Growing auto sales requires a meaningful improvement in a dealership’s ability to conquest new customers. 

That’s because out of the three kinds of car buyers -- first-time shoppers, loyalty customers and conquest customers – only conquest has the potential for meaningful growth. Loyalty sales only protect the market share you already have, and first-time shoppers are becoming rarer in almost every market as the car-buying population ages.

This keeps conquest in its long-time role as the primary driver of car dealership sales growth. But what’s new today is conquest is no longer just a function of bigger advertising spends or word-of-mouth. Today’s most effective dealership conquest campaigns are driven by big data, not big dollars, and the results are undeniable.

In this post, we dive into how predictive analytics can revolutionize automotive conquest sales, including:

• – Identifying and targeting the best auto sales prospects before they start shopping

• – Improving dealership marketing effectiveness and ROI

• – Powering conquest opportunities through the service drive 

Improving Both Quality & Quantity of Car Sales Leads

Predictive analytics redefine the historic “quality versus quantity” question for car sales leads by automating parts of the lead qualification process that had previously been the limiting factors for dealers. 

Rather than manually qualifying incoming leads on a one-by-one basis, dealers using predictive analytics marketing tools can effectively consider every prospect within their geographical market a lead. By utilizing automated predictive marketing tools powered by data sources that range from public, to proprietary, to the dealer’s own DMS and CMS, dealers can efficiently rank prospects based on their likelihood to convert. 

Instead of a monthly stack of leads of uncertain value, our dealer partners work from a list of prospects ranked according to a 0-100 Behavior Prediction Score®.  This empowers their team to focus on the highest-quality, most-actionable car sales leads first – increasing the time salespeople spend actually closing sales.

Of course, this sort of approach is only possible with high-quality, accurate automotive consumer data. For instance, any analysis of a household’s readiness and ability to purchase a new vehicle needs to include social demographic information like household composition, existing vehicle makes and models in the family garage and household financial information. 

That’s why Market EyeQ’s predictive analytics insights incorporate high-quality data sources from IHS Markit, CARFAX, TransUnion and OEMs, and integrates with dealer DMS and CMS systems to offer our dealer partners a 360-degree view of their entire market.

The Predictive Marketing Revolution

Even with the growth in online advertising, the total marketing cost-per-sale and ROI have barely budged over the past decade: In 2010, dealers had spent $635 per sale, at 7.9% of total gross costs. In 2019, the average dealer spent $640 per new vehicle sale, accounting for 7.9% of total gross costs.

However, personalized automotive marketing campaigns powered by predictive analytics are proving their worth when it comes to improving dealership marketing ROI. Rather than giant and expensive monthly blasts with broad standardized messaging, analytics-driven marketing creates customized marketing campaigns for each conquest prospect that walk them through an individual journey of the right offer at the right time through the right channel to maximize their likelihood of turning into an activated, high-quality prospect.

Mastermind dealer partner Lexus of Towson is experiencing the power of predictive marketing first hand. In its first month, a direct mail campaign based on our platform’s analysis of thousands of data points empowered the dealer to close 20 deals. At a 63% close rate, it was up from the store’s typical 35-40%.

Their success using our behavior prediction technology isn’t unique. Dealers using Mastermind’s data-driven predictive marketing campaigns gain up to 15 additional conquest sales per month. Further, dealers using Mastermind’s personalized dealership marketing solutions report an average $115 per-sale advertising cost – an 82% ROI improvement from the industry average that goes straight to the dealership’s bottom line.

Powering Service Conquest

While the most cost-effective dealership sale is to an existing loyalty customer, the next-best option is conquesting a customer with whom you have a pre-existing service-not-sold relationship. 

Predictive analytics are especially powerful for improving your dealership’s service-to-sales process as your dealership has unique access to critical data about the customer’s existing vehicle that informs how likely they are to start shopping for a replacement vehicle. 

Dealers that have embraced predictive analytics as a tool for driving service conquest auto sales regularly have a dedicated salesperson or even team devoted to reviewing the analytics-driven insights on each and every scheduled service appointment and proactively engaging with service drive visitors who have been identified as high-quality car sales leads by their sales platform’s predictive analytics tools. 

Mastermind’s dealer partners who have embraced this model report converting service customers into new car auto sales at 4x the activation rate than the competition. On average, Market EyeQ helps dealers activate 55% of their service drive into in-market customers. That kind of increased sales volume from high-ROI customers is a powerful addition to any auto dealership’s profitability.

Fact: conquest auto sales help dealers hit sales targets at the end of the month. That’s never been truer than right now, as the unprecedented disruptions to new and used vehicle supply and to consumer demand have dealers scrambling to identify and connect with every possible quality prospect they can find.

However, conquest auto sales are a double-edged sword. Just as you’re trying to conquest your competitors’ customers, they’re doing the same to you. There are a lot of nuances to consider, but with the right conquest marketing strategy, there is tremendous opportunity for conquest sales – beyond hitting end-of-month numbers.

In this blog post, we discuss:

• – Identifying and attracting “nomadic” car shoppers

• – What the changing used car marketplace means for conquest opportunities

• – Connecting the dealership service drive to the showroom floor

• – Turning conquest customers into loyal customers

Creating a Home for the Nomadic Shopper

“Nomadic” consumers are car shoppers who have no meaningful brand or dealer loyalty and jump from brand to brand when buying a car. Even with brand loyalty at an all-time high, these nomadic consumers are still a powerful force in the marketplace. According to data from IHS Markit, 9 million nomadic households will be in-market for a new car in 2020 – more than brand loyalist and “super-loyalist” households combined. 

This is why knowing the unique car buying factors that drive nomadic buyers’ car buying  decisions is critical. In general, nomadic shoppers are heavily price-sensitive, which means they are a critical audience for leveraging your OEM incentives. This is where analytics-driven predictive conquest marketing is an incredibly powerful tool, thanks to its ability to factor in the specific offers your dealership has available and identify the consumers most likely to respond to what you have to offer at any given time. 

Using the Used Car Marketplace for Conquest

The massive changes in the used car marketplace have an impact on both new and used conquest auto sales. Even before Hertz filed for bankruptcy and increased the likelihood it would sell off more of its fleet, auto rental companies and other major fleets were going through an unprecedented defleeting that flooded the used car marketplace. As a result, J.D. Power predicts that used vehicle prices could drop by 7% before recovering this summer, depending on what happens with the broader economy.

But with an increase in supply comes a potential increase in demand. Tens of millions of American households have experienced unemployment during the COVID-19 crisis, with almost 41 million unemployment claims filed across the country. While almost all these job losses are expected to be temporary, the combination of economic uncertainty and the supply disruptions to OEM new vehicle manufacturing will push many would-be new vehicle shoppers to consider pre-owned options in their next purchase cycle.

This is where having your predictive conquest marketing tools connected not only to your new vehicle sales operations but also to your pre-owned inventory and DMS will pay dividends. 

Used conquest auto sales are even more heavily product-driven than new, as they’re powered by the specific inventory you have on the lot and your ability to quickly identify high-quality prospects and touch them with an actionable offer for a specific vehicle. Leverage your DMS, CRM and dealership sales platform to identify prospects likely to be in the market for a used vehicle, and structure an offer that takes advantage of OEM CPO programs, financing terms and your dealership’s available inventory. 

Driving Conquest Leads Through the Dealership Service Drive

Service-not-sold conquest auto sales leads have always been valuable to dealerships, but there are a few broad trends that suggest dealership service conquest will only continue to grow in importance. One is that the average age of vehicles on the road continues to increase, meaning consumers are even more likely to have the service drive, not the showroom door, be their entry point to a dealership. 

We find the most effective service conquest operations typically dedicate a salesperson to prospecting their upcoming service appointments for sales leads, engaging them with personalized offers to trade-in their vehicle or similar offers. 

Turning Conquest Customers into Loyalty Customers

Conquest marketing will be integral to maintaining market share and accelerating recovery throughout the remainder of the pandemic and beyond. However, as you focus on capturing consumers returning to the market, you must also protect your current customer base against competitors trying to do the same. 

The evidence is clear that a dealership customer experience (CX) strategy is your most powerful tool for building customer loyalty and protecting against conquest losses. Simply put, when you know your customers’ needs and deliver great CX, they are much more likely to stay loyal even in the face of aggressive competitive conquest efforts.

In our previous blog on personalized marketing , we discussed the basics of what personalized marketing is, what types of personalized marketing capabilities are available for dealerships and how we use big data at Mastermind to help dealers understand and target consumers. We also provided a case study of how this all works in a real-world dealership.

This post serves as a “part two” of that narrative, diving deeper into the complex topic of personalized marketing and why it’s more important than ever for auto sales after COVID-19 disruptions. In this post, we’ll discuss: 

– The importance of personalization in the increasingly digital automotive customer experience

• – How to effectively personalize your entire car sales process

• – How personalization helps your dealership’s bottom line

The Importance of Personalization in Dealership Marketing

Fact: By the time today’s auto buyers get to the dealership, much of their shopping is already over and done with. 

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers were increasingly doing their auto shopping online. In 2019, according to Cox Automotive, consumers spent 61 percent of their time online while auto shopping, compared to just 20 percent of their time at the purchase dealer and 14 percent at other dealers.

As consumers increasingly opt for shopping online over in-person, personalized customer experiences delivered by brands like Amazon have become the norm. The more shopping someone does online, the more touchpoints and data points they create to help you identify and understand their wants and needs – if you have access to that data and the tools to turn data into actionable insights. 

Effective personalization in digital marketing is dependent on high quality data. Ensure your dealership’s customer insights can be collected and analyzed in a single environment, integrating data from your CMS and DMS to identify customers in the early stages of their car buying journey so you can tailor your outreach.

Not all marketing is digital. That’s the point of personalized marketing – some consumers are digital-first, and others are not. Your job as a marketer and salesperson is to ensure you’re connecting with them through the most effective channels for that specific car buyer at the right time to maximize engagement. 

This becomes even more critical as dealerships compete for few higher quality auto sales leads in the post-pandemic market. Your marketing efforts need to account for the myriad facts impacting consumer buying behaviors to create a cadence that is sensitive to concerns and entices consumer engagements. At its core, personalized marketing is customer-driven marketing. 

Personalizing Your Entire Auto Sales Process

Effective personalized marketing becomes personal selling if you manage the interaction between marketing and sales functions effectively. Today’s car buyers don’t want just a great deal – they want a great dealership experience and want to feel comfortable during a post-pandemic time where they may not feel comfortable with other things happening in their lives.

This is where dealership marketing support and an automotive marketing platform such as Market EyeQ makes a huge difference by creating a seamless transition between marketing and sales, arming the salesperson with the same insights that powered the personalized marketing campaign that turned the consumer into a prospect in the first place. 

By utilizing predictive analytics to offer personalized customer recommendations, dealers can create a car sales experience that is centered around their customer’s individual wants, building off that first touch point.

This approach goes beyond the sales department. The most effective personalized marketing campaigns have a strong F&I component, with a targeted and actionable offer based on household financial data and other factors. With affordability continuing to play a huge role in auto shoppers’ decisions, personalized F&I needs to be an integral part of your dealership’s marketing and sales process.

Benefiting Your Bottom Line

In our interactions with auto dealers all over the country and in every kind of market, we see a consistent competitive advantage for dealers who have meaningfully integrated personalized marketing into their dealership as part of an overall customer experience-focused strategy and culture.

Dealers who have embraced this business model have more and better auto sales leads, spend less money on ineffective marketing campaigns, generate more leads with their personalized marketing touchpoints and are more effective at closing both new and used car sales. 

They also increase loyalty retention rates, capture market share through service-not-sold conquest and are even increasing service drive revenues.

When you reduce your auto lead generation costs, decrease your marketing spend, increase your marketing campaign’s effectiveness and improve your sales closure rate, the results will show up in your bottom line. That’s why the average spend-per-car-sale with Mastermind is $115, versus $624 for the auto industry as a whole. 

As we’ve discussed before, digital analytics have changed the traditional balance of quality versus quantity in auto sales leads. Automating the auto lead generation and analysis process means dealers can focus solely on the best car sales leads without wasting time on prospects who aren’t ready to buy.

However, digitizing car sales lead generation has never replaced the need for skilled marketing and salespeople in an auto dealership. This is truer today than ever before but making the most of those auto leads right now requires that marketing and sales teams understand and effectively engage their marketplace, customers and the economy.

In this blog post, we’ll cover: 

• - Understanding what the COVID-19 crisis has done to the broader economy

• - Adapting to the realities of your local marketplace

• - Personalizing your marketing and sales for each individual prospect

• Understand and Adapt to the Current Economy

  A new car sales lead doesn’t live in a vacuum. It’s part of a broader economy, and making the most of your car sale leads requires your marketing and sales teams to be engaged and thoughtful in how they factor broader economic influences into how they work their car sales leads and interact with prospects.

  Most importantly, the U.S. economy just had its single biggest one-month increase in unemployment since the federal government started tracking those figures after World War II, jumping from 4.4% to 14.7% in April. A total of 23.1 million Americans are out of work, and a historic low of just 51.3% of Americans of all ages are working right now.

  The bright side of this massive economic downtown is almost all those job losses are categorized as temporary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects 18.1 million workers to get their jobs back at some point, compared to only two million who have permanently lost their positions due to the crisis.

  The obvious impact of this current reality on car sales lead generation and management is that individuals or households who would have been high-quality leads two months ago may suddenly not be today. But they may revert to one of your best auto leads in just a few short months. 

  This is a driving factor for why consumer research is finding that while many consumers are planning on delaying a new or pre-owned car purchase, few are cancelling their plans altogether. Your marketing and sales efforts should factor this in and combine a cadence that is sensitive to consumer concerns with offers designed to alleviate uncertainty and entice action sooner rather than later.

  Know Your Market

  There’s always been a tremendous amount of diversity in dealers’ businesses across the country, but the variation in infection rates and different policy responses to COVID-19 have created even more differences between what challenges dealers face and what options they have to address those challenges. 

  For instance, a dealer in urban Michigan, with more than 45,000 confirmed cases and an unemployment rate over 21%, will have a different marketplace than one in rural Montana, a state with fewer than 500 reported cases and where 20 of the state’s 56 counties have yet to report a diagnosed infection. Those two dealers cannot and should not interact the same with a new car sales lead.

  In addition to practical factors such as limitations on dealer operations and higher unemployment rates in states with stronger stay-at-home orders, auto dealers also need to recognize the different cultural impact that COVID-19 has had and ensure their marketing and sales engagement is respectful of regional cultural variations. For instance, consumers in hard-hit communities where it is common to have lost friends or family to the disease are going to be understandably more sensitive to messaging that implies the pandemic has created a great opportunity for them to save money. 

  Personalize Your Marketing, Nurture Your Leads

  Your marketing and sales efforts cannot presume that what was true about your dealership’s prospects two months ago is still true today – or that their current challenges are disqualifying in the long term. Even households that get back to work are going to be impacted by three to six months of unemployment or underemployment. 

  As an example, a new car sales lead may suddenly become a pre-owned sales lead. With economic uncertainty ahead, the glut of de-fleeted used vehicles on the market and the disruption to new vehicle manufacturing by OEMs, many consumers may choose to purchase pre-owned rather than new. This will require your car dealership to seamlessly transition those prospects between new and used sales teams to maintain a consistent dealership customer experience. 

  Another way to personalize your sales cycle – and not waste resources on car sales leads that have suddenly become ice-cold – is to encourage your sales teams to learn more about where their prospects fit into the broader recovery. 

  In general, states that have limited economic activity for public health reasons are planning on reopening on an industry-by-industry basis, which means workers in some industries will generally be waiting longer than others to go back to work. A new car sales lead employed in the tourism industry, at an airline or at a concert venue is more likely to postpone or downgrade their purchase plans than someone in road construction, agriculture or another essential business.

  In the coming weeks, the quantity of quality auto sales leads may potentially decrease, which means it’s more incumbent than ever for auto dealers to make the most out of every valuable sales lead. This requires taking a data-driven approach at lead generation and qualification and continuing to use those customer insights to nurture leads and deliver a deeply personalized customer experience. 

  If you’re struggling with adapting your lead generation process to the current environment, please contact us. We’re here to help.

Hey Siri, OK Google, Alexa – tell me, how can my dealership successfully market to prospects who are using voice search to shop for a new car?

Compare that sentence with the way you’d normally type a query into a search engine to find that same information and you’ll start to understand how much dealership websites and other digital content needs to change to be effective in the world of voice search. 

What you may not realize is how much we already live in that world – or at least, how much your prospective customers already do. Whether your dealership successfully engages with them is going to depend on how well you prepare for a voice search-driven future by reviewing, updating and expanding your dealership’s online content. 

Dealers know the number of prospects reaching them through mobile devices has exploded in recent years – in 2018, Google noted that the number of mobile searches for brand-specific “SUV models” had grown by more than 90 percent since 2016. That’s a core component of the automotive shopping experience today for consumers.

The next step for consumers is moving from typing “SUV models” into their phone to simply asking the phone for information on those models, and that’s already starting to happen: Google reports more than a quarter of the world’s online population is using voice search right now on their mobile devices. 

These searches will either connect with content on your website and drive those shoppers to you, or they won’t. The more voice searches that do connect, the more business you’ll be doing as a result. How much more business? Gartner, for one, predicts that brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search by 2021 will increase their digital commerce revenue by 30 percent.

In this post, we discuss how dealers can prepare for voice search marketing by first answering:

• - What is voice search and why is it important to dealerships?

• - How will voice search change the automotive industry and the car buying journey?

• - What are some ways automotive dealerships can prepare and optimize for voice search?

What is voice search? Why is it important to car dealerships?

When you search for information by speaking to Siri, the Google Assistant, Alexa or some other app, that’s voice search. While the search engines and algorithms that underpin the process are roughly the same, the way the queries are framed and presented to users have significant differences that can be critical to dealerships attempting to engage online car buyers. .

With regards to the query, people don’t format voice searches the way they often do with relatively old-fashioned text queries typed into search engines. Instead, they simply ask a question, such as “How much does a new Mercedes A-Class cost?” or “Where is the closest Lexus dealer to me?” or “What is the trade-in value on my 2012 Ford Focus?”

In return, the search engines look for trustworthy web content that answers the user’s question as closely as possible. If the user asks, “How much does a new Mercedes A-Class cost?” then the voice assistant is going to be searching for a web page that has the equivalent of, “A new Mercedes-Benz A-Class costs $33,000” and directing the user to that page – and that page alone.

This means dealers looking to have users directed to their website need to review their web content and look for opportunities to either replace or add to existing content that does not present important information in full sentences to answer potential questions. 

It’s also important to understand that while text search engine results present the user with a list of highest-rated results, voice search on mobile or on an assistant such as Amazon’s Alexa or a Google Home device will frequently only give the user the top-rated result. These devices are becoming increasingly common parts of shoppers’ everyday lives, with more than one in ten Wi-Fi enabled homes in the country hosting a “smart speaker” device.

This places a massive priority on dealership search engine optimization (SEO) for the local market – if you’re not the top-rated result for common searches referencing your local city or region, then shoppers are heading directly to your competitors. 

How will voice search change the automotive industry and the car buying journey?

Potential car buyers will be heading to those competitors more and more frequently because voice search is becoming an increasingly common method of shopping online.

It’s no secret that online research has quickly become a standard component of the automotive shopping journey. According to Google, 92 percent of car buyers research online before they buy. 

In response, dealers have adapted. They’ve transitioned resources from traditional advertising into digital channels, they’ve invested in tools such as Market EyeQ’s predictive marketing solutions and auto dealer software to engage with consumers in their area, they’ve built out Business Development Centers (BDCs) to lead their online engagement efforts and more.

But the combination of technological innovation and increased integration of online resources into virtually every facet of our lives means dealers can’t sit back and consider their digital evolution to be complete. Voice search is the next adaptation dealers need to embrace if they want to continue to meet consumer expectations, as it’s a different way of connecting with potential buyers that comes with its own requirements and opportunities.

How to Optimize Your Dealership for Voice Search

1. Audit Your Site: The most basic method of preparing and optimizing your dealership for voice search is to review your website’s design and structure to ensure that critical content is presented in plain language that answers the kinds of questions your key prospects might be asking. This means avoiding presenting key information in images, in sentence fragments, in tables or other formats that a search engine cannot return as a result to a natural-language voice search.

2. Create FAQ Pages: A great tool for engaging with voice search is the classic “Frequently Asked Questions,” or FAQ, page. When you’re looking to host content that asks potential questions that are commonly asked in voice search by car shoppers, a page designed to answer frequently asked questions is extremely well suited to fill that role. Consider creating multiple FAQ pages on your website that ask and answer questions a voice-searching shopper might ask, including not only brand, product and price but also F&I, service, body shop and other fixed ops and more.

3. Optimize for Local Search: Focus your voice search optimization efforts on geographic market localization, using both site coding and references to your local municipalities and region – including common nicknames – to increase the potential that your site is the top response to shoppers searching for local dealers in their community.\

4. Implement Schema: One way to support your dealership’s local search efforts is to make sure your web developers are using what’s called “schema” on your site. Schema are behind-the-scenes tags and structures that help search engines understand what your site is about and what it does – everything from automatically identifying it as an auto dealer to search engines to helping define the price range of your vehicles, what geographic areas you serve, what brands you offer, whether you have staff fluent in foreign languages and much more. 

Schemas are critical to helping search engines position your site in response to questions like “Where is the closest Buick dealership to me right now?” or “What local auto dealers are open after 6 p.m. on Thursday?”

1. Evaluate Your Speakable Content: In addition to the previous schemas,, Google is developing tools that allow web developers to identify content on their pages that is most suited for playback in a voice search response or other text-to-speech usage. Make sure your web team is up to date on these and other tools that are designed to improve your website’s performance in a voice search environment, as search engines will often prioritize sites that have been optimized in this manner over those that have not.

Car shoppers asking their phones to answer questions is only one way the automotive sales environment and dealership marketing landscape are evolving. It’s important for dealers to have an auto sales platform and marketing partner that is leading the way into that future, helping position you to take advantage of new digital opportunities and separate the trends of the moment from the best practices of the future.

If you’d like to learn more about what Mastermind is doing to help dealerships like yours thrive in the evolving automotive marketplace, contact us to set up a free demo.

Disruption isn’t new in the auto industry. Brands – and OEMs – rise and fall, new technologies change the game, consumer preferences shift and external factors like interest rates and gas prices can make dealers scramble to adapt to a suddenly changing marketplace.

In recent years, some of the single biggest automotive industry trends revolve around the rise of digital tools that empower both consumers and dealers to know more and engage more effectively – if the right tools are used in the right way.

In this blog, Mastermind explores the digital future of the auto industry and looks at how modern digital tools are:

- Getting consumers into – and out of – the market for a new vehicle at unprecedented speed

- Simplifying the already challenging process of engaging prospects through digital marketing

- Making the dealership customer experience more important than ever before

Pre-Purchase Car Research Condenses Time-in-Market

One of the most important automotive industry trends is the degree to which car shopping online has changed the relationship between dealers and consumers. While purely online car sales have not yet materialized to the degree that many predicted, the breadth and depth of information and capabilities online have armed consumers with more information and insights than ever before.

Today's digital-savvy car buyers are increasingly looking for objective, third-party sites during their car buying  journey. According to a 2019 study by Cox Automotive, third-party sites are the most used of any online resource for car shopping and research, with 80 percent of all car buyers visiting third-party sites during the shopping process.

Additionally, the availability of online tools has shortened the process of buying a car. According to Cox Automotive, the time spent shopping and researching a vehicle purchase continues to go down as consumers get more online tools to automate and accelerate the process. Between 2017 and 2019, the average amount of time consumers spent shopping and researching a new vehicle purchase shortened by more than a half hour, from 13 hours and 48 minutes to 13 hours and 6 minutes. It decreased even more for used vehicle purchases, from 15:07 to 14:12, a decrease of almost an entire hour in just two years. 

Cutting the amount of time that consumers spend shopping and researching contributes to decreasing how long they’re in the market for their purchase, eliminating an average of 22 days from time in market, from 118 days in 2017 to 96 days in 2019.

The Changing Face of Automotive Digital Marketing

This means it’s more important than ever before that car dealership digital marketing is as targeted as possible. And in today’s digital environment, “targeted” means more than simply having the right prospect. It also means having the right offer, delivering that offer at the right time within the constantly shrinking window of opportunity of the consumer being on the market and then connecting in the right format that meets the consumer where they are. 

In digital terms, this means that in order to give their customers the best online digital car buying experience, dealers need to make sure their digital dealership marketing is powered by predictive analytics tools that deliver communications tailored to the devices your customers are using. It’s not just identifying which prospects are on a computer, which use tablets, and which are doing their research on smartphones. Cox Automotive’s research into car sales trends found that more than half of car buyers today do their research on multiple devices. Almost 60 percent use a smartphone to shop for a car, but more than three quarters use a desktop or laptop. While tablets such as iPads are becoming less common as phones become bigger and more powerful, they’re still used in a quarter of digital car sale experiences.

Elevating Dealership Customer Experience

In our digital world, consumers know what they want, they know how they want to be treated – and they’re not shy about sharing with all their friends and connections when a dealer (or any other company) doesn’t meet their expectations. Here at Mastermind, there’s one fundamental common factor we see in dealerships that are thriving in today’s marketplace versus those that are struggling: Their commitment to delivering a great customer experience.

Digital connectivity and capabilities are a double-edged sword for customer experience in the dealership environment. They’ve increased customer expectations for personalized service, but they’ve also given dealers tools like Market EyeQ that provide the necessary capabilities to meet (or exceed) those expectations. 

Consider this: According to PwC, nearly 80 percent of American consumers value speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service as the most important elements in a positive customer experience. 

Market EyeQ – or any digital tool – can’t make your staff any friendlier. But it certainly can make the process of buying a car faster and more convenient. It can also ensure your sales and F&I teams have all the information and insights they need to provide personalized and knowledgeable service.

Those capabilities extend beyond the sales floor and F&I room to the service drive and other fixed ops opportunities for consumer engagement. Through ongoing engagement and digital analytics, dealers can continually connect with customers to identify new opportunities for revenue while deepening the customer experience relationship and building long-term loyalty.

Are you trying to navigate digital disruption in the auto industry and position your dealership to engage and win in this new environment? Contact us to find out how Mastermind’s combination of auto industry expertise and digital excellence is driving results for dealers of all types and sizes.

Marketers rank high-quality data as the number one factor driving performance success. Have you invested in quality automotive marketing data at your dealership, and in turn, are you taking action based on what the data is telling you about your customers? 

Dealerships are no strangers to metrics or dashboards, but all too often the only figures that leadership and staff use in performance analysis are future auto sales targets and rearward-looking figures, such as 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 blog, Mastermind helps take your dealership reporting to the next level with insights into:

- How integrating your DMS and sales platform opens new possibilities

- Benchmarking improvements by looking at every stage  of the car sales process

- Comparing your brand and model performance to in-market competitors

• - Ensuring return on your sales platform investment by evaluating each salesperson’s usage and opportunities for growth

• - Leveraging predictive analytics to create a forward-looking view of your dealership’s performance

DMS-Sales Integration Drives Insights

We’ve written before about why data-driven sales platforms are critical tools for auto dealers in today’s marketplace: 

• - They deliver new insights about dealership customers and prospects

• - They help dealers be more proactive in sales and marketing

• - They make the car sales process more efficient

• They improve customer’s dealership experience 

• - They’re a critical tool for growing customer loyalty.

When it comes to dealership performance analysis, auto dealer software like Mastermind’s Market EyeQ provide a wealth of insight into all aspects of how the sales cycle is performing in your dealership. Your dealership is much more than just sales, so for the most comprehensive and useful reporting it’s critical to ensure your sales platform is integrated with your DMS.

Connecting the marketing and sales expertise of your sales platform to mission-critical data factors such as cost accounting, labor cost, inventory, pricing and more ensures your reporting isn’t artificially siloed into “sales and marketing” and “everything else.”

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 metrics that have a real impact on their bottom line. A comprehensive dealership dashboard ensures some of those metrics are being measured and reported, which encourages teams to work to improve them.

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.

It’s also important to generate these kinds of metrics not only for “sales,” but also for loyalty, service conquest and market conquest customers. Among other factors, a reliably profitable and high-ROI service-not-sold conquest operation is critical to running a profitable service drive in today’s automotive marketplace, and insight into those factors helps both sales and service leadership manage their operations accordingly.

Watching the Competition

Motorsports drivers wouldn’t win many races if they didn’t pay attention to where the other drivers on the track were and what they were doing. Just the same, your dealership won’t do very well in a flat sales environment where growth comes at your competitor’s expense if you’re not watching what they’re doing and where they are or aren’t succeeding.

That’s why Mastermind’s reporting tools integrate Market360 reporting, giving you competitive dealership insights into what brands and models are selling in your local auto market. It lets you benchmark against the competition and identify opportunities to capture market share against a weak competitive product or improve your selling against a strong competitor.

Improving Sales Staff Individual Performance

It’s obviously critical to report on and review individual salesperson numbers. Are they hitting their sales targets? Beyond that, 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. Are they great at loyalty relationships but have challenges closing new customers? What’s working for them, and what isn’t?

One key tool 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. Are they using the auto dealer solutions you’ve invested in and are they getting the desired results? 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.

Dashboards fueled by data from across your dealership and informed by best practices and predictive analytics can transform your dealership performance analysis from just looking at what has already happened into a forward-looking view of what’s going to happen in the future. 

If you’re interested in seeing what kind of insights Mastermind’s reporting tools can bring to the way you run your dealership and manage your team, contact us for a free demonstration.

The 2010s were a time of incredible change in automotive marketing. Not since the growth of radio advertising in the 1930s or television ads in the 1950s have dealers had both the challenge and opportunity of reinventing the way they engage with potential consumers as they did during the decade where the Internet, social media and data analytics became a ubiquitous part of American life.

Automotive marketers looking forward to 2020 and beyond can benefit from a reminder of how much the landscape has changed in a relatively short period of time.

As consumers increasingly spent their lives online, advertisers followed. In 2010, U.S. advertisers spent $26 billion on online advertisements. By 2019, they spent roughly that much on search advertising alone – in just the first half of the year. By the end of June 2019, combined digital advertising spending in the U.S. had exceeded $57.9 billion and was on track to pass offline ad spending for the first time.

What it meant to be “online” and “offline” evolved, as well. The 2010 U.S. Census found that roughly two-thirds of Americans lived in a home with some form of Internet access, primarily cable or DSL service. The Internet – and online marketing – was something that happened on your computer, as fewer than one in 10 Americans used their mobile phone to access the Internet. 

By 2019, 81 percent of Americans owned a smartphone and the richness of the mobile experience had gotten to the point where more than a third had made their phone or tablet, rather than the computer, their primary method of going online.

Looking forward to 2020 and beyond, what do automotive marketers need to know? What dealership marketing strategies are ready to drive growth, and what auto marketing tools are driving sales and ROI? Mastermind’s best practices for automotive marketers in 2020 include:

• - Recognizing where evolving product mix is driving a change in your prospects.

• - Driving down costs through efficient personalized marketing.

• - Committing to service and other fixed ops marketing to drive revenue in a flat sales environment.

• - Nailing down your most efficient sales through effective loyalty and service-not-sold marketing.

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New Auto Models and Consumer Preferences 

The auto industry is grappling with changing consumer preferences, and dealers are being forced to work their existing inventory while trying to predict which future models consumers might be interested in. 

Marketers know that when what you’re selling is changing, whom you’re selling to changes, as well. In 2016, there were 91 CUVs on the marketplace. By 2021, there are expected to be 136 models competing for consumer attention. As consumers continue to opt for larger vehicles in 2020, car market share is forecasted to continue shrinking, while SUVs are expected to grow and pickups to stay relatively steady.

Even with so many new models on the horizon, 2020 car sales are expected to be relatively flat. According to NADA, sales of new-light vehicles are expected to decline by 1.2 percent in the next year, signaling that the competition between dealers is only going to grow fiercer.     

In an environment like this, it’s more important than ever to base marketing decisions on forward-looking predictive analytics – and more dangerous than ever to assume that what’s worked before will continue to work in a new era with new consumers and new products.

Better Personalization Means Better Dealership Profits

Mastermind’s personalized marketing campaigns, powered by industry-best data from partners such as TransUnion, Carfax and IHS Markit, rendered into simple and usable insights led by our proprietary Behavior Prediction Score®, help dealers maintain their competitive edge by ensuring they’re reaching the best possible customer in their market with the right message – at the right time. 

Looking ahead, the timing of dealership’s marketing messages is growing increasingly important. According to Cox Automotive research, the average car shopper is spending significantly less time on the market than ever before: 96 days, which is down 20 days in just two years. And while 96 days is the average length of the car buying journey, a growing cohort of shoppers is even quicker on the trigger, with one in four new car buyers spending 30 days or less on the market.

Identifying the best prospects for your existing offers and product mix and then using data-driven insights to deliver marketing content that has the highest potential to move that specific prospect to take action is how the average dealer marketing spend-per-car-sale with Mastermind is $115, versus $624 for the auto industry as a whole.

Effective personalized advertising is the secret to conquest success in a flat and increasingly competitive marketplace. The results are real: Our dealer partners report the combination of predictive analytics and personalized marketing in Market EyeQ’s Market Conquest feature drives up to 15 new conquest sales a month.

Softening Sales Call For Selling Service

As we discussed a few months ago, auto industry experts generally predict a flat to softening sales market in 2020. In addition to heated competition, this means the risk of marketing oversaturation for consumers is high. Even though the auto industry is slowly decreasing its share of total national digital ad spending, the total amount spent continues to grow steadily. The total automotive online advertising spend has virtually doubled in just four years, skyrocketing from $9.11 billion in 2016 to a predicted $18.15 billion this year.

Personalized dealership marketing can help break through the noise, but the time is certainly now for dealers to look at new revenue opportunities – starting with the service drive.  

Dealership marketers need to embrace the opportunity to get more loyalty customers into the service drive through effective relationship marketing and to attract more new service-not-sold customers through efficient predictive analytics and personalized marketing campaigns.

More service drive customers doesn’t just mean more fixed ops revenues – although it certainly does mean that if managed effectively, which is great for the dealership’s bottom line. But bringing more customers into your dealership means more opportunities for sales, even if it’s not the showroom door through which they’re entering.

Dealership Retention: Keep Your Existing Customers In-House 

If auto industry forecasts are correct, efficiency will be critical to dealership’s profitability in 2020, and there’s no more efficient way to do automotive marketing than to your existing customers. Industry statistics suggest it’s as much as five times cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to conquest a new one. That means huge impacts on your bottom line. In fact, research from Bain & Company suggests that increasing your dealership customer retention rate by just five percent can increase total profits by anywhere from 25 percent to 95 percent.

Market EyeQ’s predictive analytics capabilities are incredibly powerful when it comes to service conquest, as it’s able to integrate your own dealership DMS data with Mastermind’s arsenal of proprietary and public data to identify the service-not-sold customers who are most ready for a new vehicle, and who are the best prospects for the products and offers you have available.

This combination of analytics and existing service relationship is why Mastermind’s dealers report activating an average 55 percent of their service drive into high-quality new car sales leads, while continuing to show steady service and parts revenue growth.

Finally, by maintaining customer relationships over time, dealers can continue to maximize their sales opportunities even in a flat market. By integrating their CRM with a sales platform such as Market EyeQ, dealers can proactively identify when an existing customer has become a valuable prospect for a lease-end or turn-in deal generating potential revenue from factors such as new and used car sales, lease initiation, upsells and initiation fees. By leveraging this approach, Market EyeQ improves our dealer partner’s retention sales rates by an average of 15 percent over non-Mastermind dealerships.

Does the changing landscape of automotive marketing have you worried that your dealership is falling behind rather than leading the charge into the future? Contact us for a free consultation on how you can use predictive marketing to attract new conquest customers, increase service revenues, keep your loyalty customers in-house and improve your marketing ROI in 2020 and beyond. 

The automotive industry continues to face dynamic challenges such as shifting marketing conditions, increased competition, cost pressure and volatility. For dealers with the right technology, tools, and ambition, it represents an exciting time with a lot of opportunities to differentiate themselves in a very crowded automotive market space. 

Technology is rapidly transforming the automotive industry, and predictive analytics, while now a common industry buzzword, is a core differentiator for dealers who use it well. Predictive analytics is being used to analyze consumer purchase trends and make predictions about future events using techniques like data mining, data modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). 

In this blog, Mastermind dives deeper into predictive analytics in the auto industry and what that means for dealers, including:

• - The definition of predictive analytics and why it matters to dealers

• - The increasing importance of predictive analytics in the auto industry

• - How predictive marketing is shaping the future of auto

What is Predictive Analytics and What Can it Do For a Dealership

Predictive analytics uses historical data to forecast future outcomes. This is done through a variety of statistical techniques like data mining, machine learning, and predictive modeling. Predictive analytics helps identify and understand dealer prospects before they even reach out, giving dealers the chance to proactively market to the customer in a highly personalized manner. With this proactive marketing approach, dealers can sell more efficiently because they have the data and knowledge about those customers to allow their sales teams to develop personalized talking points. Dealers can be informed about their customers before the first point of interaction, helping improve the overall dealership customer experience and ultimately building customer loyalty.

Not only will data-driven customer insights allow dealers to understand their existing customer base, but with the right tools, similar behavior prediction algorithms can be applied to conquest customers as well – which is a game changer from the current “spray and pray” methodology used in present day conquest marketing tactics. 

This data is actionable because predictive modeling involves combining what we know about an individual and what we know about the behavior of people who are in similar circumstances. The more we know about the general wants, needs and behavior of the aggregate group, the better we’re able to predict what the individual is likely to do next in their buyer journey and what messaging they’re likely to respond to.

How Dealerships Can Use Predictive Data

Predictive modeling takes the guesswork out of car sales prospecting and marketing by identifying the information that matters about potential customers and analyzing it to determine what’s most likely to change consumer behavior at that particular point in the sales cycle. Those customer insights can then be put into useful context that empowers a dealer’s marketing efforts and sales team to confidently reach out to targeted potential buyers.

For car dealerships, predictive analytics will help the sales team close deals and promote proactive maintenance in the service department. Data analytics can help in optimizing deals against the competition and even provide insights into ways that will help speed up the sales process. Sophisticated data analytics algorithms will find the most profitable opportunities based on critical customer details, analyze it, and then provide deals that prospects are most likely to accept, at the least cost to the dealer. Sales teams can even engineer deals based on the unique needs of an individual customer.

 The Future of Predictive Analytics for Car Dealers

Among other strengths, the auto industry has done a great job in attracting new customers with traditional marketing strategies such as television, radio, and print media. However, these advertising mediums are quickly losing their effectiveness as audience sizes steadily decline. Predictive analytics is perfectly suited to help the auto industry overcome these marketing challenges. By tapping into the power of big data, predictive analytics applications can accurately identify persons most likely to purchase a vehicle in the near future. Complex algorithms consider factors such as time since last purchase, number of repairs on current vehicle, current mileage, and information pulled from social media to identify likely buyers. 

While some dealers are inherently skeptical about any new technology that promises to change their business, predictive modeling is different – and even more important is the datasets that go into them. Sales has always been based on an instinctive form of predictive modeling that salespeople engage in through personal experience: Knowing what you do about the prospect, how do you think they’ll respond to this tactic or that offer? What’s the most likely thing you can do to get them to make a decision?

There’s a key reason why a predictive modeling sales platform is such a powerful tool for auto dealers: Rather than metaphorically tearing out the showroom floor and starting from scratch, predictive modeling is the next evolutionary stage of sales best practices that dealers have been developing for more than a century. It removes inefficiencies and automates costly and wasteful processes. Rather than replacing salespeople, it empowers them, giving them not just more information, but better information, along with suggestions on how to use it most effectively as part of their sales process to sell more cars every month.

Auto dealerships should have a predictive analytics platform in place that is focused on harnessing data and gaining insights for your sales team to help your dealership sell more cars.  Market EyeQ by Mastermind is the first sales platform that gives your dealership the power to target and communicate with every potential buyer in your market from one tool. With the right technology and resources, your dealership can thrive this holiday season and beyond. If you need help, contact us to set up a Market EyeQ demo. 

Direct mail, email, digital, mobile… what’s a dealer to do? The rise of dealership internet marketing has created a changing environment in which many dealers wonder what the “best” marketing method is for them to engage with prospects. 

In reality, there isn’t one marketing channel that’s better than all the others in all circumstances and for all prospects. The answer to dealers’ questions is not in picking a favorite marketing tactic and doubling down on it. Rather, the most important aspect of an effective dealership marketing strategy is to have a personalized omni-channel marketing strategy in place at the right time to deliver the right message to the right prospect – whatever those might be.

In this column, Mastermind shares dealership marketing best practices and tips for finding the right marketing channels, including: 

• - It all starts with predictive marketing capabilities

• - The importance of a multichannel marketing strategy

• - How to enrich your customer’s experience via personalized marketing

How to Use Predictive Analytics to Create a Multichannel, Consumer-Based Marketing Strategy

While the rise of new marketing channels such as email and digital tend to grab the most attention when dealers look at the changing marketing landscape, the real revolution has happened behind the scenes. That’s where the data and analytics revolution took place that changed what dealers know about consumers and how they can identify the best prospects in ways they never could before.

This is why Mastermind developed Market EyeQ’s predictive marketing capabilities, connecting automotive data and predictive customer analytics directly to personalized marketing campaigns. Market EyeQ’s direct mail campaigns contain actionable offers personalized for each consumer’s situation, but pre-approved from the dealership.

Best of all, predictive marketing means not having to sacrifice lead quality to keep costs down. The process of automated lead identification of the most qualified car buying prospects  for your dealership means that you’re only spending to market to the highest quality leads in your market. That’s why Mastermind’s dealers report a marketing cost-per-sale of just $128, compared to the $632 industry average.

Finding the Right Marketing Channels for Every Prospect

Different people care about different things – and prefer different ways of communicating. Market EyeQ is designed to engage with potential car buyers in the most effective manner possible, matching its customer insights about each prospect to the most appropriate mix of more than 100,000 campaign variations.

Those connections can change based on where the customer is in the car-buying process. Some touch points might work better in the form of a letter, others in email, others through a slickly designed – yet personalized – brochure or other collateral. Each connection is made at the appropriate time in the customer’s journey with the most appropriate messaging to maximize the potential of the prospect showing up on the showroom floor for your sales team to close the deal.

Part of choosing the right channel at the right time is knowing what works and when, especially when it comes to direct mail vs. email. Direct mail’s response rates are still solid, averaging 4.4% in a recent Direct Marketing Association study compared to email’s 0.12%. For many consumers, there’s still value to receiving something in the mail that digital channels can’t replace. This is why more than 40% of people still at least scan every piece of mail they receive.

However, that’s not to say that digital tools like email don’t matter. The low cost of sending each message means that while email’s response rate is much lower, its ROI is significantly higher – averaging $28.50 versus $7 for direct mail. But at the volumes at which dealers are working, it can be challenging to drive sufficient response with email to reach those industry-wide ROI figures. To put that into perspective, a 0.12% response rate means emailing more than 80,000 prospects to average one response.

As a result, Market EyeQ’s analytics-driven campaign personalization often begins with direct mail’s much higher response rates and then moves to the immediacy – and low cost – of email once the original connection has been made and the prospect is much more likely to engage with the dealership’s messages. It’s this mix of traditional and digital marketing tools, driven by personalized insights into each prospect, that makes predictive marketing a powerful tool for automotive dealerships.

The Importance of Customer Relationship in Marketing

The first interaction a customer has with your dealership might be with your marketing messaging. Regardless of what marketing channel that connection is made through, it will set a precedent for their overall customer experience with you. 

This is one of the many benefits of predictive marketing, as dealerships that pride themselves on personalized service can set that tone at the very first touch by communicating with an offer relevant to them, through a channel and in a manner that demonstrates your understanding of the customer and their unique needs.

The evidence is clear that today’s customers value – and increasingly expect – a personalized dealership customer experience. They reward dealers who provide that experience with profitable loyalty and punish those who don’t by purchasing from a competitor who will give them what they want. When you’re developing your dealership’s marketing strategy, are you starting off your relationship with potential customers in a way that grows that personalized experience, or are you putting yourself at a disadvantage from the start? 

If your dealership’s marketing strategy is focused too much on identifying the best marketing channel and not enough on understanding what your prospects want and need from you, it’s time for a change. Contact us for a free consultation on how to make all your channels more efficient and effective through predictive marketing.