Hartwell UK uses SpinnakerPro to drive new sales

Monday, 22 March, 2004

Hartwell PLC is one of the UK's largest and most successful car retailers with 48 dealerships and 14 franchises employing around 2,600 people across the UK. Hartwell is renowned within the industry for its use of technology to ensure compliance with best business practice and has invested substantial time and effort to gain a detailed understanding of the processes around car retailing.

Richard Burn, Hartwell’s marketing and data manager explains, “We have been running targeted marketing campaigns for 12 years using direct mail and telephone calls and recently email. However, the preparation and distribution of email campaigns was technically complex, time consuming and was difficult to track feedback from users.”

In mid 2003, senior management at Hartwell decided to upgrade the functionality of its Integrated Showroom System (supplied by Ebbon-Dacs) in response to the growing number of customers that expressed email to be their preferred method of contact. The strategic goals included; a reduction in the complexity of email production and distribution, detailed response reporting to track individual recipients, and strict compliance to permission marketing guidelines.

In August 2003 Hartwell started to look at the prospective software vendors. Richard Burn explains, “We looked at a number of vendors and all had strength and weaknesses, but SpinnakerPro offered a strong product with the advantage of straight forward integration into our Showroom System and the ability to use .NET-based Web services to ensure future proofing and protection of investment.”

The award winning SpinnakerPro eMarketing was successfully implemented alongside the Hartwell Integrated Showroom System within a week of product selection and the first e-mail campaigns started in September 2003.

Richard Burn has been with the company for 10 years and is responsible for the creation and distribution of e-marketing campaigns. He says, “We have 48 dealerships and approaching 140,000 customers who have supplied e-mail contact addresses directly to us after visiting the dealerships or via our Web site, so we are able to create e-marketing campaigns that are highly targeted at particular customer groups based on many factors such as age, geography, previous purchases and stated requirements.”

SpinnakerPro has a full range of creation tools to allow an e-mail campaign to be put together in a matter of hours. Each e-mail can have embedded hot-links to allow users to quickly make purchases, visit micro-sites for more information or even opt out of future marketing campaigns. All these customer activities are collated by the software and presented to the marketers as detailed real-time reports or for use within CRM and ERP systems.

Richard Burn comments “The process of creating e-mail shots has been greatly improved by SpinnakerPro and we are able to create campaigns in a matter of hours where before it could have taken days. The campaigns run over the first three months have generated over £100,000 in sales that would have been unlikely to have walked into a showroom – especially on some quite unusual items.” Tracking statistics show that the average Hartwell campaign yields 31% readership by recipients with only a 0.4% opt-out.

Currently, SpinnakerPro is used to create, broadcast and track e-mail marketing campaigns to selected segments of the customer list held in the Integrated Showroom System. However, future plans for the software include a monthly customer newsletter and staff journal. In addition, the system will be used to send reminders for customers of MOT and vehicle servicing appointments, which will link straight to the Hartwell Web site, enabling online booking of an appointment.

ABOUT HARTWELL: Hartwell are dedicated to offering the car driver, the widest choice of new and used vehicles. Customers can choose from the widest selection of quality motor vehicles all offering great value for money, with regularly updated special offers. We also offer vehicle servicing, MOTs, body shop repairs, finance, insurance, commercial and fleet vehicle services all for your convenience. The Hartwell website, www.hartwell.co.uk, allows you to place cars in a virtual showroom using unique software, and enjoy the experience of visiting one of our showrooms from the comfort of your home. We have 48 showrooms across the UK.