Service Pays

Nissan USA has been pulling a response rate of about 6% to a 1.1 million-piece mailing it sent out earlier this summer. Long-standing customers were offered rebates on maintenance work done at Nissan dealerships.

This was the automaker's first-ever service-related rebate program, according to Liam Steuart, account director at The Marketing Store, Nissan's Toronto-based agency.

The U.S. unit of the Japanese automaker made this rollout after getting a 5.5% response to a 320,000-piece test mailing in large markets such as Philadelphia, Washington, Phoenix and Atlanta in February.

“In the past we've run a number of different programs with Nissan where the dealerships would choose offers for these customers. But we found dealerships weren't being overly aggressive with the offers they were sending out,” Steuart says. “Nissan corporate funded the entire amount of the rebates, so it let the dealerships be a little more aggressive.”

The mailings went to customers who hadn't had their cars serviced at dealerships for at least 12 months.

Even though the Franklin, TN-based operation runs many e-mail and online marketing programs, the company decided to use direct mail this time for fairly obvious reasons.

“We do a lot of e-mail campaigns,” Steuart explains. “For this piece we chose to focus on direct mail. It's one of those tricky balances with a rebate offer — you make it easy for the dealers…but you also want to make it really easy for customers.”

Just the same, Nissan is considering placing rebate offers on its Web sites in the future. For now, though, it's sticking with direct mail.

Nissan indeed decided to offer service rebates at least in part to help out its dealers.

“[Nissan was] looking at something that'd really be no work for the dealerships because most of them want to spend their time working with customers and not have to think about any new program Nissan has to offer,” Steuart says. “The beauty of this program was that other than signing up and paying a portion for the mailer the dealer didn't have to do anything — the customer had to come in and get the service done. After that, it's all on the customer to mail in the rebate.”

In the past Nissan has run a number of direct mail campaigns to promote sales, such as sweepstakes and other rebate offers. “But it's not something it'd ever done on the service side,” Steuart notes.

Between 900 and 1,000 of Nissan's 1,100 dealers participated in the program.

Nissan is looking at running this campaign early next year and may eventually conduct it twice annually.

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