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

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

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

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

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

Using High-Quality Data

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

When it comes to auto lead generation, the adage “quantity vs. quality” is largely outdated thanks to modern dealership technology.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

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

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

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

Identifying Service Drive Opportunities

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

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

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

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

Proactive vs. Reactive BDC Strategy

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

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

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

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.

It’s challenging in the best of times for dealers to keep sales and service connected. When large portions of your auto dealership are operating virtually, it’s even more complicated – but critically important. 

When operating as a virtual car dealership, possibly with your sales staff at home and your fixed ops team on-site serving customers, how do you keep them connected, delivering consistent customer service and taking advantage of opportunities to create value together?

As auto dealership operations continue to change due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve shared numerous dealership tips and considerations, spanning from virtual dealership best practices and what your dealership’s BDC needs to be doing differently, to improving customer experience in the service drive and preparing to kickstart auto sales after the immediate disruptions end. 

Your ability to utilize these best practices inside your dealership hinges on one critical consideration: Ensuring your entire organization stays connected and your teams can support each other, wherever they may be.

In this blog post, we share how to keep the two key engines of your dealership, sales and service, connected and engaged by:

• - Working from the same information and insights

- Communicating effectively

• - Strategically managing the change process in your dealership

Common Systems, Common Experience

One critical question to ask yourself is whether your dealership’s sales and service teams are interacting with the same customer, and if so, are they on the same page? Does information and insights about the customer consistently flow back and forth between your teams and your systems, ensuring there’s a consistent customer experience no matter where they might be in the dealership? This requires you to ensure your DMS and CMS, sales platform and other dealership tools are all integrated effectively. 

We’ve talked before about how critical service drives are to the customer relationship, especially for generating auto sales prospects through building loyalty relationships or starting new ones through service-not-sold conquest. In the current virtual car dealership sales environment, it’s more important than ever that the service department’s interactions with customers be captured effectively and that you have the systems in place for your sales team to turn service interactions into high-quality sales leads.

One way many high-performing auto dealerships keep their sales and service teams connected is by dedicating a salesperson to service conquest. This salesperson’s sole role would be to use your dealership sales platform to identify and engage with high-quality service-to-sales prospects with scheduled service appointments. Now is an excellent time to consider creating that position and getting that person to work on mining what will likely be your auto dealership’s best source of sales leads for the foreseeable future.

Shoot, Move & Communicate

It’s not enough for your sales and service team members to be doing their individual jobs well. If your people are not communicating effectively with each other, your dealership’s customer service and bottom line will suffer.

The U.S. Army’s basic training manual boils down the myriad responsibilities of soldiers in combat into the deceptively simple phrase, “Shoot, move and communicate.” Whether it’s with fellow squad mates, their leadership or supporting units, military trainers hammer home the fundamental truth that communication is critical to mission success. The same is true for the teams in your dealership.

In the current environment, people have turned to a wide variety of communications tools to stay connected to friends, family, coworkers, customers and others. The challenge for a dealership manager is not that there aren’t enough communication tools. Rather, the issue is often that there are too many options, and many of them operate outside your auto dealership’s control, which means they do not engage with your CMS, DMS or other systems.

While operating remotely or as a virtual car dealership, it’s critical that as a leader, you emphasize the importance of your sales and service teams communicating effectively through the channels and processes you identify and manage on their behalf. 

Make effective communication a regular topic of discussion with your teams and highlight best practices with praise or other more tangible rewards. The goal is to both show and tell your sales and service teams that their ability to deliver on customer experience expectations in the current dealership environment is dependent on not letting physical distance interfere with effective communication.

Manage Change – Don’t Be Managed By It

If there were ever a time for what business schools call “change management,” this is it. Making significant process changes without a clear definition of what you’re changing and why runs the risk of not being successful – or even causing more problems than it solves.

In fact, researchers report that three-quarters of corporate change efforts fail to meet their goals, or end up abandoned altogether. 

This shouldn’t dissuade you from the critical effort of looking at the ways in which your service and sales teams usually interact and then defining how those processes must change to meet the needs of the current environment. 

This should be both a top-down review by leadership, as well as bottom-up from the people in the trenches who are trying to make things work. Even if you’re certain that you know exactly what needs to change and how, you’ll have a much stronger acceptance of change if your teams feel a sense of ownership in the process.

Once you’ve identified what needs to change to strengthen the connection between sales and service or in other areas of your auto dealership, the next step is to define exactly how those processes will change. Make sure you can draw a straight line between what you learned from your review about what needs to be done differently and how the changes you’re making address those identified issues. All too often, once organizations start contemplating making changes, the instinct is to make huge changes, or more changes than are needed. It’s easy to fall victim to “scope creep” by trying to change everything all at once. 

For the best chance of success in your efforts to improve the connection between sales and service, you must be able to define what you’re trying to accomplish, explain what you’re changing (including how and why) and then be able to identify when you’ve accomplished that original goal.

Most importantly, don’t get discouraged. Change isn’t immediate. Things go wrong, and it’s easy to get skeptical and frustrated or bail out too early. This is why Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, one of the world’s leading experts on how businesses can successfully reinvent themselves and their operations, coined “Kanter’s Law” – “Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” 

Keep being thoughtful, keep communicating, keep listening to what your team has to say and keep focused on what you’re doing to ensure the best customer experience possible – particularly when customers move through the service-to-sales process.

If we can help you work through the best path forward for your dealership, please contact us.

Despite uncertainty over the exact details of how the automotive industry will respond to and recover from the current public health crisis, one certainty is that digital retailing currently is, and will continue to be in the future, more important than ever for auto dealers.

Whether it’s simply a question of unexpectedly accelerating the existing automotive digital retailing transition or driving more dramatic changes in the automotive industry (such as encouraging more customers to skip the dealership visit altogether through OEM delivery programs), the automotive retail marketplace will almost certainly take a dramatic digital shift in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. Dealers need to consider where their own challenges and opportunities lie in the months and years to come. 

In this post, we share insights into COVID-19’s impact on automotive retail trends, including:

• - Auto sales trends post COVID-19 disruption patterns in Asia
• - The rise of home delivery of new vehicles during and after the pandemic
• - Choosing the right automotive digital retailing solutions for success

Accelerating the Online Dealership Transition

One early sign that the COVID-19 crisis may have accelerated preexisting digital retail trends is seen in Asian countries that have recently begun to reopen closed sectors of the economy. 

In China, shoppers didn’t come back the instant the country’s automotive retail showrooms reopened. In the first week China’s dealers reopened their doors for sales and service, showroom traffic and parts and service department revenues averaged roughly two-thirds of normal levels. 

According to J.D. Power, U.S. auto sales markets had already begun to fall by as much as 80% in March, even in states that were allowing car dealerships to remain open. Consumers clearly are not relying solely on government guidelines when making the decision to visit their local auto dealership, and that is likely to continue in the future when states begin making the decision to reopen.

With buyers potentially hesitant to return to in-person car buying experiences, dealers must be ready to identify and engage consumers in a sales process that is largely online-based if they are going to compete in what could be a dramatically tighter sales market for the duration of 2020 and beyond.

Eliminate the Auto Showroom? 

Many automakers and dealers have launched or reinvigorated programs for home delivery of new vehicles during the pandemic – and it’s likely that at least some of those programs will continue in the aftermath. 

Automakers aren’t alone in this. Home delivery services are exploding in popularity across the country, including products like cars that had largely been retail-only and alcohol. 

While many consumers may take every opportunity to leave their homes in the immediate aftermath of lockdown orders being lifted, in the long term it’s likely that at least some will have gotten in the habit of moving every component of a traditional retail transaction (except product delivery) online.

For dealers, this means making your participation in your OEM’s delivery program something you’re planning on doing in the long term, rather than just doing in the interim.  when there are social distancing orders in place. It should involve considering how you have it staffed and managed, what metrics you’re watching, how your customer experience culture should inform and interact with those services, how you integrate it into your dealership’s loyalty marketing program and much more.

Forward-looking dealers can also take investments in delivery programs and use them in concert with data-driven loyalty and conquest marketing programs. If your analytics identify consumers who are likely to be in the market for essentially the same vehicle, consider proactively offering them a hassle-free delivery as part of the offer. This may not only work for loyalty customers, but also as a potential conquest option for customers who may have moved into your market or do not have an existing dealer relationship with your brand.

Review and Update Existing Investments for Digital Retail

Dealers have invested in a variety of capabilities to be as effective as possible in their digital retailing efforts – from strategic investments in Business Development Centers and predictive analytics tools, to tactical efforts to keep up with technologies, such as voice search or video trends. 

This is a good time to look at what investments you’ve already made and consider whether you’re getting the most out of them. Additionally, this is the right time to look at whether those tools and technologies you put in place a few years ago have kept up with the state of the technological art. 

You may not want to incur new IT costs or other investments right now, but the auto sales market is likely about to enter one of its more challenging periods in years. Hamstringing your ability to compete with outmoded automotive digital retailing solutions is a recipe for disaster. Dealers who proactively adapt to changing automotive retail trends will be better equipped to not only survive but thrive during COVID-19 disruptions and beyond. 

If you’re taking this opportunity to review your automotive digital retailing capabilities and are interested in what Mastermind’s predictive marketing sales platform has to offer, contact us for a free virtual demonstration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

NEW YORK, Jan. 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Automotive dealers compete to target the right customer at the right time with the right offer and message. Dealers have always found ways to accomplish this, but have not had the power of behavior prediction to help. automotiveMastermind (aM) is the leading predictive analytics and marketing automation technology for dealerships and manufacturers – and it's transforming the sales process. The technology will be on display at the 2017 National Automobile Dealers Association Convention (NADA), taking place Jan. 27-29 at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. aM is exhibiting at booth 4655.

"Dealers cannot rely on price alone to drive sales – for the first time, they can use a more sophisticated technology to tell them who is ready to buy and why," said Marco Schnabl, CEO and founder of aM. "Our unique approach is highly successful because we reveal the motivating factors that pertain to each prospective customer. The moment a dealership goes live with our technology is the moment they start to see significant success."

The aM technology empowers sales teams with key insights and valuable information on its top prospects. Its proprietary algorithm crunches thousands of data points, combining DMS (dealer management system) information with Big Data - including social media, financial, product and customer lifecycle information, to calculate how likely a consumer is to purchase a new vehicle now. The complex data is distilled into one simple number, the Behavior Prediction Score® (BPS), which is a ranking from 0-100. The higher the score, the more likely the customer is to buy. aM takes this information one step further by layering on micro-targeted email and direct mail campaigns. The simple, intuitive nature of the technology speaks for itself.

automotiveMastermind has a proven track record of transforming the dealership experience for consumers and revolutionizing the way automotive dealerships and manufacturers, find, engage and earn long-lasting customer relationships.

NADA attendees can demo the aM technology by submitting an RSVP via this link: https://www.automotivemastermind.com/nada, or visit booth 4655 at the show.

About automotiveMastermind 
Founded in 2012, automotiveMastermind is the leading provider of predictive analytics and marketing automation technology for the automotive industry. The company's cloud-based platform helps dealers precisely predict automobile-buying behavior and automates the creation of micro-targeted consumer communications, leading to proven higher sales and more consistent customer retention. automotiveMastermind currently works with hundreds of dealerships from various automotive manufacturers, including Acura, Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Honda, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, MINI and Toyota, and has plans to add more during 2017. automotiveMastermind is headquartered in New York City and San Francisco and has more than doubled its employee count in the last year. For more information, visit automotivemastermind.com or follow them on Twitter @autoMastermind.

SOURCE automotiveMastermind

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