What if your dealership could sell more cars and decrease the cost of acquiring those new customers in the process? Through personalized marketing, my team and I confirmed that this is possible and surprisingly easy. You can do this by:
• Understanding the car buyer journey and getting to know your customers and prospective customers.
• Using predictive analytics to gain a holistic view of your market; retain and attract buyers; and improve the overall experience.
• Implementing unique messaging to build better relationships and foster loyalty with customers.
Now, let’s break these tactics down a bit further.
Understand the New Social Car Buyer Journey
Knowing the influences that led a shopper to contact the auto dealership, whether in-person or otherwise, is the first step to finding where you can fit in the new car buyer journey. Early-stage customer research introduces multiple influences, from social media that provides recommendations from friends, family and experts, to print, radio and TV ads, which can lead customers back to social media to learn about brands and automotive dealers. At this point, a lot of decision-making power rests with the customer, but you can begin to learn more about them and why they’re interested in making a purchase.
At the early stages in the buyer journey, such as initial online research, invest in a dealership sales platform’s technology. That investment allows you to gather and analyze customer social media data, gaining insight into life events that led to online window shopping. Investing in predictive marketing technology allows you to gather and analyze customer data to gain actionable insights.
Utilize Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics takes the guesswork out of car sales, prospecting and marketing. It helps identify the potential customer’s information to determine their vehicle preferences and history. To be clear, predictive analytics should pull in a lot of data about customers’ preferences surrounding make, model and features to prices, deals and leasing versus buying, to name a few. Then, you can combine your current dealer management system with the predictive analytics services to better understand all current and prospective customers. This data will allow you to better tailor your messages to customers, adding that personal touch that customers crave. Put simply, predictive analytics empowers your marketing efforts and sales teams to confidently reach out to targeted potential buyers.
Unique Messaging
When a salesperson is better informed, customers feel heard and acknowledged the moment they answer the phone or walk in the door. Having this baseline information allows you to quickly learn more robust customer information (e.g., purchase motives, vehicle needs, life circumstances). This is invaluable, as consumers prefer personalized, time-saving, transparent and gratifying vehicle-buying journeys. When customers are satisfied, it fosters loyalty not only for the brand, but for your dealership.
Unique messaging begins with reaching prospects where they’re looking.
A personalized marketing campaign delivers the right messaging, through the right channel, at the right time and with the right offer in a way that’s most likely to deliver a hot prospect to the showroom floor. Then, once the customer is in the showroom, you can meet and exceed the unique needs of each customer.
Replacing traditional marketing tactics with targeted predictive campaigns results in more relevant messaging, higher response rates and increased sales at a much higher ROI.
Your dealership can save time and effort by targeting the most promising customers from the get-go. Predictive analytics can help salespeople be more knowledgeable and transparent, which leads consumers to be more responsive and ultimately allows the dealership to increase sales. Dealers that use our technology often see a 15% increase in retention sales; a 3% increase in new customers; and the costs of unique messaging campaigns were 20% of previous efforts. Not to mention the ROI can be 15 times better.
By using that data to generate unique messages for your customers and aligning the sales and service teams, your dealership will be unstoppable. Put simply, personalizing your marketing efforts will lead to increased sales, stronger customer loyalty and a stellar customer experience.
Giorgia Favaretto-Illig
