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My old store did one of these events back at the end of September into the beginning of October. The prices came off of the website a week before the mail was delivered. They also chose to keep the prices off of the site until a week or so after the sale was over. "We don't want people seeing the lower prices after they just paid $XXXX more last week" That logic drove me nuts! So they basically went without prices on the website for almost a month. This store at the time had the best merchandising with pictures, prices, descriptions of any any store in our group. The drop in VDP's from AutoTrader was off the charts. 7700+ VDP's in August to 3400 VDP's in September to 3700 VDP's in October. Not having prices on the website and listing sites caused SRP's from AutoTrader to plummet, referrals to our website went down dramatically as well. For website visitors I noticed time on site and page-views went down. If we don't deliver what they are looking for, they aren't going to stick around, right? Lead count went down during the sale from both referred traffic and normal website visitors. So those are the results that I saw from the digital side of things.

Did it work otherwise? It blows my mind the amount of people that showed up to see if they won a prize. "Everyone's A Winner Of A Golf Coin!!" It was a dime spray painted gold, not the iPad or the 60" LCD TV that was dominated the postcard that everyone felt they were going to win. They did sell some cars at unbelievable front end grosses though. They also had 3 Better Business Bureau complaints filed and several unhappy calls to the stores new General Manager. Even with all of that they consider the sale a success because of what they paid for the promotion and the amount of gross that they made. I can't help but think of the potential business that was lost though by the ATC visitors and website visitors that did not convert that normally would have. A short term gain with long term consequences in my opinion.