I can't give you any hard numbers, but we've tried a few different things.
Please note that any of these could be executed on better or worse than we did it, but this was my experience.
- Regional billboards - very targeted to only customers heading towards the dealership - Low ROI
- Bus stop ads for sub-prime financing - Low ROI
- Weekly Facebook contests to acquire online traction - Medium ROI (we get many more followers, etc and those that win the service prizes DO redeem them, but I can't say I've found 100s of customers)
- Advertising all over a Newspaper website for a weekend - Negative ROI (Their numbers were about 500% higher than what we actually saw on the website, had an average weekend in sales both times we tried it)
- Postal Code mail drops - Positive ROI (as much as I hate it, these have worked for sales and service)
- Mailing neighbours of new car buyers, based on postal/zip code - Negative ROI (I pulled all the data apart and tried to find correlating postal codes 90 days after we tried this and didn't have any luck)
I know there's a bunch more, but that's all I can think of.
I'm looking at a few new ones now like parts departments sponsoring local car forums (ie:
Toronto Subaru Club), Service departments sponsoring local one-off racing events, running community campaigns with a free 1 year lease
through a radio station, etc.