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MUD Advertising and City Twist Please EFF off

Oct 17, 2011
181
49
First Name
Dan
I hope I am the only one on here who has this problem because it really sucks. Day and Day out I get calls, but I'm the Marketing Director, that's supposed to happen right? WRONG! These guys are terrible! No amount of kindness, anger, threats, hangups, can persuade these two companies to leave us alone.

I get no fewer than 3 calls a week from them. I've asked to be removed. I've slammed the phone down. I've even given one of them a little piece of my mind and yet the calls continue.

This morning I told Eric from MUD that if I received even one more call from their company that I would go public with my outrage. Jeff from MUD just called me and I informed him that his call was the last straw.

Does anyone have any advice on how to get these calls to stop? Is anyone actually working with them?
 
Dan,

I quick search within the forums will validate your frustration with City Twist:

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f21/city-twist-email-marketing-2578.html

I've used CityTwist in the past and you can get some good results IF you have the right offer and message. It's a numbers game. So be prepared to buy high volume with open results in the single digits. This is NOT you're in house email campaign where you expect to see 15+ open rates. This is electronic conquest direct mail.

No excuse for the excessive phone calls. This eventually works against you - reputation. How many deals and dealers are they pissing off that will never do business with them?



 
It doesn't always work but sometimes the only thing that eventually works is matching their ferocity to wear you down with over the top rudeness and outright anger when you do speak to them. I hesitated for a moment to reply since I finally seemed to have been taken off the call list for your direct mail "friends". It was not only frustrating for me but also for our receptionists as they would insist on holding until someone answered and if they went to voicemail they would just press "0" to try it again with the switchboard.
 
So I got the City Twist people to finally leave me alone, then at DD the got my DP. So no matter what I had to say, we are currently using them. They said there would be a low open rate. But the logic goes that with the high volume, the low rate is still a number of people so even a silly low rate will return enough to cover the cost. We have used the MUDD team many times through Chrysler as well. Without any input or looking at the numbers I have no tangible numbers to toss out. The only response I have to the MUDD and CityTwist can be taken from Scott Stratten, It's like walking into a room and punching people in the face-eventually someone will buy from you just to get you to stop-but you will have angered many more.
 
I hope I am the only one on here who has this problem because it really sucks. Day and Day out I get calls, but I'm the Marketing Director, that's supposed to happen right? WRONG! These guys are terrible! No amount of kindness, anger, threats, hangups, can persuade these two companies to leave us alone.

I get no fewer than 3 calls a week from them. I've asked to be removed. I've slammed the phone down. I've even given one of them a little piece of my mind and yet the calls continue.

This morning I told Eric from MUD that if I received even one more call from their company that I would go public with my outrage. Jeff from MUD just called me and I informed him that his call was the last straw.

Does anyone have any advice on how to get these calls to stop? Is anyone actually working with them?

Do you have live attendant that answers the calls? If so have her ask who is calling and if one of those two send them to a fake mailbox, one you set up just for these kinds of calls. (cant tell I have done that before can you)
 
Does City Twist just send your promotion to email addresses that are associated with physical addresses near your dealership?

If so, I have a question regarding the actual results this type of campaign produces:

If you are targeting email addresses connected to physical addresses in the region around your dealership and you are tracking the results by pairing the physical addresses you "emailed" with the physical addresses of people who buy vehicles from you, isn't it possible that the "results" you are seeing are due to the fact that the person lives in the local area and may have been exposed to your other promotional campaigns and that's what caused them to buy, rather than the "email campaign"? Or are you tracking your results a different way?
 
I think these are probably the two most aggravating vendors I use to hang up on monthly.

We did business with Mudd years ago, back in early 2000's, their results were not very good. Then they would call every 25 days, after a ton of "no's" they went away. Then out of the blue one day they started calling again, took 8 months to get them to go away.

City Twist - relentless on the phone. Never did business cause they ticked me off so much.

Get the CEO info, or Sales Directors info, start calling them and leaving voice mails to take you off their list and let them know how you feel and the name of the idiot that will not leave you alone. Everytime they call you, call the Sales Director, COO, or CEO and complain. It'll stop quick.

I have an email for vendors calling that I don't want them to have my email. I tell them they have to send me the info, i will look, if i am interested I will call you back. It works 75% of the time and you never hear back.
 
- relentless on the phone. Never did business cause they ticked me off so much.

Does the shoe fit on the other foot for some dealers? This may not be a popular response, but I think it might be worth considering.

I assisted a family member with a purchase and experienced the same thing from multiple dealers soliciting my business. I eventually told one of the salesmen that he could tell his boss that I'd died and he'd fulfilled his responsibility to follow up until my death because I wasn't going to be buying.

How do the pros here strike that difficult balance of contacting with enough frequency to prove you really want to earn the business and NOT tick someone off so much that the name of your brand makes the hair on their neck stand on end? At what point does the consumer develop the sentiment you've described due to an aggressive followup schedule? Does your management team allow queues from the consumer to supersede the follow up schedule?

I'm not asking because I think I know the right answer, but I am really curious to see what the 1%rs of DealerRefresh, dealer and vendor, think about this. Is there really a difference between B to B and B to C in this area?
 
Does the shoe fit on the other foot for some dealers? This may not be a popular response, but I think it might be worth considering.

I assisted a family member with a purchase and experienced the same thing from multiple dealers soliciting my business. I eventually told one of the salesmen that he could tell his boss that I'd died and he'd fulfilled his responsibility to follow up until my death because I wasn't going to be buying.

How do the pros here strike that difficult balance of contacting with enough frequency to prove you really want to earn the business and NOT tick someone off so much that the name of your brand makes the hair on their neck stand on end? At what point does the consumer develop the sentiment you've described due to an aggressive followup schedule? Does your management team allow queues from the consumer to supersede the follow up schedule?

I'm not asking because I think I know the right answer, but I am really curious to see what the 1%rs of DealerRefresh, dealer and vendor, think about this. Is there really a difference between B to B and B to C in this area?

It is true that B2B or B2C is annoying when you just don't want to buy, period. And we all sin on this.

Dealers are annoying when trying to sell you a car, they are also annoyed when they have an idea that they want you to develop asap. We are annoying when we try to sell dealers stuff.

In the end I think it is a human condition: We must contact others to promote our ideas/service/product, others may not be interested at this time, like we care about that (both dealers and vendors)!

Just like love, timing is of the essence.
 
Does the shoe fit on the other foot for some dealers? This may not be a popular response, but I think it might be worth considering.

I'm not asking because I think I know the right answer, but I am really curious to see what the 1%rs of DealerRefresh, dealer and vendor, think about this. Is there really a difference between B to B and B to C in this area?

Great question Ryan. And you're right to ask is there really a difference. I think the difference is in the vendor or dealer and using the right approach. Those that understand, "thanks, but I am not interested at this time" and respect that and ask if they can follow up at a later date and respect my response will get my attention. Versus those that harass me on the first call asking 25 times "what do you mean you don't want to give it a try", then call me every 30 days and I repeatedly say no.

Dealers or vendors doing the latter are not getting that you need to be respectful of what your consumer/buyer wants.