Turners True Market Challenge

Savvy bargain hunters need savvy media options

The Results

  • 86,000 price checks recorded in just over two months
  • A 20% increase in sales over the same period
  • More than 80% of customers using the service were new to Turners
  • 33,000 click-throughs from Google Adwords
  • 20,000 click-throughs from TradeMe banners
  • Increases in auction attendance numbers

The challenge

Turners Auctions sells more cars than anyone else in New Zealand, but most people didn’t know it. Changing the story required a wide-ranging yet cost effective campaign to attract more second hand car buyers and increase sales.

Objectives

Working with agency Brave New World, a multi-channel approach targeted three broad goals:

  • Make them understand: Turners had to be easy and relevant for the secondhand car buyer.
  • Ongoing engagement: just telling people why they should buy a car at auction wasn't enough. Turners had to educate, engage and provide information and knowledge to back up the reasons to buy at auction.
  • Target smartly: as the target audience for this promotion were savvy bargain hunters, savvy media options had to grab attention and persuade people to act.

The Solution

Brave and Touchpoint developed a system allowing car buyers to access sales-based valuations for vehicles they were interested in. Press and radio ads directed buyers to text in a car make, model and year. Texters then received a reply message with the average price that particular vehicle sold for. Alternatively buyers could enter their details through the website www.turnerschallenge.co.nz.

Regular prize offers, including The True Market Challenge $10,000 trip for two to Melbourne, drove people to auctions and online registration. Once involved, participants were invited to receive weekly auction alert emails about upcoming auctions at local Turners branches. Emails also served to educate recipients about Turners’ other products and services.

The campaign leveraged Turners’ competitive sweet spot – it sells more cars than any other organisation in New Zealand and had the sales data to back up the claim. Touchpoint provided Turners with the ability to measure responses and discover which media worked best. The level of quality interaction in this campaign promoted greater customer engagement.

The Turners True Market Challenge was initially set to run for two months, but was so successful that the service is still available to the many thousands who continue using it.

How Touchpoint technology helped

Txt4Info: an automated text response service that manages text requests.

Campaign management: enables the creation and execution of multichannel campaigns that consumers can interact with in real time.

Reporting: real time reporting provides a dashboard view of databases and campaign participation, and can be used to track consumer behaviour.



Brand
Turners Auctions

Channels
  • Web
  • Email
  • Text messaging
  • Print
  • Radio

Partner
Brave New World

Target audience
Second hand vehicle buyers, with a strong bargain-hunting ethic