DECKED Adopts Aggressive Acquisition Strategy, Personalized Emails
The Overview
DECKED is the leader in kickass vehicle storage solutions, including its ever-popular drawer system for pickup trucks. DECKED’s products are made 100% in the USA and their marketing is as entertaining as it is informative. In 2020 the brand set out to amass over 1 million truck owners into their marketing database while understanding what the truck accessory market really looked like. It was a true relationship marketing need with a heavy slant towards collecting zero-party data at scale.
The Challenge
DECKED had a decent customer base but struggled understanding exactly how or why they were using the products. They also did not know where to double down on their content strategy. Did they need more hunting, fishing, carpentry, law enforcement or other content and ambassadors to persuade sales?
Additionally, they wanted an aggressive growth strategy to acquire net new contacts into their database, ultimately making 1 million the goal. By adding new contacts, along with some strategic psychographic zero-party data ;points per, they could better personalize email and sms offers - along with better targeted ads - recommending core products as well as relevant accessories.
The Brief
Audience Approach was brought into lay the groundwork for their growth goals and help shape the psychographic data points they needed to acquire from their addressable audience to successfully drive revenue over the long term. Our expertise in the outdoor space dovetailed well with the ideal customer profile for DECKED which meant our strategies and tactics would perform well for the brand.
The Solution
It was determined that a new structured data map was needed in their CRM to collect and action the psychographic data they were about to collect. After a one day onsite session, the core questions DECKED needed to ask their audience were established and corresponding tags, fields and filters were added to the CRM. A sweepstakes survey was launched and promoted with their existing audience with astounding results. Using UTMs we were able to track and measure all marketing channels; paid, email, social as well as core ambassadors.
Before the first campaign had ended it was determined an ‘always-on’ sweeps strategy was a winning acquisition strategy and the Year Of Gear Sweeps was born.. Expanding into a monthly sweeps series allowed DECKED to tap the audience of like minded brands who were brought in as promotional partners. Quickly the database grew and flooded with critical information such as which vehicles were owned, which accessories were most desired, what their budgets for accessories looked like, as well as the outdoor activities consumers were participating in. This data, stored at an individual level, allowed DECKED to now use a hyper-personalized approach to marketing and sales.
Browse Some Promo Materials
The Results
In the first sweeps survey DECKED validated that their audience had a $17 million budget for truck accessories. They netted a 70% open rate on the automated post-survey emails and booked tens of thousands in high margin e-commerce sales from the first touch. With more than 350k new psychographic data points in less than 60 days, the marketing team could better map relevant dynamic content in their emails. They also learned that fishing was the most common outdoor activity among their audience, that over 60% watched home improvement programming yet less than 30% watched cable or linear TV. The survey also revealed exactly which product attribute was the biggest factor when purchasing and over 25% had an immediate need for a truck storage solution AND had a budget of more than $2,000.
This first engagement provided the critical information to not only personalize content and offers over the long term but it informed their go to market plans across budgets, channels and content formats.
"Tim and his team are the tops. Really intelligent, take the work very seriously and produce results. It was great getting Tim to our HQ to build a strategy from day one that still informs our marketing efforts today."
Chopper - VP Marketing
The Insights
The Audience Approach founders were DECKED customers before they became marketing partners, and that relationship persists today. DECKED was able to quickly validate the need for a sweeps survey strategy over the long term and continues to data mine the audiences of partnered brands to benefit their own revenue goals. The core questions asked of all net new contacts also sustains today with follow up campaigns digging deeper by targeting niches such as law enforcement, fleet managers and blue collar labor forces.
Being a data driven entity has also informed DECKED’s M&A strategy as they uncover new market opportunities and acquire products that are an easy sell to their ever growing database of consumers. Being able to reach their own audience with low cost channels such as email and sms have proven to deliver great results to their most profitable channel, the brand’s own e-commerce platform.