What Dell Taught Us About Target Marketing

3.29.2008 | Marketing, Web Hosting

This past weekend when our team met, we got into a serious discussion about upgrading our server to a dedicated machine that we would co-locate in Atlanta. While my friend at Booz Allen questioned why we would go this route when we’re not in the web hosting reseller business, we actually gave it a lot of thought and decided that this would be our cheapest, long term option.

Dell servers

So last weekend, for the first time in 5+ years, I went back to Dell.com and started spec’ing out high end servers. I think deep down inside, the geek in me would like to create something big enough that we can actually fill up a whole rack full of servers and say, “Look! That’s our piece of the internet” On the other hand, I know no one really cares about the hardware and our wallets really wanted to have nothing to do with my geeky dream.

But the fun part here is that co-located hosting is uncharted territory for us and this is one area I am looking forward to learning a lot about. My last venture had about 100,000 users and it certainly did not need any kind of extreme load balancing or backup solutions. However, with up to 16 million records per year for just vehicles plus other usage data we will be tracking, we basically need a kick ass machine just to handle the data load before we even worry about serving the site to any users.

This is where Dell in a coincidental moment, shined!

Not two days after us talking about the need to upgrade and actually looking at prices printed out on paper, a representative from Dell’s team contacted us and offered to invite us into their discount club. Apparently they found my YouNoodle.com post about our startup, liked what they saw and wanted to get us on the Dell train early so we can bring them along for the ride. (Apparently AutoTrader hosts with HP, so this could be a win for them if I get my rack of servers.)

Now, the marketing and timing here is purely coincidental, but we were more than happy to reaffirm our decision to shop for the dedicated server with Dell especially now that we could get the exact same server we wanted, add warranties and support AND save a few hundred dollars in the process.

Although some may say targeted advertising is scary and could potentially be like “big brother” with the amount of data it collects; I would have to say that as a consumer who knew exactly what he wanted, being able to add more discounts before I pulled the trigger really put me over the top for this vendor. If we were dilly-dallying before on our decision, this “just-in-time” coupon definitely won us over.

With that… we will definitely implement an online version of this sales technique on our web service to help dealers sell more vehicles.

  • kevin gao
    its a good point...you must keep in mind though that CPC and CPM ads serve entirely different purposes and its not easy to run an ROI comparison. Major advertisers primarily run CPM ads for brand awareness - witness the ads in magazines, newspapers, and any other venue that often show no specific product at all, but merely exist to attract customers in the earlier phases of the marketing funnel. I used to work at Google, and it's not always clear which ads fetch more money. I can almost guarantee you that premium sites with high traffic flow can generate much more revenue from selling CPM ads on their premium space (e.g., banner, header) than from CPC
  • First off, thank you so much for the accolades in the blog.

    I was the Dell representative that reached out to EasyAutoSales. I am in a segment that is purely driven by finding new or emerging companies that don't know about the resources Dell can offer. Many times we find these companies need our help in the form of guidance, service or simply hardware. Usually more than the large companies.

    It was certainly good timing, but purely coincidental. My inital goal when I called out to EasyAutoSales was to learn more about what you guys do and how we may be able to help. It was pretty evident early that we could certainly help. The best part was I could also save them money. The vast majority of the time we may work with a new company for months and months and never earn their business and that is "par for the course." I was just as prepared to talk about anything from hi end clustered server datacenters to what the plans for lunch were. You really never know what you will talk about when you are trying to find a new business relationship. It sounds really corny, but I simply called bryan just to chat. I simply wanted to offer any assistance if I could. When Wei was ready to talk about specs for hardware a day or two later, I was certainly ready.

    I was glad i could also use my own personal experience to help shed some light on some painpoint issues they were experiencing outside of needing hardware. I really look forward to watching you guys progress and extremely excited about being along for the ride.

    There are hundreds of links available for small, medium, large, startup, etc businesses to use, but one of the best resources for some is our www.dell.com/sb360 site which is dedicated and constantly updated for our small business customers. Many of our largest accounts and most successful customers have used these resources to educate themselves and plan out their growth.

    Talk to you soon, and we will be in touch shortly.
    Thanks again Bryan and Wei.
  • Wei
    I agree... but I feel like thousands of companies are doing that already hence why image ads on the web have been less effective than PPC ones.

    Even running Adsense, I can tell the value of image ads are less than the more targeted text ads.
  • kevin gao
    I agree with the targeted marketing rationale...although you'd have to think that if they mistargeted and contacted you regarding the latest discounts in Dell laptop computers...and then imagine if thousands of companies did something comparable...the reaction may have been a bit different.
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