MANCHESTER, NH (BRAIN)—The Bike Cooperative recently completed its second annual Great American Bike Sale national promotion.
Running early April through the end of Bike to Work Week, the event helped dealers kick off their season while providing national exposure to member stores and partner brands.
Through the event’s website, www.greatamericanbikesale.com, thousands of customers were able to look at the featured brands and find the participating store nearest them. The co-op drove traffic to the site with banner ads on Bicycling.com, MTBR.com and RoadBikeReview.com, along with Google keyword advertising. The online marketing efforts translated into traffic for dealers, with an average of nearly 40 visits from the event website to each store’s website, while some dealers received as many as 100 or more new customer leads. At the local level, over 425,000 mailings and emails were sent out to customers by the 73 stores participating in the event, many featuring special product offers provided by the supplier partners of the co-op.
Despite poor weather conditions in many parts of the country during April and May, many dealers still had excellent results.
“We killed it,” said Steffen Root, owner of Berkshire Bike & Board in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. “We had traffic and sold a ton of stuff.”
Doug Waitzman, owner of Bike to Nature in Lexington, South Carolina, added, “We have been in business for about 15 years now and we had the biggest sales day that we have ever had. Even with some bad weather, it was great. We will probably have to work a couple of nights to get caught up on service and assemblies.”
