Jeff Sierra: Hi. I'm Jeff Sierra, Vice President of Marketing and Product development from Budco - The Dialogue Company.
Mark Bardusch: Hello. I'm Mark Bardusch, National Sales and Marketing Manager for Ford's extended service business.
Jeff Sierra: So together Budco and Ford have had a long-term partnership in working together with direct marketing initiatives. We recently completed a market test that we worked on through the Xerox one-to-one lab and had some great results. Mark, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the marketing challenges that we are facing?
Mark Bardusch: Yes, in today's day and age, it's very challenging to get through and be relevant to customers, whether their busy schedules and everything they have going on to effectively communicate and make the customer comfortable that you really are trying to fulfill their needs. This can be quite a challenge in today's environment.
Jeff Sierra: So what we did is, we took an existing direct mail solicitation communication and we found ways to increase the level of personalization and make that personalization relevant to each individual customer that we were trying to speak to. We keyed a lot off of some basic demographic information and found that, that combined with information we knew about that owners' automotive vehicle and a little bit about what we knew about that owner themselves that we could sculpt and create a very personalized, relevant communication that got them to take a specific action. And that action was to pick up the phone and call an 800 number to get more information or purchase a particular product. Mark, do you want to talk a little bit about the end results there?
Mark Bardusch: Yeah, the end results were very positive. I think by going through this process, we were really able to effectively communicate to the customer that we weren't trying to push something on the customer, we were trying to understand them as a consumer and customize and tailor products and services that would fit their needs. As a result we drove our response rates up over five percent. But what was even more incredible was that the inbound phone calls, those customers that did contact us, were 35 percent more likely to buy because we were speaking to what they needed and how we could fulfill their needs.
Jeff Sierra: So, all-in-all we had a great ally, we ended up with a stronger program and we're looking forward to continuing with that level of success.