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Conquest Email Services - Exposed?

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#41
Did anyone see Pasch's new industry report - some sales guy at Citytwist just forwarded me a copy.
Looks like a total sales pitch for the scammers at Citytwist.
Lots of good stuff from Brian but in the end this is a total sales job and the company he partnered with is full of crap.
 
#44
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#46
Chris Leslie said:
it's 47 pages of "No Shit Sherlock" on my opinion
Any digital marketer worth their salt knows that you dont/cant just buy "emails" like this.

What did they expect?
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craigh said:
Wait.. I can't just buy emails and sell more cars?
I better make some calls...
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:rofl: Now that's some funny shit boys. @brianpasch does a good job of explaining things to the non-DealerRefresh audience. The big thing that should be pointed out is how risky/dangerous it is to share your customer's information with these "silver bullet" ventures. I always wonder how many of these email marketing companies are just fronts to sell people's personal information all over the place. Maybe there's some downstream linkage that uses that information to perform an incredibly vicious act.

Imagine if that were the case and someone was able to figure out the source of that person's information was a car dealer...... media shit show:eek3:
 
#47
Brian is fairly accurate. I've seen this in a couple of dealers a couple years back when I was selling into them. One dealer, new to the store, a partner was very excited about this and when he explained, I was to total shock anyone would agree to this. The whole cold email thing is very sketchy.
He did cover what I saw over the next few days. The Google analytic stats where off the chart and with nothing to show for it. They made no sense and I had to really dig in to see what was really going on.
In the end he may have sold a few cars, I don't know. I do know spending that money and building your brand, reputation and goodwill in, for him, a new market would have yielded on going goodwill and results. The way a business is built.

Digital marketing has to be a large portion of your marketing. Today, you really need to get on top of your reputation marketing, social marketing... and have someone on board that really understand Google analytics and can A/B test the hell out of everything.

I will leave you with this. Email marketing is your absolute highest ROI. This is to your own clients.

John
 
#48
John M said:
Brian is fairly accurate. I've seen this in a couple of dealers a couple years back when I was selling into them. One dealer, new to the store, a partner was very excited about this and when he explained, I was to total shock anyone would agree to this. The whole cold email thing is very sketchy.
He did cover what I saw over the next few days. The Google analytic stats where off the chart and with nothing to show for it. They made no sense and I had to really dig in to see what was really going on.
In the end he may have sold a few cars, I don't know. I do know spending that money and building your brand, reputation and goodwill in, for him, a new market would have yielded on going goodwill and results. The way a business is built.

Digital marketing has to be a large portion of your marketing. Today, you really need to get on top of your reputation marketing, social marketing... and have someone on board that really understand Google analytics and can A/B test the hell out of everything.

I will leave you with this. Email marketing is your absolute highest ROI. This is to your own clients.

John
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Thanks John, and yes I do agree that Brian is mostly accurate. My point about the report was that in the end it looks like a pretty big sales pitch for CityTwist. And for the media dollars we have spent with CityTwist, it looks like a lot of the same crap that Brian was warning against.
What's really strange is that I spoke to our agency late yesterday and they were all over Polk about this report, because like us they were burned by CityTwist. The Polk data people, who are great and we really like, promised us that CityTwist DOES NOT send their emails. CityTwist is just a licensor of their data.
So in the end I guess I am just looking at this as a sales pitch for a crappy vendor.
Between Mail, TV, Radio, Print and Digital - our dollars are shifting heavily to the digital world. Email is absolutely a big part of this increase. But with the legit players in the space.
 
#49
John R
When I said fairly accurate, I was referring to the self promoting, especially at the end and naming other digital products. Totally agree with you.

Email is huge when done right. I always saw upward of 40-1 ROI. I worked with one dealer that was triple this and i could not figure out how to replicate. Mostly because a lot of the information was kept from me by the vendor I worked for. Just to be clear, we're talking about your own client list.

There were 2 vendors that I knew of that had a very nice product to do this. One was Cobalt (CDK now) and I think the other was Reynold (i'm not 100% on this one) but I liked it more then the Cobalt product. Also, there are a few more today that look very interesting.

Above all else, keep on top of Reputation marketing and Social Marketing. You might be the best, but if your competitor is dominate in these area's, they will pass you up. It'll also improve the results of all your other marketing. Lots of information out there to back this up.
 
#50
John Robling said:
We have tested with CityTwist, Take5, V12, LeadMe, Edirect and Keono.
Almost all of these guys delivered BS traffic. Weird clicks from all over the place, desktop only??? Seriously?
We are paying a premium with Acxiom to run a real campaign.
They send us the list of people they are targeting in advance.
We are merging this file with our sales file every 30 days and seeing decent match.
I doubt that people are buying off of our emails, but they are definately talking to people who come in and buy.
An imperfect science but it is working.
Have you run any tests with CT? I remember running a free test with them. Let me know how you make out.
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Hi John,

I work with CityTwist. I think this has been a great forum for educating dealers on the pitfalls of some conquest email vendors. What Brian Pasch's report divulged was that many of the vendors in this space show very irregular Google Analytics website traffic. He labeled those vendors as "opaque". However, he also divulged a few vendors whose web traffic looks "normal". I don't think any conquest email vendor should claim sole attribution of a sale from an email or sell conquest email as some kind of magic bullet. However, I think most marketers would agree that new customer acquisition email is a valuable piece of the marketing mix. The fact that we checked out to be one of the "transparent" companies out there along with a couple others simply means that we are sending real human traffic to dealer's websites vs what appears to be bot or incentivized traffic. I welcome any other questions you might have.
 
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