When it comes to automobile marketing and sales, there is certainly not a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Car shoppers are unique in their budgets and vehicle needs. It’s important that dealers understand the uniqueness of each car buying prospect and are equipped with offer details to effectively meet your prospects’ demands and move your unsold car inventory.

Dealerships that take a data-driven approach to prospecting have the best chance of intelligently targeting qualified leads, as well as creating attractive offers that will engage prospective buyers and retain previous buyers. In this blog, Mastermind shares four automotive data types to help your dealership sell more cars such as:

1. Demographic and behavioral data to personalize your offering

2. Cost of ownership data for transparency and rapport building

3. Vehicle history data to maintain a top-notch used car lot

4. Historic customer data to predict future car buying behaviors 

Personalize Auto Marketing with Demographic and Behavioral Data

To maximize your dealership’s ROI on your marketing dollars, knowing your audience and their buying behavior is essential. Referencing automotive market data is always a safer and more reliable approach than making an uneducated guess when defining your audience. Monitoring your social media feeds and engagement is another great place to gain insight on car shopper demographics and behavior. Your dealership can analyze what type of content or offers are most attractive to your social media followers, or which demographics your offers tends to resonate with the most. This insight in turn helps your dealership identify consumer trends to best target your marketing campaigns.

Build Rapport with Cost of Ownership Data

As you know, a car is the second largest purchase a consumer will make. Not just because the base price of a car can be very costly, especially for first-time car buyers, but many additional expenses surface throughout the cost of ownership. Access to data that will better inform vehicle shoppers of what to expect throughout their years of ownership will help you better communicate to your customer what exactly they are getting into. Transparency is the key to customer retention and it helps to build rapport with customers, as well. Additionally, your dealership marketing team can utilize this data to target certain car buyer personas who wish to stay under a certain budget when purchasing a vehicle. 

Better Manage Used Car Inventory with Vehicle History Data

For many dealerships, their used vehicle inventory and fixed ops department is the bread and butter of their business, as the profit margins tend to be way higher than new vehicles. If you are in the business of selling used vehicles, or servicing vehicles (new or used), it’s essential that your dealership can access existing customers’ and prospects’ vehicle history data. Vehicle history reports will help your dealership maintain a high-quality used inventory and will give your prospects peace of mind when purchasing pre-owned. Although providing this data for leads is not free for the dealership, it’s worth offering complimentary vehicle history reports to high-intent shoppers. Carfax is an example of a vehicle history reporting service that, when coupled with a behavior prediction tool, helps your dealership manage leads more efficiently.

Be Forward-Thinking with Historic Customer Data

What better way to predict the future then look to the past? When looking to predict future automotive trends, historic customer data is the best resource to determine your dealership’s business strategy going forward. It can also help decide where to best spend your marketing dollars, as you can get in front of your customers before they decide to potentially look elsewhere. For the most part, you know your lease customers should be spoken to X amount of months out from their lead-end date, but that doesn’t mean you are doing that – a customer data platform such as  Market EyeQ by Mastermind will help you to catch a customer’s attention before they begin shopping around for a new car. It’s not always about price, either - in many cases – customers react just as positively when the offer includes a monthly payment increase.

There’s no need to guess who your audience is or wait for customers to return to your dealership with such a wide variety of automotive data solutions available to you such as Market EyeQ. A data-driven approach is the best way to stay ahead of a flattening market. Ensure your dealership has looked into all of these dataset options to drive as many actionable leads as possible that will ultimately result in more revenue for your business. 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.

As we approach the end of the year, holiday car sales are upon us, with Black Friday and Christmas being the tentpoles of many dealerships’ end-of-year sales strategies. With so many dealers competing to land price-conscious car buyers , how can your dealership leverage the holidays to finish the year strong?

In this blog, Mastermind shares 3 ways dealerships can maximize their holiday sales and sell more cars:

• - Get a head start on identifying and targeting the best prospects for your holiday sales offers 
• - Use your service drive as a conquest and upsell tool
• - Tweak your holiday sales standard practices for today’s customer

Get a Head Start on Holiday Dealership Deals 

Getting a head start on your holiday dealership marketing is key to staying ahead of the competition. Don’t wait until Black Friday – the right time to begin your holiday auto sales process is as soon as you know what offers will be on the table. That’s when you should turn your analytics tools loose on your potential customer base to identify and rank the prospects who will be most likely to buy the vehicles you’re selling.

It’s an especially powerful time to use Market EyeQ’s automotive equity mining tools and capabilities to identify existing customers who have positive equity in their vehicle and could profitably be traded into a new car during the sale. These deals offer big payoffs for dealers in addition to the new car sale by frequently triggering service, F&I, used car sales and other revenues, especially if the trade-in qualifies for factory certified pre-owned status. Market EyeQ factors in household demographic data from IHS Markit, consumer financial information from TransUnion and vehicle-specific insights from Carfax to highlight the customers who will be most likely to jump at the opportunity to trade in and trade up.

Once you have your prospects identified and ranked by likelihood of purchase during the sale with their individualized Behavior Prediction Score™, the next step is to engage them with effective and personalized marketing communications designed to maximize their likelihood of connecting to your dealership and entering the process of buying a car

This is where the science of data meets the art of automotive sales, and it’s never more important than during a crowded holiday sales season. Predictive dealership marketing is much more than printing someone’s name on the mailer. Rather, it’s an integrated and data-driven process of delivering the right message, in the right format, at the right time, to the right person. 

Once you have the prospect in the showroom, make sure your sales and F&I team are armed with data-driven customer insights, including deal parameters and personalized talk tracks, to help close the deal. 

Service Drive Shines During Holiday Sales

We’ve written more than once about best practices for turning service drive customers into sales prospects, and holiday sales are a great time to lean heavily on vehicle service conquest and relationship marketing to generate prospects and fill the sales pipeline one last time before the year is done.

In the run-up to holiday sales, make a special effort to get customers in the door with vehicle winterization offers and other service specials. Service is a local business with most people getting their vehicle serviced within a 10-mile radius of their home. Consider supporting a hyper-local charity such as a neighborhood senior center or school program in connection to service visits, emphasizing both your community support, as well as your proximity to potential service customers and the convenience your dealership offer as a result.

The run-up to the holidays is a good time to look at the communication structure between your service and sales teams. Do you have people whose responsibility it is to ensure that the handoff between service and sales is seamless from the customer’s perspective? Are your service personnel incentivized to help unearth sales prospects, and does turning a large-ticket service customer into a sales prospect penalize your service department’s numbers, creating a disincentive for them to make that handoff to sales? Dealerships who have those questions answered, using data-driven processes and tools such as Service Conquest feature are the best at converting service customers into new car sales.

Switch Up Your Dealership’s Holiday Sales Tactics 

Your customers don’t want to be stuck at the dealership for hours, working through paperwork while the season’s hot gifts and best deals fly off the shelves at toy stores and other retailers. Today’s popular video games are often available to be downloaded ahead of their launch date to avoid long download queues, you too can invite your prospects to “Pre-Load Black Friday” by handling F&I and other paperwork remotely ahead of time, minimizing the time they will spend in the dealership that day. Make sure you’re doing everything possible to get them in, out and on their way in their new car as quickly as possible, and make sure they know it.

With affordability being such a huge concern for consumers and contract lengths extending further into the future than ever before, it’s a rare customer who can pull off the traditional “red bow in the driveway.” This creates not only challenges but also opportunities for creative dealers to find ways to work with customers who want to surprise their significant other with a new car – but need their signature on the F&I paperwork to make it happen. Big red bow aside, consider the other ways you can help the gift-giver create that special moment they’ve seen in advertisements for years. 

The tightening auto sales market hasn’t made 2019 a year of good cheer for many dealers. But by combining cutting-edge data analytics with sales and marketing best practices (and a bit of creativity), dealers can close more deals and ring in the new year on a high note. If you’re not confident in your dealership’s ability to turn holiday sales into strong sales numbers, contact us to set up a demo.  

With car sales down this year, dealers are always looking for an edge in organic lead generation. Challenges facing dealerships often present great opportunities, and auto manufacturers as well as dealers alike are starting to recognize this. David Kelleher, for example, of the David Auto Group in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania saw a 37% increase in profits last year despite a declining market. “I spent less money and sold more cars than I have in 25 years.”  What’s his secret sauce to improve his dealership sales? Digital video. Over 75% of auto shoppers say that online video has influenced their shopping habits or purchases.1 Video use may seem foreign to many dealers, as auto marketers traditionally have relied on mediums such as television and print, but as Kelleher and others are uncovering, video hosted on platforms such as YouTube engages consumers throughout the car purchase customer journey, multiplies reach and cuts the cost. In this blog, we dive deeper into how this emerging dealership marketing channel is turning a historically “traditional” industry upside down by:

• - Increasing brand awareness by exposing vehicle models to consumers they may not have previously considered

• - Allowing consumers to pick and choose relevant marketing content to them

• - Using visuals to get customers in your dealership’s door 

Video Drives Brand Awareness

If you’re in the market for a new car, one of the first things you’ll likely do is carry out your own internet-based research. Increasingly, car buyers are relying on video to help them in the car-buying decision process. For savvy auto marketers, this is the perfect time to connect with people who are already thinking about making a purchase — even if they haven’t yet heard of or considered your product. The automotive industry takes pride in the fact that their products have more visual appeal than most other markets, and seeing that product on a medium consumers spend the most time on can be very effective. In fact, according to a recent study on the automotive consumer journey, over 40% of shoppers who used online video for research said that it helped them discover a vehicle they weren’t previously aware of or considering.1  Whether it’s viewing a video on your website, YouTube channel or even via social media, the first step the buyer wants to take is to see the vehicle in action and mentally put themselves in the driver’s seat.

Video Allows Shoppers to Compare Options

In addition to aiding discovery, YouTube is also becoming more assistive as people research vehicles. Over half of auto shoppers who turned to online video while researching said it helped them learn more about vehicles they were considering and 40% said they used it to narrow down their consideration set. That makes sense; after all, the sight, motion and sound of video lets shoppers experience a product in a way that few other mediums allow. And YouTube, with its breadth of content — everything from professional comparison videos to user-generated reviews — enables shoppers to research and experience vehicles in new, more immersive ways. Customers want to actually see someone test drive a car and hear their opinions. As opposed to television, digital video commands the viewers' attention in ways TV cannot. TV ads are unwarranted, and with many streaming services, can be easily avoided. Digital ads are targeted and placed in a destination where the user had intent to navigate to. When it comes to digital video, the consumer not only opts to view the video, it allows a user to click through to the website and move further along in their car buying journey through the sales funnel.

Video Gets Car Buyers to the Dealership 

Video doesn’t just facilitate discovery and exploration; it also encourages people to take action. One of the huge advantages to video over print or static image ads is the visualization aspect. Consumers can see themselves in the vehicle, which provokes the consumer to physically check out the car in person. Of the auto shoppers who used video during the research process, over 60% reported visiting a dealership or dealer website after watching a video of a vehicle they were considering. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles saw something similar when it turned to digital video to promote their annual Jeep Celebration sales event. In collaboration with one of it’s certified providers, UnityWorks, and 300 of its Jeep dealers, FCA measured foot traffic to determine the offline impact it’s online video campaign drove. The results were impressive. The brand established that the video campaign drew more than 50,000 visitors to it’s Jeep dealerships in just a six-week period.

 As the auto industry continues to face adversity through declining sales, how brands and dealers invest their marketing dollars matters more than ever. Word of mouth remains one of the largest factors for a consumer to decide which dealership to make a purchase from. In house at Mastermind, our dealer partner testimonial videos are a large part of our B2B marketing outreach. 

Interested in learning more about how Mastermind’s solutions can help turn your dealership’s challenges into opportunities? Contact us today for a free consultation.

1 (Stewart, 2018)

A customer walking into a showroom is often the first step in the car buyer journey. Next, is getting them to come back for regular vehicle service and maintenance. The ultimate goal? The customer returning for their next car purchase, and repeatedly for years to come. As a dealer, you want to exercise customer experience best practices in order to maximize sales opportunities and maintain relationships year-over-year. In this blog, Mastermind shares three ways to maintain relationships with customers and extend your dealership’s sales lifecycle:

1. - Make every in-person dealership experience positive and memorable
2. - Offer exclusive dealership rewards and loyalty programs
   - Utilize digital campaigns

Make Every In-Person Dealership Experience Positive and Memorable

It comes as no surprise that how your dealership’s team engages with customers has a major impact on customer loyalty and retention. Recent studies show that the dealership sales experience is the top influencer of post-purchase brand loyalty, followed by maintenance and service. Customers take notice of the small details, especially when a dealership personalizes the customer’s buying experience. For example, providing a waiting room space that maximizes your customers time with free WiFi and charging stations is helpful for people who had to take time off work for their car repair. A clean and organized office environment can also make a big difference to a customer. The dealership should be presentable, and each staff member should be focused on helping visitors find answers to questions. Put simply, a positive customer experience makes a buyer want to form a relationship with the dealership.

Offer Exclusive Dealership Rewards and Loyalty Programs

To build a loyal customer base, your dealership needs to offer exclusive benefits and unrivaled customer service. Even for loyal auto buyers, price is the number one buying motive, which may lead them to another dealership. Some dealerships have started offering dealer loyalty programs with rebates or special service offers to increase customer retention. Other unique options include digital campaigns through search and apps like Waze to reach customers when they are on the road, searching for service or maintenance services. 

Another dealer loyalty program tactic is to offer a rewards program for their customers, which may include:

- Discounted pricing for immediate family
- Free oil changes for life
- Special offers for referrals 
- Incentives for trade-in

Dealers need to focus on coming up with unique packages for their customers. Delivering exceptional value will keep your clientbase thriving over time and set you apart from competitors where price will always be the biggest decision-making-factor.

Utilize Digital Campaigns

Personalized digital marketing campaigns keep customer informed on deals and savings directly related to them. A monthly newsletter provides subscribers with useful and informative content like car maintenance tips, dealership events and auto industry news. A comprehensive sales platform, such as Market EyeQ by automotiveMastermind can generate personal messaging for every customer using existing customer data from your DMS and service drive. This sales platform uses social media interactions, vehicle history, real-time OEM and dealer data, and other relevant data points to deliver meaningful and personalized communications. This leads to higher conversion rates and a stronger ROI – all while being 100% brand compliant.   

Selling cars is the single biggest challenge of any car dealership, but by effectively focusing on the dealership customer experience by offering exclusive benefits and incentives and implementing targeted digital campaigns, you can increase your dealership’s car sales and improve customer relationships. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how your dealership can retain sales and enhance its customer loyalty, contact us today.  

Smart phone users in the United States send 764 text messages and place 164 phone calls per month. Without a doubt, younger generation users skew that data, but even users aged between 55 to 64 text on average 80 times per month and users 65+ text on average 32 times per month1. Given this shift in text messaging becoming a primary form of prospect contact, dealers must adapt to effectively reach out to consumers the way they want to be reached out to.

From a car sales prospecting standpoint, the automotive industry tends to be more traditional and in turn, tends to perform more telephone outreach than most other sales industries. In this blog, Mastermind covers:

- Why car sales text messaging is favorable over phone calls to auto dealers and prospects alike  
- How automotive dealerships can build a strong text message marketing strategy
- How dealers can increase customer loyalty through text rather than phone calls
- How dealers can avoid hefty privacy law fines by getting consumer consent

The Automotive Cold Phone Call: The Dinosaur

Even dating back to the early 2000’s, calling and leaving voicemails were the easiest and fastest way to reach a prospect’s ear. Texting was only for more personal relationships, and the response time was nowhere near as quick as it is today, prolonging the already dreadful prospecting process. With today’s abundance of robocalls and local area phone number masking, prospects have learned to ignore calls from unfamiliar numbers and are less likely to check voicemails from those numbers, leaving auto salespeople in a state of limbo.

Now for dealerships, SMS marketing programs allow for faster response times from smartphone users as dealerships generally have a high number of mobile numbers in their CRM database already due to the increasing amount of homes getting rid of outdated landlines. Studies show texts are replied to, on average, within four minutes. The expectation for a return call to a voicemail is the same day, and the expectation for an email is 24 hours. This is crucial to the sales cycle turnaround time when a dealership is tasked with moving a certain amount of metal off of the lot before end of month. 

Dealership Text Messaging Marketing Strategies 

With an SMS marketing strategy, automotive dealers can build a strong database of subscribers and increase customer loyalty. Even with a strong marketing program in place, SMS could complement, if not propel, that marketing program forward. The first step to executing a successful text messaging marketing strategy is to simply use your mobile contact database from your CRM as a communication tool. Reach out to existing customers who may be approaching their lease-end dates and you will likely get a higher response rate than trying to cold call them.

Another approach is to use SMS marketing to increase the response rate of your email campaigns through targeted SMS. The average open rate of text messages is 98%, which is 78% higher than email marketing messages2. Using SMS to engage your audience through discounts, promo codes, etc. can help each facet of your marketing work off one another. Lastly, using lead nurturing technology can help import your contacts from Facebook or Google ads into your CRM. Given how powerful the response rate is for SMS marketing, when combined with other marketing technologies such as predictive marketing campaigns offered by Market EyeQ, dealers could maximize outreach to sell more cars.

SMS Marketing Regulations

With great power comes great responsibility. Considering how personalized a text message can become, there comes certain rules companies must abide by to follow privacy laws. TCPA regulations are aimed at restricting unsolicited phone calls and text messages which means consumers must opt-in to receive communication from your dealership. In order to avoid harsh fines, a dealership can take certain precautions when developing an SMS strategy:

- Attain written consent at the time of the vehicle sale

- Attain written consent at the point of service or when a customer brings in a car for repair

- Obtain prior express written consent on website forms and recorded chats. Whenever you capture phone numbers in lead forms or in person, make it part of the dealership process to attain the customer’s written consent to be contacted via text messages

- Make sure to honor opt-outs: Offer “text STOP to end” in messages sent and make sure your texting vendor immediately blocks unsubscribed numbers from all future text messages.

The global increase in mobile devices has expanded the huge potential of text message marketing for car dealerships. Every auto dealer can take advantage of the benefits associated with having an SMS strategy. There is one constant in this day and age– people will always have their phones by their side. If you can get them to opt-in to lead nurturing, they will never miss a message from you. The SMS strategy discussed in this article can be used to increase customer loyalty, increase leads, and generate revenue in conjunction with your dealership’s existing marketing programs to help your dealership sell more cars

Interested in learning about how to improve your dealership’s marketing? Contact us to set up a demo today.

Historically, relationships with customers began when they walked through your showroom doors. Today, thanks to the Internet, sophisticated marketing campaigns and increased consumer research practices, the customer experience journey begins long before they ever set foot in your dealership. How can dealers design and structure their operations to ensure they’re making the right first impressions? In this blog, Mastermind covers:

- How to use personalized, data-driven marketing to set high expectations for a customer’s   relationship and experience with your dealership

- How a data-backed automotive sales platform can drive exceptional customer experience

- How to convert prospects into customers with a personalized marketing

- How to integrate data-based personalization into all aspects of your dealership’s interactions with prospects and customers

Predictive Marketing Establishes Great CX from the Start

Simply put, predictive marketing delivers the right message, to the right prospects, at the right time through the channels that are most likely to get their attention. This data-driven process includes the production of personalized offers and marketing materials designed to engage customers or prospects and drive them through the sales funnel to purchase. 

Modern consumers are taught to expect this level of personalization in so many other facets of their lives and have come to view personalized marketing as a benefit they value from a company. By communicating with messaging that is relevant to their unique needs, you can show prospects they matter to you, establishing a great starting point for the dealership customer experience. 

If you’re concerned about your dealership team’s ability to execute an effective personalized marketing campaign, don’t worry. Mastermind’s dealership veteran support team can work with you every month to ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing dollars.

Data Drives Personalized CX

Of course, you can’t deliver on personalized marketing, or any other component of CX best practices, without good data. Where does this data come from? Some of it is yours, from your existing DMS and other legacy tools. Some of it is public information, including things like social media and other nonproprietary data points. 

What makes a real difference in the effectiveness of your analysis and the CX on which it depends is the inclusion of information from critical proprietary databases. At Mastermind, our proprietary automotive marketing data partners include IHS Markit, TransUnion and the CarFax Snapshot Tool, ensuring our dealers have access to extensive customer insights such as household demographic data, personal finance information and social media interactions to deliver the most relevant and profitable offers possible.

With so much available data in today’s increasingly digital world, it’s nearly impossible for dealers to “know their customer” the old-fashioned way. You need the right tools and training to put data at the heart of your dealership’s interactions with your customers.

Effective sales people rely on traditional sales skills and on digital sales platforms to deliver all the information and insight they need about a prospect. A dealer sales platform also ensures your customers that your dealership understands them as an individual and wants them to be satisfied through every step of the car buying journey. 

Turn Automotive Prospects into Customers 

These days, the sales process often starts while the customer’s at home, engaging with your website or social media. This is a critical point in the car buying journey and is a good reason for dealers to consider an integrated business development center (BDC) to manage those communications to ensure they’re personalized and data-driven.  A BDC is a powerful marketing tool to convert leads into sales, a great asset to your dealership’s marketing efforts. BDC is a powerful tool. It also plays a key role in setting CX expectations when it’s a prospect’s first point of contact and delivering on them from the first interaction they have with your sales team. 

Once a prospect walks through the door, your sales and F&I teams need to be armed with actionable and reliable information, too. These customer insights should include not only relevant facts and figures, but also suggested deal parameters, highlighted areas of concern and a selection of personalized messaging that’s likely to play the most effective role in closing a good deal with a happy customer. 

This isn’t a simple change, and even the best sales team can use help incorporating customer data and CX best practices into their car sales techniques. That’s why Mastermind offers not only introductory car sales training for new salespeople, but also ongoing refreshers for veteran sales team members, at no additional cost.

Car Dealership Customer Service Extends Beyond the Sale

Your customer’s experience doesn’t stop with the sale and neither should your data-powered CX interactions. Customer relationship management, including service loyalty, keeps customers satisfied in their experience with you all the way through to the end of the sales cycle and the start of the next.

The end of one sales cycle and the start of another is a place where a modern, data-driven sales platform such as Mastermind’s Market EyeQ pays dividends. By integrating your existing customer insights with equity mining tools that proactively identify when an existing customer has become a valuable prospect for a lease-end or turn-in deal, you can drive a variety of potential revenues from factors such as new and used car sales, lease initiation, upsells and initiation fees.

Additionally, service departments and other fixed operations are fertile ground for data-driven conquest, with some estimates finding that turning a service-only customer into a new vehicle sale is five times cheaper in terms of cost of acquisition than other methods. Mastermind’s Service Conquest tool automates the drudgery of the service conquest process, empowers our dealer partners to convert service customers into new car sales. 

When your CX is effective, happy customers speed up the sales process, lower your cost of acquisition and make a measurable difference in your bottom line. Learn how automotiveMastermind can help you improve your dealership’s customer experience from the first touch to the last. Schedule a consultation today.

As game-changing as the Internet has been for dealers, the best way to sell more cars at a dealership continues to be getting more customers in the door and onto the showroom floor. In this article, automotiveMastermind covers four ways to increase customer traffic at your dealership:

- Have the vehicles they want and make them easy to find 

- Target prospects who have never stepped foot in your dealership

- Use personalized marketing messages to contact prospects in the most effective manner

- Provide a great customer experience to help encourage dealership loyalty

Have the vehicles customers want and make them easy to find

It may seem simplistic to say that the best way to increase car sales is to have the cars on hand that people want to buy, but it’s surprising how many dealerships aren’t successful at this. It’s critical to have a varied inventory, because today’s Internet-enabled shopper is going to be able to find a dealership that has the trim package they want on their lot and you’ll have lost the chance at a sale.

This, of course, also gives you the opportunity to be that dealership. One of the lowest-effort conquesting options you have to get someone onto your lot is simply to make sure as much of your inventory as possible is listed on the third-party sites where people browse for cars in their area. This is especially useful when it’s integrated into the responsibilities of a well-run Business Development Center team that is focused on connecting with Internet leads and turning them into sales appointments that get those new customers in the door and engaged with the sales team.

Target prospects who have never stepped foot in your dealership

It’s simple math, in a way: If you want to increase customer traffic through your doors and sell more cars at a dealership, one of the best ways to do so is to bring in new customers who haven’t been there before. Loyalty is critical (we’ll get to that in a moment), but growing the business requires identifying new dealership leads and converting them into hot prospects who are standing next to the car, talking to a salesperson.

For almost a century, dealers largely did this through advertising and direct mail. Dealers used “spray and pray” marketing and advertising messages to broad consumer demographics in their markets that they believed were the most fertile ground for the cars they were trying to move. 

Today, through data and analytics-based marketing, dealers can move from marketing to demographic groups to personalized marketing. This involves using a combination of proprietary and publicly-available databases to identify and score potential prospects as dealership leads, using a system that constantly learns from your real-world results to improve its ability to pick out the best prospects in your market and develop an individualized marketing campaign to get them in the door.

This leads us to:

Use personalized dealership marketing messaging to contact prospects in the most effective manner

Personalized marketing means contacting the right person, with the right message, at the right time and in the right format.

Once your predictive marketing tools have identified the prospects in your market who are the highest-quality dealership leads, the focus turns to using what you know about those prospects to get them in the door. It starts with putting together the right offer components, with the right vehicle and terms to fit their situation, based on data from a variety of sources. It involves not only using the right channel – direct mail, digital or otherwise – but also a cadence of touchpoints and connections that is appropriate for where they’re showing themselves to be in the sales cycle and that changes with their interactions – or inaction.

When you connect to the most qualified prospects with messaging that is relevant to their unique needs and circumstances, the results are higher response rates, increased customer traffic to your dealership and ultimately increased sales at a much higher ROI.

In today’s marketplace, consumers don’t view personalized marketing as an intrusion when it’s making them an excellent offer on a product they truly want. Great personalized marketing is a solid foundation for the broader customer experience they’ll have with your dealership, and the start of a relationship that can pay dividends for years to come.

Provide a great dealership customer experience to help word of mouth and encourage loyalty

Today’s consumers have been trained by analytics-driven companies like Amazon and Netflix to expect you to know just as much about what they want and need – and maybe even more – than they do. Ironically, the transformation of the American business landscape by data and artificial intelligence has increased consumers’ expectations that they will receive personalized, human service from the companies with whom they’re doing business. And when that business involves the largest purchase they’re likely to make that year (or more), they are holding dealers to a customer experience standard that many traditionally-successful dealers are failing to meet.

Dealers have long understood that their customers care about the totality of their experience. That’s why they’ve invested in everything from free coffee in the service waiting area to major showroom upgrades. But in today’s economy, truly impactful customer experience – often abbreviated “CX” – goes beyond having a baby changing area or service satisfaction follow-up call.

The kind of dealership CX that makes a true difference in building loyalty, increasing your word of mouth and improving your bottom line requires you to arm your team with meaningful information and insights about the customers with whom they are interacting. Your customers consider themselves to have a relationship with your dealership as a single entity, and expect the dealership to return the compliment by treating them as a valued customer in every department, even when they’re interacting with a new team after only ever having been a sales or service customer in the past. In most dealerships, it’s the gaps and handoffs between departments that cause the greatest CX frustrations that degrade loyalty and can ruin a multi-year relationship in moments.

Can your dealership use some help in getting more customer traffic through the showroom door? Contact us today to learn how a data-backed automotive sales platform can help identify and convert the best prospects in your market.

With the rise of the Internet, many dealerships have launched Business Development Centers, or BDCs, and charged those teams with the mission of converting online leads and other inbound sales opportunities into sales – with varying levels of success. Dealers looking to launch a BDC or get more out of their existing operation should consider whether they have the tools and team in place to effectively integrate the BDC into their dealership’s customer experience strategy. Here, dealers will learn:

- How to convert leads into sales with BDC representatives and targeted messaging

- How to track metrics that focus on performance

- How to staff and manage an effective BDC

Just as with every other connection a dealership has with potential or current customers, a BDC’s long-term value depends on its ability to contribute to a comprehensive customer experience (CX) strategy. Over time, excellent CX builds loyalty, increases return business and decreases the dealership’s cost to make a sale.

BDCs Can Help Convert Leads by Setting the Tone for the CX

As potentially the first interaction between a prospective customer and a human being at a dealership, a BDC representative can play an outsized role in setting the tone for a customer’s experience. To maximize effectiveness, BDC management must focus on providing their BDC staff with access to as much information and insight as possible about their prospects. Managers also must ensure the customer’s interaction with the BDC is a seamless component of overall customer experience by making it an integrated – and not isolated – part of the larger dealership team.

Tracking BDC Effectiveness

Some BDC teams are new, while others are updated models of traditional customer service center functions. In either case, they need to be managed against metrics that track not just immediate sales-related figures such as sales appointments scheduled, but also relationship-building concepts such as whether the prospect continues to interact with the dealership in some way even if they’re not ready for a sales appointment, or if they are able to successfully answer a customer’s question in a way that leads to continued shopping.

While BDC staffing models vary, the primary role of the most common model is to deliver qualified prospects to the sales team for closing, rather than close the sale themselves. This is why many dealers look to include customer service veterans in addition to – or even in lieu of – traditional sales professionals. If service-oriented staff are provided with meaningful data-based information and insights about customers and prospects, they can return powerful results in customer experience and relationship building. This is especially true for loyalty and retention clients who are still early in the sales cycle and not quality candidates for a sales appointment in the near term, but who still benefit from a personalized connection to the dealership through the BDC team. Over time, those customers will become hotter prospects ready for their next showroom visit.

A core concept of effective dealer customer experience is the importance of interacting with the right customers, in the right way, at the right time and with the right message. Managing BDC teams primarily to a metric that is appropriate just for customers at one stage in their relationship with the dealer – sales appointments scheduled – incentivizes them to either deprioritize customers at different points in that relationship building or to try to force customers into a stage for which they’re not ready. Either response to that management pressure ends up limiting the very outcome you’re hoping your BDC will accomplish: Moving prospects from the early fact finding stage to an informed decision, where you get them on the showroom floor.

How to Select Effective BDC Managers

When selecting BDC managers, dealers need to ensure they’re identifying people who are able to balance the necessary concern for metrics with a broader dedication to customer experience and customer relationship management. While there’s value in having someone with experience in sales managing a BDC on a day-to-day basis, the CX focus of the role suggest considering candidates with a diversity of backgrounds and experience with managing in non-sales environments.

When they’re structured, staffed and managed appropriately, BDCs can be useful accelerators of the prospect’s decision process and helpful contributors to the customer’s satisfaction with their overall experience. Those engaged and happy customers show up in a dealership’s bottom line. Dealers need to make sure that they’re staffing their BDCs with the right team, arming them with the right information and insight about prospects and then managing them to metrics that measure their success in building a relationship with their customers, not just getting them on a showroom’s calendar.

Learn how automotiveMastermind can help your BDC team effectively communicate with prospects. Schedule a consultation today.

When the topic of “artificial intelligence in the automotive industry” comes up, most people probably have visions of autonomous vehicles humming through city streets, picking up and dropping off riders and cargo with no driver at the wheel. But while that vision still may be accurate in the future, there are plenty of other ways in which AI has been revolutionizing the auto industry for years, with more to come. In this blog post, automotiveMastermind discusses:

- How AI is used in the auto industry beyond bringing autonomous vehicles to the roads

- Why dealers integrating AI see real results

- How the utilization of AI in targeted marketing campaigns helps close more deals

Automakers and Suppliers Embrace AI Early

Auto manufacturers and larger suppliers embraced AI relatively early in its commercial availability, recognizing its potential in processes that involved data mining, pattern recognition, problem solving, extrapolation and other functions at which AI excels. AI systems were quickly proving their worth in such areas as supply chain optimization, demand prediction and production planning, preventive maintenance management, consumer research and segmentation, warranty program oversight, manufacturing quality control and more.

On manufacturing shop floors, the rise of AI-enabled industrial robots and adaptive manufacturing is revolutionizing the process of making vehicles, especially when combined with machine learning-based quality control systems that use neural networks to constantly improve their ability to identify defects.

AI Integration in Dealerships

But while OEMs and their supply chains have been transforming key functions through AI for some time, it’s only recently that dealers are following suit. And as with virtually every other industry and within other automotive segments, dealers who are ahead of the curve in AI integration are seeing real bottom-line results that deliver a meaningful advantage over their competitors.

To understand what this looks like, consider a standard new customer lifecycle and how AI revolutionizes it.

It starts long before a customer ever walks in the door, when data mining tools dig into public and proprietary data sets about all the potential customers in a given marketplace – not just those who fit a traditional demographic – and use a scoring system to identify the best prospects and the appropriate products for them.

Instead of advertising and direct mail based on broad demographics, AI-powered dealer marketing campaigns are highly individualized and targeted, personalized to appeal to the specific factors that were pulled out of the data and brought that prospect to the front of the line.

There’s far more to AI-driven marketing personalization than a mail merge making sure the prospect’s name is added to the offer. Rather, these tools allow dealers to automate the delivery of the right message, to the right person, at the right time, with an offer unique to them.

Often, these systems are so effective they identify and engage potential customers who haven’t even realized they’re in the market for a new vehicle, just as the AI-powered predictive systems at Amazon or Netflix are able to present you with products or movies you didn’t know you wanted – yet.

Applications of AI in Dealers That Help to Close Deals

Once the customer is in the door, AI systems support dealer sales teams by providing them with simple and relevant digests of what those systems have learned about the customer, what the interactions have been like, what they can likely afford and what talking points will have the most impact. With access to credit report databases, the systems can even generate proposed deal structures that take a customer’s own finances into account.

Once the sale is made, dealership AI systems generate value for service departments by managing maintenance programs and integrating relationship marketing to improve customer experience (CX) and increase dealership loyalty. These tools also help turn service drives into high-powered conquest tools by applying much of the same data mining and sales potential scoring to service-only customers and arming sales teams with the tools to engage service customers with personalized offers when appropriate.

We don’t know exactly what the future of AI-powered automobiles will look like, but there’s no denying that the AI-powered auto industry – or auto dealership – is running smoother than ever before.

Interested in learning how to implement an AI-powered sales platform at your dealership? Contact us today for a consultation.

Six years ago, Mastermind attended our first National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Show in San Francisco, with a small 10x10 booth. We disrupted the industry with the introduction of behavior prediction technology to help dealers sell more cars. Our proprietary algorithm and Behavior Prediction Score® revolutionized the way that dealers communicate with their loyalty customers, ultimately increasing retention sales. Over the years, we evolved the concept of ‘equity mining’ into ‘data mining.’ Since then, many of our competitors have developed a similar likeliness-to-buy scoring system and NADA show floors annually are filled with companies claiming to do all or part of what we do. This year was no exception and we made several major announcements leading into the show, capped with receiving an award for excellent dealer satisfaction and the debut of the first-ever automotive sales platform.

Award-Winning Technology

Mastermind was founded on the principle of simplifying and improving the car buying process for both the dealer and consumer. We empower our dealer partners to have intelligent and personalized conversations with prospects utilizing our proprietary behavior prediction technology and highly-personalized marketing. As a result, this year we were recognized with a DrivingSales Dealer Satisfaction Award in the Owner Marketing category.  The award measures dealer satisfaction with vendor products and services and is based on cumulative ratings tallied and verified during the calendar year. We’re so grateful for our dealer partners and we appreciate all of your kind reviews that allowed us to win this award. 

The First-Ever Automotive Sales Platform

Fast forward to NADA six years later. As we stand on the same show floor where we debuted Mastermind to the industry six years prior, we debuted to the industry the first-ever automotive sales platform, Market EyeQ. Market EyeQ allows dealers to view their full prospective buyer market more holistically, no matter if that customer comes from your retention, service, or conquest portfolio. Backed by real-time proprietary data, Market EyeQ helps identify, communicate with, and close more customers in a dealer’s local market.

Part of what makes this sales platform so unique is Mastermind’s partnerships and relationships which grant us powerful datasets. Access to proprietary household demographic data from IHS Markit and key vehicle history details through the Carfax Snapshot tool gives dealers an exclusive 360-degree market view. Further, our partnership with TransUnion uncovers potential sales opportunities with customers who have not previously bought from a dealership. These partnerships, coupled with information from your current Dealer Management System (DMS), allow dealers a holistic view of their local market by enriching the data they have on-hand and supplying them with data for prospects unknown to them.

Why limit your focus to 10,000 loyalty customers when you can see 100,000 customers of all types in your local market, including loyalty, conquest, and service customers?

What does this mean for dealers? No more segmenting your buyer audience and managing multiple technologies to find and market to different types of prospects.

With projected sales for 2019 to dip below the 17 million mark, dealers will need to do even more to compete and grow in this flattening market. At Mastermind, we are committed to leading the charge in the industry for our visionary approach to selling cars. We have set a precedent as the company that can help dealers stay ahead of evolving sales trends.

We met with more than 150 dealers during NADA to debut and demo the industry's first-ever automotive sales platform, Market EyeQ. Did you miss out? Sign up for a demo today.