Perhaps you have been eying an electric vehicle (EV). Here is your opportunity to conduct minor research to understand your chosen EV’s features and then write a direct-mail message to pitch the car to a well-defined audience. Here is information about the Nissan Leaf, for example:

The Nissan Leaf is the best-selling electric vehicle of all time; more than 400,000 cars have been delivered worldwide. Nissan completely redesigned the Leaf for the 2018 model year. In 2019 the automaker added a long-range Leaf Plus option. New features were added in 2020.

With an MSRP of $31,600, the Leaf offers an attractive price for an EV. It features a generous interior, huge cargo capacity, composed handling, and lively acceleration. However, other compact cars offer more upscale interiors and better predicted reliability ratings.

According to the EPA, the standard Leaf delivers 149 miles of range, while the Leaf Plus can travel up to 226 miles. The Leaf Plus starts at an MSRP of $38,200. These aggressive base prices are complemented by attractive lease deals.

The Leaf comes standard with an 8-inch touch screen, Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, Bluetooth, and satellite radio. Standard safety features include forward collision warning, automatic emergency braking, blind spot monitoring, rear cross traffic alert, and lane departure warning. The Leaf Plus offers a more powerful electric motor.31 Obviously, no one runs out to buy a car, not even after reading an eloquent sales letter. Purchases of big-ticket items typically take a long time to develop. They involve research and don’t happen spontaneously. Before you can start, you will need to analyze your audience and your purpose.

Your Task. 

Choose a currently available electric car that you will pitch in a sales letter to be mailed to an audience of recent college graduates. Your target group is defined as follows: gender neutral; mostly unmarried, no kids; late millennial and early Gen Z cohort; primarily an urban dweller with a first job out of college, receiving a steady paycheck and building credit; cares deeply about the environment and takes climate change very seriously.

Challenges you can expect: Many members of the ecologically minded age groups you’re targeting don’t feel the need to own a car. Walkability of their neighborhoods is more important to them. They have public transport options and may bike to work. Even the least expensive electric cars are pricier than their gasoline-burning counterparts. People contemplating electric vehicles experience range anxiety; they fear running out of power, sometimes irrationally so. Gasoline in the United States continues to be a lot cheaper than it is in other developed countries. Tuition debt could be a crushing burden.

What is your purpose? The best you can hope for is to build awareness and potentially prompt a social media response to measure the effectiveness of your campaign—for example, liking a page, encouraging a post of some kind, making a TikTok video on a related topic, or similar activities. You have a budget of $2,000 to buy items that might serve as inducements to raffle off among a certain number of those who respond first, create the best submission in a contest, or visit the dealership to test drive the EV.