Car Dearlerships & Garages
Expert Leaflet Distribution Campaigns For Car Dearlerships & Garages
Design, print and door to door delivery to build your business and build your brand
Start your campaign todayOver the years Mr Flyer has helped dozens of car dealers and garages to dramatically increase footfall and sales.
If you’re looking to increase your footfall and sales with a proven, measurable and cost-effective design, print & distribution strategy, get in touch with the Mr Flyer team today to start your campaign.
What our customers say
“ Mr Flyer provides outstanding and extremely well-tailored service, giving helpful and honest advice from the offset. From a repeat distribution Mr Flyer have recently carried out for us, we have already sold 6 cars, what a fantastic result! ”
Neil Lawley, Perrys Mazda
Leaflet Drops & Direct Mail For Car Dealerships & Garages
Thanks to many years working alongside national car dealerships and local garages, we have learned what works and what doesn't. This page reveals our most effective strategy to ensure you see the highest possible return on your leaflet distribution and direct mail campaigns.
Car Dealership Gift Marketing
The gift marketing principle has probably generated the highest ROI for our car dealership customers than any other sector. I'm sure you've received a flyer with information about how long the garage has traded, a list of services, and a picture of their showroom. You didn't respond, right? They didn't give you anything to respond to - it was just a montage of irrelevant info.
Marketing needs a call to action, and the usual option is a discount. But to perform a flyer distribution campaign with a discount your margins can justify, it will look like a joke: '0.5% discount with this flyer'! Typically if a discount isn't 20% or more, it's not going to be considered - but in your industry, such margins are fantasy, which is why a gift works so well.
"Advertising mail delivers increased customer value by increasing sales activity through long-term engagement." DMA
Gift Marketing Implementation
Choose a gift relevant to your target audience, and then make it easily accessible. For instance, at Mr Flyer, we do regular flyer distributions for various Mazda dealerships, so for their target audience, we chose a £10 M&S voucher. If you were promoting a little Citroen C1 with free insurance for 18-year-olds, a Topshop or McDonalds voucher would be more appropriate.
The gift works best when getting prospects through the door rather than upon completing a sale. For instance, a bottle of wine with a test drive is much more effective than a bottle of wine upon sales completion (even if the wine was more expensive).
By doing it with a test drive, you get to qualify people when they phone to book, which helps sift out time-wasters, and you can see a trackable return from your marketing campaign.
A word of caution - don't make the gift too good. Against our advice, an estate agent client once put a £20 House of Fraser voucher with any house valuation on their flyer. After the distribution, they received numerous valuations, but none converted into listings because the gift enticed time wasters.
"90% of campaigns that included door drops saw an increase in new customers, compared to 59% of those without ." MarketReach
Leaflet Distribution Fundamentals
Gift marketing is the overarching strategy for car dealerships and garages, but this must be supported with the Mr Flyer fundamentals to create a complete and successful campaign.
This includes:
- Initial consultation: This will establish your ideal customer, locality, goals, timescale, budget and more. Our sales consultants can then make recommendations and build your quote accordingly.
- Demographic targeting: Your ideal customer will determine where and how we target, usually with the aid of a free Experian demographic reports. The report provides the most appropriate postcode sectors for you.
- Actionable artwork: All flyer designs should include three keys: a bold headline, an eye-catching image, and a call to action (a gift). See above a successful case study for a leaflet targeting lower-income families.
- Appropriate print: The choice of paper quality, size, shape, and finish all represent your dealership. The case study above was printed on A5 170gsm gloss as it wanted some quality but still to be affordable. However, for Mazda, the artwork is often an invitation style, so we use a DL size and print on premium 350gsm silk as they have a more affluent target audience.
- Drip effect marketing: This is the most critical fundamental; without it, the gift strategy and all the pointers above reduce effectiveness dramatically. Drip marketing is where you repeat to your audience regularly - this builds awareness, trust and then engagement. We recommend a minimum 3-stage campaign where each distribution is repeated three times over 12 weeks.
"Your advertising mail (including leaflets, flyers and brochures) will deliver the best results if you design it with a big-picture view. Ensure that you map your customer journey out over a full year." DMA
Our Flyer Design Solution
We cover our three keys in every flyer design, which have proved time and again essential for maximum returns:
A bold headline. Pose this as a question relevant to your target audience. E.g. 'Want to get in shape for free this summer?' Then follow with a sub-headline, 'Now you can with a 7-day FREE PASS'.
An eye-catching image. Not your premises (it's likely not inspiring!), but a before and after picture, or an inspirational man and woman on gym equipment..
A call to action. Based on the above, it would reiterate your 7-day pass gift. It should also highlight a prompt expiry, so you see a quick return on your investment.
Direct Mail for Car Dealerships & Garages
The bulk of this page covers attracting new customers to your dealership utilising the proven gift marketing strategy. The next step is to continue with the same approach, this time engaging with your existing customers. As you will know, it is typically easier to sell to existing customers rather than new leads. Emails have a notoriously low open rate, so what is a more effective and personal approach? The answer: direct mail.
Direct mail is where we post a personalised (Dear Joe Bloggs...) item to your existing client base. The most cost-effective things to send are postcards, letters and booklets (but we can be much more creative too!).
You can use Direct Mail for standard communications such as service or MOT reminders and more compelling reasons such as a VIP invite-only event and exclusive upgrading offers.
All the marketing principles we have discussed above regarding targeting, actionable artwork (with a gift), appropriate print, and the drip effect marketing strategy remain. Drip feed marketing plays a vital role here - too often, our customers give up just before the breakthrough. Repeating your message to your clients consistently compounds your response rate as it demonstrates to your client that you care about serving them and that you value them.
"Mail isn't a one-off thing in a box; it's about building connections over time." JICMAIL
Ready to get started?
Hopefully, you now have a clear understanding of how your garage or car dealership can see the highest possible return from flyer distribution and direct mail campaigns. This strategy also works for servicing and other non-car sales-related marketing. Please contact us today and speak with one of our sales consultants, expressing your interest in the gift marketing strategy.
Get StartedAccreditations, Awards & Sustainable Commitments
Mr Flyer is a multi-award-winning company. We are ISO9001, ISO14001 and ISO27001 compliant. In addition, we are an accredited member of the DMA (Data & Marketing Association), JICMAIL (Joint Industry Committee for Mail) and the IPIA (Independent Print Industries Association).
Our Green commitments and credentials include, Carbon Balanced Printer with the World Land Trust, SME Climate Hub commitment and Love Paper & Two Sides members.
Customer Reviews
Mr Flyer is trusted by some of the UK’s smartest businesses. Why not join our continually expanding number of customers seeing a strong ROI with us.
