Effective dealership marketing in today’s increasingly competitive and rapidly evolving market means more than putting your name on a billboard or blanketing your market with spray-and-pray offers. To stay ahead of both local competitors and online-only retailers in the consumer-first era, dealers need to leverage a data-driven approach to engage prospective sales leads. 

However, many dealerships overly spend on broad or ineffective marketing strategies rather than spending time leveraging and optimizing their greatest asset: their own dealership data. 

Instead of sending mass emails to every name in their CRM, forward-thinking dealerships are taking a data-driven approach, reaching prospective customers who are actually interested in hearing from them with messaging that reflects their exact needs. 

In this blog post, we outline the principles of data-driven dealership marketing process, including the three P’s of high performing dealership marketing:

- Permission

- Proactivity 

- Personalization

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• #1 Permission

First and foremost, effective dealership marketing begins with ensuring you’re reaching prospective customers who want to hear from you – and you have permission to contact them. Amid new data privacy laws and the growing threat of cybercrimes, protecting your dealership and customers from potential loss needs to be every dealership’s number one priority when handling any sort of customer data. 

Outside of ensuring your dealership is meeting federal or state regulations, ensure your team is following best practices when it comes to handling and maintaining your first-party data, such as the information in your dealership CRM and DMS. 

While it may seem tedious, this starts with ensuring everyone in your dealership has a clear understanding of your dealership’s privacy policy. Every member of your team who handles customer data needs to have a clear understanding of the types of data they’re collecting, as well as how the data is stored and protected.  

This commitment to security and privacy needs to extend to any of your dealership’s outside partners, as well. When vetting software vendors or third-party data providers and technology, only look for partners who demonstrate a clear commitment to data privacy and maintain strict security standards.

#2 Proactivity

The best way to capture sales before your competition is to reorganize your team into a proactive sales powerhouse capable of identifying and engaging customers before they return to market. 

To analyze the full spectrum of factors influencing a prospect’s decision to buy, dealers need to look beyond standalone equity mining tools in exchange for comprehensive dealership data mining technology. These tools layer the data saved in your dealership’s CRM and DMS with additional insights like financial records and household demographic information to paint a clearer picture of your audience and potential sales opportunities. 

When powered by predictive analytics, these tools go one step further, automatically sifting through your dealership’s databases to identify your best possible sales leads and the unique factors driving their decision. This empowers your dealership’s sales team to maximize the efficiency and efficacy of their efforts – and stay a step ahead of the competition – by automatically scoring and prioritizing your best prospects preparing to return to market.   

#3 Personalization

Finally, after identifying which sales prospects to nurture and when to engage them, the last principle of dealership marketing dealers must follow is ensuring their marketing messages inspire prospects to act by tailoring and personalizing their approach. 

Ultimately, this data-driven approach to dealership marketing benefits both your staff and your customers by empowering your team to confidently speak to the needs of your audience. According to a recent study, brands who offered a personalized customer experience increased customer satisfaction rates by 20%, sales conversion rates by 10-15% and employee engagement by 20-30%.  

However, true personalization means more than pasting their first and last name at the top of your email templates. High-performing dealership marketing campaigns typically include targeted, actionable offers and strong F&I components that account for household financial data, estimate trade values and more.  

This focus on personalization needs to extend beyond that first customer touchpoint. Ensure each marketing message builds on the last, meeting prospective customers where they are in their buyer journey and keeping them engaged throughout the entire purchasing process. Finally, build trust with buyers. In a recent industry study, 91% of car buyers said “trust” was important to them when deciding which dealership to purchase from. Look for opportunities to build trust with buyers based on their needs, such as marketing F&I products like extended warranties and wrap coverage, or even assistance raising their credit score 

Faced with fewer opportunities to engage prospective buyers, increased competition from both local and online-only retailers and diminished customer loyalty, it’s critical dealers engage the right prospects with the right messaging. This comes down to maintaining three key principles. ensuring every marketing message is permissible, proactive and personalized.

While loyalty customers have long been critical to dealership success, the segment has grown in importance in 2021. 

According to a recent IHS Markit report, “During the past several years loyalty has emerged as one of the most watched metrics in the US new vehicle industry, along with market share and profitability.” 

Now amid inventory shortages and historically high vehicle prices, nurturing and protecting dealership loyalty customers against competitor’s conquest attempts has become key – critical to both immediate and long-term success.    

In this blog post, we’ll explore three key reasons why dealers need to focus on their loyalty audience in 2021 including: 

• - Securing success in the short term

- Building even more customer loyalty 

• - Supporting future dealership loyalty sales efforts 

Supporting Short-Term Success 

While ongoing inventory challenges spurred by global chip shortages may make stocking your dealership with the right vehicles seem like an impossible task, mapping the vehicles already available in your inventory to the buyers predicted to be interested in them has never been easier. 

According to a recent report from IHS Markit covering automotive customer retention statistics a third of all US new vehicle registrations in 2020 were for loyalty households. Focusing your immediate efforts on tapping into your most loyal customers is a fantastic way to start leveraging loyalty to increase your sales numbers in the short term – and this dealership loyalty strategy isn’t just limited to brand. 

While brand loyalty, the percentage of return-to-market households that acquire the same brand again, is typically the most cited loyalty metric, IHS Markit registration data details loyalty at various other levels ranging from manufacturer loyalty to loyalty for import vs. domestic brands. For example, mainstream compact CUV buyers led in segment loyalty in 2020 at 52%, while SUVs led in body style loyalty at 71%.

By leveraging behavior prediction technology to analyze customer insights from their CRM and DMS, as well as inventory data, dealers can account for the wide variety of factors beyond brand loyalty influencing a buyer’s purchasing decisions to map their available inventory to the best prospective buyers.   

This loyalty sales process empowers dealers to meet their short-term sales goals by maximizing their available inventory – all while protecting against competitor’s conquest efforts by reaching buyers before they start shopping around. 

Loyalty Builds Loyalty

Not only will tapping into your loyal customer base support your immediate sales goals, focusing on this already critical segment only increases its value. To put it simply, loyalty builds loyalty. 

According to IHS Markit, a loyal household becomes more loyal with its next acquisition, and the growth continues after that. For example, in 2020, older super loyalists, or those who acquired their three most recent acquisitions from the same make, generated an incredibly high loyalty rate of 90%, while young nomad buyers generated a 73% loyalty rate. 

Understanding these subsets is critical to dealers identifying which of their loyalty customers present the greatest sales opportunities and which are most at risk to be conquested by a competitor. This becomes increasingly important as lack of available inventory pushes some customers to begin shopping elsewhere. 

With tools powered by behavior prediction technology, dealers can reach loyalty customers at key relationship building touchpoints, like with conveniently timed and personalized service notifications.  

By further leveraging their unique access to information on their customers’ existing vehicles and buying behaviors, proactive dealers can take this one step further and identify when customers are preparing to re-enter the market to engage buyers before they’ve had the chance to defect with messaging designed to retain their business, such as extended lease offers.

By taking a similar approach using Market EyeQ’s intelligent behavior prediction modeling, our dealer partners increase retention sales up to 15%.

Loyalty Customers Supply Future Sales

Finally, dealership loyalty customers represent a critical source of future sales regardless of what lies ahead. 

Long before the pandemic, total new vehicle registrations declined year-over-year in both 2019 and 2020. At the same time, rapid digitalization has only increased competition between dealers. To succeed despite growing and evolving challenges, its critical dealers take a proactive approach to dealership customer retention

Remember: Loyalty customers increase in value and commitment over time. Just as it’s critical to think ahead and protect this segment against the competition through consistent communication, dealers need to ensure they’re not jeopardizing a long-term customer relationship with a short-sighted approach. 

Loyalty customers are an invaluable supply of high ROI sales, less likely to negotiate and more likely to generate service and other fixed-ops revenues, as well as contribute to referral business. Among inventory shortages and other uncertainties, focusing on dealership customer loyalty equates to a steady supply of highly profitable sales now – and in the future. 

Dealerships of all kinds and sizes are undoubtedly familiar with metrics and dashboards. Whether it’s your CRM, DMS or sales platform, a good portion of your day is already spent on reviewing dealership performance reports and information. But is the data you’re reviewing relevant to the decisions you’re making every day? Is the right data being tracked in your systems to provide useful and actionable advice, or are you simply checking to see if a deal closed and moving on?  

Marketers across every industry, including OEMs, are increasingly looking at metrics like loyalty rates to drive future success. However, all too often the only figures that dealership leaders and staff use in a dealership performance analysis are auto sales targets and conversion rates.

What if your dashboard didn’t just tell you where you’ve been and where you need to go? What if it helped you understand how to get there and where to start? In this post, we share four tips for taking your dealership reporting to the next level, including: 

• - Understanding your dealership’s sales

- Identifying service drive opportunities

• - Maximizing your dealership’s existing customer portfolio 

• - Improving your staff’s individual performance 

Understanding Your Dealership’s Sales

It’s easy for dealership leaders to get so focused on hitting sales targets that they fail to pay attention to other critical performance metrics that have a real impact on their bottom line. Your dealership is much more than just sales, so for the most comprehensive and useful reporting it’s critical to ensure your reporting dashboards integrate with data from your CRM, DMS and sales platform.

Integrating data from your dealership’s tools (as well as factors like cost accounting, labor cost, inventory, pricing and more) ensures your reporting isn’t artificially siloed into “sales and marketing” and “everything else,” providing more comprehensive insights and critical context when assessing your dealership’s performance. 

Some examples of these comprehensive sales metrics include per-sale profit and marketing ROI, both of which get to the heart of making your dealership’s operations great not just at selling cars, but at doing so profitably. These metrics also demonstrate the value of integrating your DMS into your sales platform, as your dashboard will need data from both to generate these insights.

Identifying Service Drive Opportunities

These kinds of metrics are not just critical for measuring your dealership’s sales performance. As proactive dealerships increasingly look to their service drive to engage potential buyers and acquire in-demand trades, it’s critical dealers track how their service drive is contributing to their bottom line. 

A reliably profitable and high-ROI service-not-sold conquest operation is crucial to running a profitable service drive in today’s automotive marketplace. Insight into those factors helps both sales and service leadership manage their operations accordingly. Ensure your dealership reporting tracks metrics like service-not-sold leads generated in your drive, as well as the profitability of these sales.

When assessing their process for working the service drive, it’s critical dealers analyze broader factors like the average size of repair orders, year-over-year sales and customer loyalty and service conquest marketing ROI to guide their approach with greater context.    

Maximizing Your Dealership’s Existing Customer Portfolio 

Amid evolving inventory challenges, dealerships around the country are increasingly finding value in taking a data-driven approach to maximizing their existing customer portfolio. The expanse of data and the reports generated by the advanced marketing tools allow your team to make countless decisions about keeping or wholesaling vehicles based on the wants and needs of your customers in real-time. 

To build a more profitable pre-owned inventory, ensure your team is tracking localized trends and demands, including the makes and models that have sold consistently well over the last 30-90 days – and which vehicles have sat on your lot the longest.

This approach not only empowers dealers to make more profitable pre-owned acquisitions, it also enables dealers to maximize their most valuable asset: their loyalty customers. Mastermind data finds customers who serviced with a dealer were just over 2.5x more likely to purchase their subsequent vehicle from the same retailer. 

Customers who remain loyal always yield the highest-profit sales, and keeping customers coming back for multiple vehicles and regular service means also ensuring they don’t end up as conquest customers for your rival. Ensure your car dealership’s reporting includes metrics related to retention, gross and net revenues to help identify opportunities to improve loyalty and project what even small improvements could mean to your bottom line. 

Improving Sales Staff Individual Performance

Beyond assessing your team performance, it’s critical dealers report on and review individual salesperson numbers. Are they hitting their sales targets? Are they great at loyalty relationships but have challenges closing new customers? What’s working for them, and what isn’t?

Beyond just answering these questions, powerful reporting tools help you understand why salespeople are or are not hitting their sales targets and where there are opportunities for improvement and growth. 

For example, one key feature Market EyeQ includes in the salesperson evaluation process is a user-by-user analysis of how each of your salespeople is using the data and analysis tools of Market EyeQ, including how well each is tracking to the Behavior Prediction Score®, whether on their own or compared to the rest of your sales team. 

This enables you to both see how an employee is performing compared to their team, as well as whether they’re effectively using the auto dealer solutions you’ve invested in. When combined with reporting tools that break out Market EyeQ-driven sales and profitability, the result is a comprehensive set of insights that make you a more effective manager of your critical sales functions.

Making data-driven decisions inside the dealership requires more than tracking conversions and noting success in sales. Leveraging comprehensive reporting dashboards fueled by data from across your dealership and informed by best practices can take your dealership performance analysis past simply looking at what has already happened to a forward-looking view of what’s going to happen.

For decades, automotive digital retailing and the concept of “buying online” was the future, deemed cutting-edge…and for some, a passing fad. 

By now, many dealers have at least accepted digital retailing isn’t going anywhere, with a recent survey from Automotive News finding 88% of dealers are likely to increase their use of digital tools to increase customers as a result of COVID-19. However, simply having a dealership digital retailing option isn’t enough – especially if that option isn’t turnkey or is inefficient.

In the current competitive landscape, if your dealership is ill-prepared to deliver an efficient, user-friendly digital retail experience, you risk watching from the sidelines soon.

In this blog post, we outline three ways dealerships can improve the efficiency of their digital retailing processes by: 

• - Investing in digitally-savvy personnel and continued learning

• - Using high-quality data to fuel dealership operations

- Embracing omnichannel marketing solutions 

Invest in Tech-Savvy Personnel and Continued Learning

Chances are that your dealership is staffed by all sorts of interesting people. From long-time industry vets to up-and-coming Gen Z leaders, oftentimes a dealership’s greatest strength is its team’s collective and diverse skill set. But in a quickly evolving, digital-first market, it’s critical your team shares one common trait: tech savviness. 

Whether it’s video production, social selling or confidently using customer-facing technology, every member of your sales team, from top to bottom, should be capable of and actively engaged in contributing to your dealership’s digital retailing process. 

That doesn’t mean you should clean house and start from scratch. Just as elements of your dealership’s traditional sales strategy translate to your digital retailing strategy, focus on transitioning and readapting your team’s existing skill sets first. Inspire your team to continue growing by participating in ongoing training and education opportunities, such as virtual events that circumvent the formerly prohibitive costs and time lost associated with in-person training events. 

Use Data to Fuel Dealership Operations

With so many variables out of a dealer’s control, digital retailing success hinges on how well you adapt and focus on the elements you can control. The more information you have about what is going on around you, the easier optimizing your digital retailing process will be. 

Start by ensuring the data locked deep in your CRM and DMS can be used to fuel processes like your dealership’s acquisition and inventory strategies. For example, dealers can reduce their dependence on third party lead providers by utilizing advanced behavior prediction technology like Market EyeQ. 

When integrated with data from your CRM and DMS, these tools incorporate intelligence from top-tier sources to predict which of your customers are reaching a point in their lives where they will likely be shopping for a new vehicle soon. By focusing on only the best leads and opportunities, dealers can both reduce time wasted on nurturing unqualified leads and resources lost to spray-and-pray marketing. 

These same advanced tools can also be used to fuel a data-driven inventory strategy. When deciding which vehicles to retail and which to send to auction, dealers using these tools can analyze factors like a vehicle’s maintenance history, current auction prices and local sales popularity to determine which models are most likely to turn a profit – and won’t spend too much time sitting on the lot. 

Embrace Omnichannel Marketing 

While automotive digital retailing is quickly evolving, brick-and-mortar sales aren’t necessarily defunct – far from it. With the pandemic accelerating the use of digital retailing, many dealerships have started seeing success adopting an omnichannel sales strategy and solutions to quickly and easily meet customers where they are – whether that’s online or in-person. 

Not only does this approach empower dealers to appeal to new consumer buying behaviors, it also ultimately enables dealerships to operate more efficiently. In a recent industry survey, 70% of dealers using omnichannel retailing solutions say their sales process is more efficient as a result. 

There’s no singular path every customer takes from their first inkling of wanting or needing a new vehicle to signing on the dotted line. Whether they’re researching, visiting the dealership for the third time with their third salesperson or walking into the dealership ready to submit their credit application, every interaction with your dealership should be connected – and, above all else, represent your dealership’s core values. 

To customers, there is no difference between their interactions in person or online. Ensure your team can follow customers across platforms and seamlessly transition from each touchpoint. It’s critical your dealership’s website and other digital retailing platforms are connected and reflective of your in-person dealership experience and able to support your customers throughout their entire buying journey – and beyond. This means connecting your dealership’s inventory, CRM, DMS, digital retailing platforms and more to provide a simple and straightforward customer experience. 

A sustainable plan for improving your dealership’s digital retailing strategy means taking a deep-dive into critical processes and people supporting your dealership – and may require dealers to reassess the way you are currently doing business. While this might seem like a massive undertaking, in the end, improving the efficiency and efficacy of your dealership's digital processes empowers dealers to continue doing what they do best long into the future – serving their customers. 

As dealerships from coast to coast are tightening their belts in preparation for uncertain months ahead, many proactive dealers are turning away from expensive third-party auto lead providers and either reallocating the funds or simply cutting budgets for lead generation. 

This may seem counterintuitive – more leads normally mean more sales, right? Third-party leads are plentiful and often come with grand claims from the external provider about how their leads are “ready to buy” and “motivated for purchase.” Oftentimes, these statements refer to a percentage of those leads, and even if these leads are ready to purchase, they’ve likely been sent to multiple dealerships, including your competitors.  

While these leads close at different rates depending on various factors, selling is all about percentages and volume. Closing a low percentage of deals from a massive pool of paid leads is far less cost-effective than closing a higher percentage of internally generated sales leads at a significantly better ROI. For dealerships looking to achieve sustainable success throughout 2021, swapping third party auto leads for sales opportunities generated by high-quality data and actionable insights on each individual prospect is key. 

In this post, we share three steps to ditching third party auto lead providers and generating your own sales opportunities by: 

– Using high-quality data to identify prospective buyers
– Mining the service drive for sales opportunities
– Taking a proactive approach with your BDC 

Using High-Quality Data

The first step to proactively and successfully “cut the cord” from third party auto lead generation companies is to properly gather and utilize high-quality data from within your own dealership’s walls. 

When it comes to auto lead generation, the adage “quantity vs. quality” is largely outdated thanks to modern dealership technology. While some dealerships remain focused on generating and sifting through large numbers of typically low-quality leads, innovative dealers are using modern behavior prediction and automated marketing tools to do significantly more with less.

Instead of manually sifting through large stacks of leads, advanced marketing tools allow dealers to automatically analyze data from their DMS, CRM, sales platform and other datasets to identify and rank prospective buyers predicted to be ready to enter the buying cycle – before they’ve started shopping around.

To accurately identify customers early in their buying journey, or to avoid nurturing a lead who seems like a good opportunity on the surface, but deeper factors render them unlikely to purchase soon, dealers need high-quality, up-to-date data. The data also needs to be relevant. 

A customer’s intention can be determined through a variety of factors, including financial considerations, online buying behaviors, demographic information and more. With so many factors and data sources, knowing what information to analyze is a growing challenge for many dealers. Fortunately, modern dealership marketing tools like Market EyeQ, fueled by data from sources like IHS Markit, CARFAX, Transunion and other unrivaled sources, empower dealerships to effectively mine their entire local market for sales opportunities. 

Identifying Service Drive Opportunities

Dealers have long known their service department can be a critical source of sales leads. But, simply treating every service ticket as a potential sale is as ineffective as sifting through stacks of third-party leads. As with their competitor conquesting efforts, dealers can maximize the efficacy of their service-to-sales process by taking a more proactive, data-driven approach. For example, Market EyeQ's Service Conquest feature empowers our dealer partners to convert service customers into new car buyers at a 4x higher activation rate than the competition.  

Breaking down the barriers between sales and service is the first crucial step to discovering proactive success at your dealership. Some dealerships employ a service-to-sales liaison, either dedicated as a go-between or as an extension of the BDC, to identify, engage service-to-sales leads using insights from their CRM, maturity manager or data mining tool. With increasingly thin margins, if a dedicated salesperson is not an option for your dealership, arming every service technician with the training and technology needed to carry out this process is critical. 

With the number two influence on brand loyalty (only after the sales experience) being a customer’s maintenance and service experience, and loyalty customers typically generating the most profitable sales, it’s critical to utilize your service drive to build loyalty and proactively identify when customers are ready to re-enter the sales cycle. 

Proactive dealerships approach building customer loyalty by utilizing advanced marketing tools and customer data to serve as an ongoing customer concierge through well-timed service alerts and offers. These same tools allow dealers to prioritize and engage the buyers predicted to be ready to buy again soon. No matter their reason for buying, delivering service customers specific messaging that motivates them to purchase before they enter the buying cycle is crucial to nurturing auto sales leads through their buying journey and maximizing ROI. 

Proactive vs. Reactive BDC Strategy

A proactive strategy shouldn’t be confined to the sales floor and service drive. Many dealers skip the BDC, assuming their role is to make as many calls as possible to the third party-generated leads, waiting for the proverbial wide net to capture some customers ready to buy. With more options than ever when it comes to where and how to buy, staying ahead of customers has never been more important – and never been more possible. 

Industry research finds 80% of car buyers start their journey online. For a BDC to effectively get ahead of online buyers and engage them before they begin shopping around, being able to identify the behaviors and influences that precede a purchase are key. Here, advanced marketing tools are irreplaceable, able to both identify pre-purchase consumer behaviors and generate personalized messaging based on the specific factors predicted to influence a prospect’s purchasing decision. 

Turning away traditional, paid third party dealership leads in favor of in-house lead generation may seem to be counterproductive at first glance, and in truth, it can be challenging. But when high-quality data is combined with a proactive strategy and buy-in from across the dealership, the results will speak for themselves.

It’s rare to find a dealership completely unaware of the value of their service drive. Parts and service sales currently account for 12.5% of new vehicle dealership’s total sales, according to NADA’s latest report. However, few are truly maximizing all the profitable opportunities available in the service drive, discoverable only by connecting a dealership’s service with their sales teams. 

In this blog post, we outline three dealership service drive best practices to drive vehicle acquisitions, conquest sales and loyalty through the service drive by:

• – Breaking down the barriers between service and sales departments

• – Building an effective data-driven service-to-sales process

• – Identifying and proactively engaging service-to-sales prospects to drive sales and build long-term customer relationships 

Break Down the Barriers Between Service & Sales

Many service drives remained bustling during the early days of the pandemic by serving as hubs of constant customer interaction while sales floors fell quiet. In 2020, sales and service revenue decreased its average share of total dealership revenue by only 0.3% compared to 2019, according to NADA. 

However, as customers return to the market quicker than initially anticipated, driven largely by OEM incentives, dealers are presented new opportunities to drive revenue through an effective service-to-sales process. 

This starts with breaking down the barriers between your service and sales departments. Many auto dealerships find success by deploying a dedicated service-to-sales manager to identify and engage service-to-sales prospects. Every dealership’s needs are different, so while considering this dedicated service-to-sales staff, assess the value by asking questions like how many repair orders your service drive completes per day and how robust is your current service department.

With many auto dealers strapped to “do more with less,” a dedicated service-to-sales manager may not be possible. In this scenario, many dealers are finding success by utilizing their BDC to proactively identify potential service-to-sales prospects, engaging those prospects and nurturing them through the car buying cycle. 

To have an effective automotive service drive sales process do this effectively, your BDC can’t simply view every upcoming service appointment as a potential sale. Instead, leverage insights from your CRM, maturity manager or data mining tool to quickly and easily identify your best service-to-sales opportunities. 

Solidify Your Dealership Service-to-Sales Process

Dealerships waiting for customers to decide when and where they want to shop – or have their vehicle serviced – are playing a game of chance with their profits, ignoring tremendous opportunities that come with proactively identifying and engaging prospects. In this same way, building an effective automotive service drive sales service-to-sales process hinges on a dealer’s ability to proactively identify and engage potential service-to-sales prospects. 

Identifying prospects before they enter the buying journey requires understanding which consumer behaviors typically precede a purchase, such as changes to a person’s career or a growing family. Behavior prediction technology tools enable dealers to do this by analyzing all the available data in a dealer’s CRM, DMS and sales platform to predict which customers are most likely to be shopping soon. 

Forward-thinking dealerships using these tools to proactively engage potential buyers are empowered to meet customers where they are with the right message at the right time, rather than waiting and hoping that customer comes to them. It’s in this way Market EyeQ's Service Conquest feature converts dealership service customers into new car buyers at a 4x higher activation rate than the competition. 

Create and Capitalize on Dealer Service Drive Loyalty

One of the most important aspects to any dealership’s long-term success strategy is creating and capitalizing on customer loyalty. Loyalty customers are always the highest profitable sales, and keeping a customer long-term means keeping them from becoming a conquest victory for your competition. OftentimesOften times, this loyalty is built in the service drive, with the number two influence on brand loyalty (only after the sales experience) being a customer’s maintenance and service experience. 

Much like identifying service-to-sales prospects, progressive dealerships are taking a proactive approach to building customer loyalty in the service drive to increase service department sales. By utilizing behavior prediction technology, auto dealers can maintain consistent communication with buyers and build long-term customer relationships through convenient service alerts. 

By serving as an ongoing customer concierge through well-timed service alerts and following dealership service drive best practices, dealers can build the type of service experience that keeps customers coming back and prioritizes the buyers who are most likely to re-enter the sale cycle soon. By proactively identifying and engaging loyalty customers before they enter the sales cycle, dealers who market with Market EyeQ increase retention sales up to 15%. 

While breaking down the barriers between your sales and service teams may seem daunting, the potential benefits that come along with solidifying this automotive service drive sales process in your dealership can’t be ignored. By building a proactive service-to-sales process, supported by data-driven tools and best practices, dealers are empowered to take advantage of additional sales and acquisition opportunities while building long-term loyalty.

From OEMs to dealerships, predictive analytics tools are revolutionizing the automotive brand experience for consumers. Simply put, these tools analyze trends and data from the past, along with what’s currently happening, to predict what is most likely to happen in the future. 

Across a growing range of industries, predictive analytics drive things like auto insurance rates, sports team strategies, airline ticket prices, YouTube video suggestions, how much your rideshare trip will cost and much more. 

From an automotive retail perspective, dealers can use predictive tools to inform decisions related to inventory, merchandising, pricing and more, resulting in improved efficiency and efficacy to pave the way to greater ROI.   

When fueled by high-quality, relevant data, predictive marketing software  can generate insights that empower brands to intelligently identify, engage, convert and retain more customers. With 80% of dealerships expecting a future change in the way business is being done away from the traditional approach, these tools offer dealers an especially valuable opportunity to look ahead and proactively plan for success. 

In this post, we’ll share how predictive analytics empower automotive OEMs and dealers to adapt and evolve and innovate, including: 

• – Upending the traditional sales lead “quality versus quantity” model

• – Revolutionizing marketing and dramatically redefining the ROI equation through personalized marketing

• – Providing the necessary insights to win and keep customer loyalty

How Predictive Analytics Benefits the Sales Lead Equation

We’ve previously explained how predictive analytics have upended the traditional balancing between quality and quantity for automotive sales leads. 

Predictive analytics lead scoring tools like Market EyeQ combine customer insights from dealers' CMS and DMS, as well as demographic, historical and financial data from third-party data partners such as IHS Markit, TransUnion and CARFAX in a single environment. From here, Market EyeQ automates the process of sifting through leads by leveraging predictive analytics to assess each household in a dealer’s market and identify which customers are most likely to buy. 

Instead of a stack of leads, sales and marketing teams receive an actionable assessment of customers ranked on a 0-100 scale according to Market EyeQ’s Behavior Prediction Score®, along with the actionable insights explaining exactly what went into that prospect’s ranking. 

This predictive analytics lead generation approach empowers sales teams to make the most of their leads by focusing their time and efforts on their best opportunities. As a result, dealers who leverage Market EyeQ’s Market Conquest gain up to 15 incremental new conquest sales a month.

Revolutionizing Marketing ROI with Predictive Analytics

To understand the power of customer-centric marketing powered by predictive analytics, look no further than one of the standard-bearers of analytics in business: Amazon. 

Amazon is famous for its “obsession,” as founder Jeff Bezos calls it, with customer service – and dealers know how much customer service impacts sales. Amazon’s focus on customer service is rooted in its use of predictive analytics and intelligent, personalized marketing. The company’s predictive marketing is critical to its success, with research finding 73% of regular online shoppers had clicked on a personalized Amazon product ad – 83% of which converted to buyers.

For automotive OEMs and dealers, results like these come from connecting customer insights, just as Amazon does, with high-quality third-party data to automatically identify consumers who are predicted to be in the market for a vehicle – along with those who may not be shopping yet, but are predicted to enter the market soon. Predictive marketing software like Market EyeQ automatically engage these high-potential buyers when they are most likely to respond with personalized messaging designed to shorten the length of the sales cycle. 

By deploying this type of low-touch marketing, Mastermind’s Market EyeQ sales platform lowers dealers’ cost-per-sale by an average of 80% and generates up to 15x ROI.

Changing the customer relationship

In the modern automotive environment, brand loyalty is largely dictated by a customer’s experience – and knowing what customers want. Research from Mintel found 44% of U.S. automotive consumers were looking to change automotive brands on their next purchase, with 53% citing their needs not being met as a reason for defection.

Predictive analytics tools often generate insights that empower brands to rethink what “everyone knows” about what matters to consumers. For instance, analytics-powered research conducted by IHS Markit for Toyota found that the strongest driver of automotive brand loyalty was, of all things, collision repair orders. Meanwhile warranty repair orders – commonly considered an important customer service touchpoint by dealers and OEMs alike – had no impact on brand loyalty. These findings, in part, lead the automaker to expand its certified collision program.  

At a dealership level, it’s insights like these from predictive analytics tools that provide real opportunities to proactively build the kind of customer experience-driven loyalty that is so important to a dealer’s bottom line. 

Simply knowing what factors are impacting customer loyalty is only half of the equation. You still need the tools and high-quality customer data to leverage those insights in an efficient and meaningful way. According to Microsoft, more than 75% of consumers expect customer service representatives to have visibility into previous interactions and purchases, and 70% expect you to know their contact, product and service information and history in front of them –  regardless of the channel. 

Market EyeQ’s intelligent behavior prediction modeling algorithms empower dealers to do just this. By both identifying which customers are ready to re-enter the sales cycle and generating personalized messaging based on the specific factors predicted to influence their purchasing decision, our dealer partners are able to deliver an exceptional customer experience – and increase retention up to 15%.

Dealership best practices for engaging auto sales leads have evolved over the years to keep pace with changing automotive consumer preferences and marketplace conditions. With each advance in technology or shift in the market, the best practices in automobile dealerships have kept pace as dealers innovated to close sales and build customer relationships better, faster and more efficiently than their competitors.

That remains true today, as broad trends have unexpectedly accelerated, and consumer needs have suddenly shifted due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors in play. While the fundamentals of the automotive business remain the same, many dealership best practices for identifying and engaging prospective customers are changing – with dealers discovering the key to generating auto sales leads is to identify prospective buyers early in their car buying journey – or better, before it even begins.  

In this post, we look at four valuable auto dealership best practices for engaging auto leads in a rapidly changing marketplace to stay ahead of the competition, including:

• – Powering your outreach analytics with high-quality data

• – Analyzing your local market for opportunities

• – Maximizing your dealership’s virtual retailing process 

• – Proactively engaging loyalty and service conquest customers

Start With Quality Data

The past year has been marked by incredible volatility, impacting the finances of everyone from OEMs to buyers and driving major change in consumer buying habits. In fact, a recent automotive industry survey found one-third of customers intend on spending less on their next vehicle as a result of COVID-19. 

If your audience’s finances and buying preferences are changing, does your auto dealership’s data reflect that? When it comes to the quality of the data your analytics are using to generate auto sales leads, remember the old computer industry saying: “Garbage in, garbage out.” 

Low-quality data generates low-quality analytics insights, low-quality analytics insights create low-quality auto sales leads and low-quality leads cost you time, money and profits. There’s real money at stake: Gartner estimates that bad data costs the average organization it surveyed $15 million a year, in everything from wasted time to increased risk to decreased consumer confidence.

With increased competition and thinning margins, access to reliable data offers auto dealers an invaluable competitive advantage – especially when their competitors don’t have access to that same data. For example, Market EyeQ incorporates high-quality proprietary data from partners such as IHS Markit, TransUnion and CARFAX, with information from our dealer partners’ own DMS and CRM data, giving them a comprehensive look at the local market – something their competitors simply don’t have. As a result, our auto dealer partners report gaining up to 15 incremental deals per month, on average.

Pay Close Attention to Your Local Market

It’s always been important for a dealer to pay attention to what’s going on in the world outside their walls, but that’s arguably never been truer than right now. While this is certainly the time to search out the latest information about big picture automotive industry trends, consumer sentiment and other relevant information on a monthly or even weekly basis, it’s equally as critical that dealers monitor their local market for changing buying behaviors – and potential opportunities to attract auto sales leads. 

According to IHS Markit’s review of U.S. registration data, the automotive shopper mix is different in 2020 than it was a year ago. Compared to 2019, characteristics of 2020 car shoppers who are back in the market so far this year are:

• – More likely than they were to own a light truck, with pickups being the most popular body style overall

• – More likely to buy domestic

– More concentrated in small towns and rural areas

• – Older

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– More likely to purchase than lease

Do you know which makes and models are popular right now in your unique, local market? By analyzing their local market and ensuring their available inventory mix reflects changing consumer behaviors, dealers can create a more welcoming environment for auto sales leads, paving the way for an exceptional customer experience from that very first touchpoint. 

This approach to engaging auto leads is especially impactful in today’s market where an increasing number of consumers are now considering both new and pre-owned options. Edmunds reports 29% of current new vehicle buyers are also considering used – a 5% increase in just a few months. By taking a comprehensive look at their local market, dealers can both create an attractive inventory and engage prospective buyers more effectively by matching them to the vehicle they’re most likely to purchase – whether that’s new or used.

Deliver the Sales Experience Customers Want

Consumers haven’t just changed which vehicles they’re shopping for – they’re also changing how they’re shopping. According to a recent study, more than 75% of Americans have tried new shopping methods, brands or places during the pandemic, and at least 60% have the intention of sticking with them in the long term. 

Online,  auto dealers aren’t just competing with local competitors or even other dealers – they’re competing with the estimated 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements the average American sees each day.

To both stand out among the noise and deliver the new experience buyers have come to expect, it’s critical dealers take a data-driven approach to their conquest marketing strategy. This goes beyond utilizing the right marketing channels. Rather, by leveraging predictive dealership marketing tools dealers can ensure they’re both targeting the right prospects and delivering the right message at the right time and in the format predicted to convert those prospects into buyers.  

Another notable trend is the rise of mobile online shopping: Comscore reports that in the first half of 2020, almost twice as many online automotive shoppers were on mobile devices than on desktop computers. 

Is your automotive dealership’s virtual retailing process optimized for mobile shoppers as opposed to desktop users? Is your BDC taking advantage of text and other forms of mobile communication? Now is the time to ensure you’re maximizing your dealership’s virtual retailing process to take advantage of every sales opportunity. 

Drive Auto Leads With Dealership Loyalty & Fixed Ops

Dealers have long understood the best auto sales leads are the ones you create, rather than discover. Loyalty sales are the most profitable thanks to the low cost of customer acquisition and pose a valuable opportunity for dealers to be proactive in identifying and engaging auto sales leads. 

Like conquest auto sales, predictive analytics combined with personalized marketing solutions are one powerful answer for how to generate and engage loyalty leads in an efficient and profitable manner. 

For example, according to IHS Markit, more than 3 million leases will expire before the end of 2020. Predictive analytics allow dealers to not only identify prospects coming up on lease-end, but also those whose vehicles will likely qualify for factory certified pre-owned status, offering dealers additional revenue opportunities, including F&I reserves, upsells and initiation fees.

Another long-time dealership best practice, service conquest can also be taken to another level with predictive analytics and personalized marketing solutions. The combination of high-quality third-party data with a dealership’s own internal DMS and CRM information and insight into a service customer’s existing vehicle turns service conquest into an increasingly powerful generator of auto sales leads – as well as a source of trade-ins to profitably fill used vehicle inventory. Using this data-driven approach, Mastermind’s dealer partners convert service customers into new car buyers at 4x the rate of competitors. 

While customers may shop around for fuel efficiency, they have nothing on dealers who are seemingly on a constant search for operational efficiency. With razor-thin margins and cutthroat competition, dealers know they can’t afford to allow inefficiencies to build up in their operations if they want to protect and grow their bottom line. 

A recent study by Automotive News found 88% of dealers are likely to increase their use of digital tools to increase customers as a result of COVID-19. 

The digital revolution in the automotive industry has given dealers a whole new set of tools and capabilities to drive deep and meaningful gains in efficiency throughout their dealership operations. But for all the ways in which digital tools have improved auto dealer efficiency, possibly none has been as powerful as the revolution in auto dealer marketing. 

The combination of high-quality digital marketing for car dealers, along with new capabilities in conquest marketing and the implications for the entire sales and service process, are driving powerful bottom-line changes for dealers who have embraced it.

In this post, we examine three key ways to improve auto dealer efficiency with the right digital tools by:

• – Improving dealership marketing ROI with predictive analytics

• – Reducing the time wasted on low-quality auto prospects

• – Activating more service customers as conquest leads

Digital Automotive Tools – Not Just Digital Automotive Marketing 

Dealership efficiencies from applying digital tools to auto dealer marketing aren’t found solely in cutting ad buys to print or TV in exchange for digital ads. Of course, automotive digital marketing is a powerful strategy that plays an important role in any dealer’s marketing portfolio, but the truly game-changing capabilities of digital tools when it comes to improving dealership efficiency is realized in the application of predictive analytics tools to create personalized predictive marketing campaigns.

Using high quality data sources and AI-powered analytics tools, predictive marketing personalizes and targets auto dealer marketing messages in a way that isn’t possible with a non-digital strategy. Each consumer touchpoint is targeted to its individual recipient based on channel, timing, messaging, offer and more to maximize the person’s potential engagement with the dealer and conversion into an active high-quality auto lead. 

This one-on-one personalized outreach would be immensely expensive if your dealership had to do it manually but becomes less expensive than legacy auto dealer marketing campaign models – while also generating significantly more actionable auto leads – by automating the entire car sales process through the power of modern digital tools.

Virtually anything that would make a previous dealership process 15 times more efficient than before is worth embracing wholeheartedly, and that’s the kind of results Market EyeQ’s predictive auto dealer marketing solutions are generating for our dealer partners: 15x marketing ROI over industry averages.

Improve Dealership Employee Time Management

When it comes to improving dealership efficiency, the importance of dealership marketing isn’t just in how much it costs, but also in what kind of leads it generates. 

Simply put, low-quality leads cost your dealership time and money. That might be time your dealership’s Business Development Center spends chasing down a weak online lead, or it might be wasted marketing spend reaching out to someone who seems like a good opportunity but already bought elsewhere because you are using a reactive dealership marketing approach versus a proactive dealership marketing approach.

Another important reason to improve your auto lead quality and reduce the time your salespeople spend on low-value prospects is to avoid the efficiency trap of constantly losing good people to greener pastures. 

Great salespeople won’t stick around long in an environment where they aren’t being supported with the right tools. Research found that 61% of all dealership employees don’t think their dealership is using the latest technology, and 25% were considering leaving as a result to find a job somewhere with a brighter future. High performers don’t want to be left behind, especially in an industry as competitive as auto sales, and they want the tools they use to be effective and efficient in getting the job done.

This drive for efficiency is one factor of Market EyeQ’s Behavior Prediction Score® that ranks every prospect on a 0-100 scoring system. The simplicity of a single numeric score according to the likelihood of a sale allows salespeople to quickly and efficiently prioritize their leads and give each one a realistic share of their time and effort.

Activate Dealership Conquest Opportunities Through the Service Drive

Service drives have long been epicenters of key customer experience touchpoints at the dealership. Attracting new service customers through effective automotive digital marketing is not only key to running a profitable service department, it also serves as an increasingly valuable conquest marketing opportunity.  

Conquesting service-not-sold leads has become a critical practice in the current automotive sales environment when the service drive is often the de-facto front door of the dealership, and digital tools like Market EyeQ’s Service Conquest functionality supercharge the process. 

Market EyeQ automatically mines the service drive for sales opportunities by assessing each upcoming service appointment and every drive-up customer as a potential sales lead, combining information from your DMS and CMS with data from other sources – and factoring in what repairs their vehicle will need – to generate a ranked list of prospects for your team to engage with personalized offers. 

This model is so efficient that Mastermind dealer partners who use Market EyeQ to convert service customers into new car buyers at a 4x higher activation rate compared to industry averages.

There’s no denying that automotive leads are the lifeblood of any dealership. But seldom, if ever, has there been a dealership that is completely satisfied with its car sales lead quality and quantity. 

Some of the most common questions we hear from dealers revolve around automotive leads and prospecting: Where do qualified leads come from today, how do you get more leads and how do you convert them into sales?

According to research from Foureyes, 39% of the average auto dealership’s leads are organic leads generated by searches or research, 28% are prospects who have come directly to the dealership, 23% are from paid advertising, 9% are from referrals and 2% are from social media channels.

But in today’s marketplace, the best automotive leads are generated by high-quality data analysis that develops actionable insights into each individual prospect, giving dealers the knowledge and tools they need to power their marketing, sales and customer experience management.

In this post, we take a data-driven look at:

• – Who are your dealership leads?

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• – What do you know about them?

– How do you connect with them?

Who are Your Leads?

Some auto industry veterans may think of automotive leads as people who have somehow indicated to your dealership that they’re in the market for a new or used vehicle. In reality, that’s only one kind of lead.

According IHS Markit research, there are approximately 9 million in-market consumers who are ready to buy without strong loyalty to a specific brand in 2020. These nomad buyers offer dealerships a massive opportunity when it comes to identifying and engaging auto sales leads.  

To take advantage of this opportunity, dealers need to effectively view every single person of car-buying age in their marketplace as a potential dealership lead of greater or lesser quality. That obviously isn’t a prospect list you can plop down on a salesperson’s desk and tell them to start calling, but it is a starting point for modern data analytics tools like Mastermind’s MarketEyeQ. 

By analyzing a combination of public and private information about the consumers in your marketplace – including from sources such as your own DMS and CMS in addition to OEM and third-party providers – MarketEyeQ identifies the consumers who are most likely to be in the market for a vehicle purchase, presented in a 0-100 Behavior Prediction Score® that lets your sales team easily prioritize the highest quality dealership leads.

What Do You Know About Your Auto Leads?

The challenge isn’t that there isn’t enough data. If anything, it’s that the connection of so many parts of our lives to the digital world means all of us – including the people behind your dealership leads – are generating almost inconceivable amounts of data. 

The total amount of data stored worldwide is predicted to grow 16.6% in 2020 alone, reaching 16.6 zettabytes – 16.6 trillion gigabytes – of data. That’s four times the amount of combined data all humans generated in just 2013, which demonstrates how big “big data” has gotten and how it’s getting even bigger.

When it comes to auto dealerships, some of that data is relevant to automotive lead generation, but most of it is not. The increasingly important challenge is to ensure you’re using the right data to maximize sales lead quality. That’s why Mastermind’s predictive analytics tools rely on high-quality data from IHS Markit, TransUnion, CARFAX and other unrivaled sources to give our dealer partners access to insights from 200 million households, 3.2 billion ownership records and 650 million vehicle records.

How Do You Connect With Your Auto Sales Leads?

When it comes to auto dealership leads, sales and marketing are deeply intertwined. The average dealership spent $554,292 on marketing in 2019, averaging $640 in advertising spend per new vehicle sold. With the added pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic challenging dealers to “do more with less,” it’s critical dealerships be more efficient and effective in their marketing without wasting high-quality sales leads. 

But in the advertising marketplace, you’re not just competing against other dealers. Whether it’s conquest marketing, dealership loyalty retention or other forms of automotive lead generation, your messages are competing with the estimated 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements the average American sees each day. 

This isn’t merely ensuring your marketing spend is aimed at the right marketing channels. Rather, the power of predictive marketing in the automotive industry is seen in its ability to determine which channels are most likely to connect with each individual prospect at the right time – and with the right message to influence their decision process. 

The most successful predictive marketing campaigns maximize the effectiveness of your message by building off each previous campaign. In fact, by creating a personalized experience that nurtures leads through the sales funnel, Mastermind’s predictive marketing solutions help our dealer partners gain up to an incremental 15 conquest sales per month.