Business Objectives:   As a leading manufacturer of marine engines, Mercury Marine relies on a network of over 4,500 independent dealers to promote its product line. As is the case with many manufacturers, marketing budgets are limited to national campaigns while the local marketing is initiated by dealers and supplemented with co-op dollars.

Mercury’s challenge was two-fold; dealers were doing a poor job of promoting the Mercury brand to consumers, and Mercury lacked the staff and budget to design and produce marketing materials for every dealer request.

Mercury needed a solution that would:

• Support dealers with professional marketing materials
• Control brand image

Results:Mercury worked with their service provider, Pinpoint 360, to develop a web-based marketing program called Mercury Online Marketing (MOM).A test campaign was conducted in spring 2010 with six dealers participating. Dealers were allowed to customize the offers and contact information for their own business needs.

The audience consisted of aluminum boat owners within a 15 mile trade radius of each test-site location and whose boat registration was four to ten years old.

The test included two direct mail formats that were mailed three weeks apart. The results for this test campaign were:

• Contacts in mailing list:  23,583
• Boats sold to contacts on mailing list:  54
• Conversion rate:   0.23%
• Total boats sold during promotion period:  910 in MN market
• % of new boat sales from direct mail:  6%
• Assuming a 25% closing rate from sales staff, this pilot generated a 1% response rate
• 3,500 dealers are now enrolled in MOM for a participation rate of over 77%

Read more about how this campaign was structured and why it succeeded.

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