Updates give dealers a comprehensive view of their local market and enable Meta advertising

automotiveMastermind (aM), part of S&P Global Mobility and a leading provider of predictive analytics and marketing automation solutions for dealerships, has announced enhancements to its flagship automated sales and marketing platform, Mastermind, that will offer greater market insight, visibility into lease buyouts and new digital advertising options to improve how dealers connect and communicate with current and prospective customers.

The new enhancements give dealers the ability to access new advertising channels, integrate deeper with their technology stack and view comprehensive analytics and insights, which empowers them to better understand the market, streamline sales processes and make smarter business decisions. Combining predictive analytics to understand their customer base better and improve how dealers connect with them through hyper-relevant marketing gives business leaders a unique advantage to leverage their first-party data to drive positive business outcomes.

“Dealers and OEMs have experienced unprecedented market conditions over the last few years,” said Aaron Baldwin, chief product officer at automotiveMastermind. “A great example is customers buying out their lease contracts instead of entering new lease agreements. We see buyouts north of 40% in most brands. With our expertise in predictive analytics, we recognized the opportunity for OEMs and dealers to take better control of their first-party data to enable them to proactively navigate difficult and varying macro-economic conditions.”

Market Impact

Market Impact is an analytics dashboard that utilizes registration and loyalty data to give dealers an unbiased view of their market performance. Traditionally, dealers did not have a holistic view of the new and used market relative to their competitors. Market Impact allows dealers to compare their performance with other dealers – as well as across high-level make, model and segment benchmarks – regardless of brand. With this information, dealers can see data on pre-owned sales (in available markets) – information not readily available from OEMs. Since Market Impact sources information from sales and registration data, it gives a more complete view of both new and pre-owned data by standardizing markets across the nation.

Gaining insight into purchase trends in their own backyard enables dealers to reduce defections, boost their customer loyalty, identify critical opportunities and improve inventory mix based on what is selling best in their area – ultimately increasing their profitability.

Lease Buyout

With the new Lease Buyout feature, dealers will have visibility into customers who have purchased their leased vehicle as opposed to turning it in or trading it for another vehicle. From 2019 to 2022, there has been a 275% increase in customers buying their lease out (from 12% in 2019 to 45% in 2022), according to data from dealerships who use Mastermind. Dealers will be able to visualize these customers and view them as a lease intender instead of as a used car customer. This gives dealers and OEMs the opportunity to focus on rebuilding their lease portfolios and resecuring their loyalty potential.

“Our commitment to leverage our data ecosystem to create high value sales opportunities remains our core focus,” said Baldwin. “Giving dealers insights into their lease buyout customers is another example of how automotiveMastermind is helping the industry solve tomorrow’s challenges, today.”

Digital Audiences

aM has also integrated its data enabled audience segments into digital advertising networks beginning with Meta. The new Digital Audiences solution is an audience builder that enables dealers to create custom or pre-built audiences from their enriched first-party customer data. These segments are automatically and continuously updated in their Meta Ad Accounts. 

Digital Audiences extends the value and proven results of aM’s proprietary Behavior Prediction Score® (BPS®), which uses data to help dealers identify potential buyers by ranking them on a scale of 1-100 based on how likely they are to be in market for a vehicle, to a new channel.

Advertising can be an expensive line item for dealers, and blanket approaches to advertising often waste money by targeting people who are not in-market. Digital Audiences combined with the BPS® and segment activation offers a way to identify an in-market audience accurately and efficiently, while also enabling dealers to target potential customers over multiple channels, increasing touchpoints with loyalty and conquest audiences.

aM dealer partners who participated in the Digital Audiences pilot program saw a 48% increase in clicks per unique customer versus only using first-party data.

“Whether you need to move cars faster, acquire more vehicles at better prices, drive loyalty, streamline marketing spend or conquest new opportunities, Mastermind has you covered,” said Baldwin. “Market Impact, Lease Buyout and Digital Audiences are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to enhancements and integrations we’ll introduce this year.”