Case Study: The Agnew Group

e-shot drives communications of leading multi-franchise dealer group

The Agnew Group is one of the UK’s top 25 franchised vehicle dealers. Operating in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the company has 13 dealerships representing nine brands, including Audi, Porsche, BMW, Mini, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen. Established in 1931, the Agnew Group employs over 1000 staff, sells over 20,000 vehicles (new and used) per year and has a turnover of around £450m.   

Challenges

Agnew use email for a variety of key communication objectives from brand and product awareness, promotion and offer communications and event management to sales/aftersales reminders and upsell messages. With a small centralised marketing team, managing all the campaigns across all brands and sites – it can get very hectic. Improving engagement and response rates has also led Agnew to trial SMS as a communication medium to support their email campaigns.  

How e-shot™ helped

In the last 12 months Agnew have streamlined their communication strategy, using insights from the reporting to drive efficiencies. Seeing the benefits of improved engagement, increased ROI and response rates, they are undertaking far more testing to derive further insights to push their activity to the next level. The detail available in the e-shot™ reporting allows the team to test and optimise and easily identify insights so they can share best practices ensuring the benefits can be felt across the brands and across the sites. 

Through the reporting section the marketing team are also able to easily provide lists straight to the dealerships, when recipients have engaged with particular campaigns, providing ‘warmer’ leads at the touch of a button to make follow-up contact by the dedicated sales teams much more effective.  

Results, ROI and the future

With e-shot™ you can both reply and embed links in SMS which was not available through their previous supplier, but as a result of this feature Agnew has been able to drive some fantastic results. An example of this was a service reminder SMS, sent to contacts who had not responded to an email campaign. The conversion rate on the SMS was 50%. Unsurprisingly, Agnew are now looking to roll out their SMS activity across the rest of the sites and to support other communication objectives. 

Effectively utilising automated series through a number of key campaigns, the team is also looking at further automating recurrent communication patterns and building customer journeys to ensure that customers receive the right communication at the right time. By using automation, the small team is able to focus on other value added activities while these campaigns continue to effectively run in the background. Building these sophisticated programmes of emails, analysing the reports and acting on the insights is positively affecting Agnew’s bottom line.   

“We have a great working relationship with the e-shot™ team. Nothing is ever too much trouble and they always listen and are open to our suggestions. The resources they provide along with hints, tips and ideas are helping us get so much more from the platform. Working together we are going from strength to strength”