, producing great results.” A fourth-quarter auto-service campaign last year with Visible Customer had a 12 percent return on investment according to his own calculations, Jensen adds.
Ballweg pays a monthly fee of approximately $4,000 to Visible Customer (this varies from customer to customer, depending on the scope of services they want), and then pays nothing more to execute individual campaigns. In return, Jensen says, he’s getting the first marketing program he has ever used that relies heavily on e-mail.
“Instead of sending out 36,000 direct mail pieces at whatever a pop, [Visible Customer] will go through our database and find the 6,000 people who are likely to be in the market for a new car,” Jensen says by phone. “Their ability to look into and predict the buying habits of our customers is just phenomenal.”
In the next few months, Visible Customer will roll out a whole new roster of services, opening up more marketing channels for its dealer-customers: customer surveying, live calling, click-to-chat e-mails. Nelson is shooting to take on 500 new customers in 2009. His longer-term goal? To make Visible Customer a $1 billion company in the next 5 to 10 years.
“Over the course of time, we’ll take over the majority of the marketing responsibilities for auto dealers across the country,” Nelson says. “And we can do it. Visible Customer has no direct competitors. Nobody else is coming and attacking this industry the way we are.”
