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.  

Customer experience (CX) is more than customer service. While customer service certainly influences CX, the concept extends throughout the entire relationship a customer has with your dealership, from their first online touchpoint or glimpse of marketing materials, through the end of the ownership cycle and beyond.

Getting CX right matters to a dealer’s bottom line, but it doesn’t happen by coincidence and it doesn’t happen just because you’re trying hard at it. It requires a data and evidence-based management strategy, backed by the right automotive data tools to empower your staff. In this blog, Mastermind shares:

 - What dealership customer experience management is, and why dealers need it

 - Why customer experience is critical to a dealership’s bottom line

 - How to create a customer experience management strategy that works for your entire dealership – with the tools your staff needs to succeed

What Is Customer Experience Management for Dealerships?

As with virtually any other facet of business, successfully delivering on CX requires defining and managing an actionable customer experience strategy. Without knowing what you’re trying to accomplish and bringing your team together in pursuit of that goal, you risk even the most well-intended teams pursuing inconsistent and potentially mutually-exclusive visions of customer experience that risk negating its value – or even causing unintended harm to your relationship with your customers.

Customer experience management is the process through which dealers come to understand what their customers care about so they can develop a vision and plan to meet those needs and expectations, defining goals and measuring progress at every appropriate touchpoint.

Even as increasing amounts of the research and communication involved in the automotive sales journey move online, consumers are expecting more personalized attention from their dealers at every touchpoint. Without a coherent customer experience management strategy, dealers risk failing to meet those expectations; losing customers to dealers who deliver on them.

Why Dealership Customer Experience Matters

Research is clear that the automotive customer experience plays a critical role in dealership bottom lines. For instance, research from Capgemini found that more than half of American car buyers would change dealers after experiencing poor customer service as early as the interest phase of a car purchase.

However, the dealership customer experience isn’t all about avoiding dissatisfaction. The same survey found that customers who’ve had a positive shopping and service experience at a dealership are willing to pay for that experience – in fact, more than 60 percent of them are willing to spend as much as 24 percent more.

An Autotrader survey broadly agrees, finding that more than half of consumers would buy from a dealership that offered their preferred experience, even if it didn’t have the lowest price, and two thirds said that in general, they are much more likely to buy from a dealership that provides their preferred customer experience. 

Additionally, while 65 percent of customers said they would drive further to buy from a dealer who had the lowest price, even more – 73 percent – said they’d drive further to close a deal with a great salesperson.

How to Create a Customer Experience Management Strategy

The key components of  creating a customer experience management strategy are:

1. Understand what your customers care about

2. Define a vision for how your relationship with those customers will fit into those expectations

3. Share the vision broadly and consistently throughout the entire dealership. Work with your team to define measurable goals at each customer touchpoint that contribute to achieving your visionEnsure that your team has the training, tools, resources and authority to meet those goals

4. Measure your progress toward those goals, including through direct feedback from customers

5. Update your strategy based on your measurements and feedback

A successful customer experience management strategy begins with understanding what your customers care about, and that means often considering feelings more than facts. Emotions are incredibly important when it comes to CX, and dealers can’t focus so much on hold times and satisfaction surveys that they forget to simply look at how they’re making their customers feel about the entire relationship.

A Harvard Business Review study defined a number of “emotional motivators” that drive consumer choices, and many of them hold opportunities for dealers to create emotionally motivating connections: “Stand out from the crowd,” “Enjoy a sense of well-being,” “Feel a sense of belonging,” “Feel secure” and “Succeed in life” all offer potential avenues of emotional connection to customers. 

When you’re defining and sharing your vision, that must involve making sure that your employees understand how you want your customers to feel about their interactions with your dealership. What kind of emotional connections are they being asked to make or encourage?

Arming Your Staff With the Right Tools to Succeed

From a practical and more measurable perspective, there’s a great deal of strategic value to focusing resources on the exact things that your customers aren’t expecting you to do well. The Capgemini research that found more than half of car buyers would change dealers over poor customer service during the car-buying process also identified areas where dealers had the most ground to make up to meet their expectations: Quality of answers from dealer staff, speed of customer service and proactiveness by staff. All of those are measurable and go directly to customer experience.

Fortunately, these are exactly the areas in which automotive analytics tools such as Market EyeQ can help dealers make huge strides. When dealership employees proactively receive the information they need about a customer, the quality of their interactions improves along with the speed with which they’re able to address customer needs.

Additionally, behavior prediction tools offer dealers an unparalleled opportunity to move from a reactive to proactive model for many customer interactions, improving the customer experience to meet their expectations . They also deliver additional measurement and management tools, empowering dealership leaders to constantly review, update and effectively manage their strategy.

Are you interested in seeing how Mastermind’s solutions can power a transformative dealer customer experience management strategy? Contact us today to set up a free demonstration. 

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.

A productive and efficient sales team is the lifeblood of a dealership. While many auto dealer sales trainings focus on big-picture tips and tricks, not enough dig into the core factors that truly help dealership salespeople succeed: finding high-quality prospects; knowing what motivates those prospects to buy; and nurturing customers with the kind of experience that ensures dealer loyalty. 

Car sales training matters. But when it comes to empowering salespeople, all the training in the world can’t replace the customer data and analytics-driven capabilities of a modern digital sales platform in creating an environment for success. In this blog post, automotiveMastermind discusses how to:

- Fill the pipeline with high-quality sales leads without breaking the bank

- Arm salespeople with the information and insights they need to close more deals

- Ensure the entire dealership is committed to ensuring a great customer experience

Filling the Car Sales Funnel

For auto dealers, customer prospecting goes back to the day the first store opened its  door

s. For a century, dealership sales teams have been unhappy with the quality of their leads and managers have tried to manage their marketing budgets without crippling their sales forecast. Modern personalized marketing, analytics, lead management, and sales tools for dealers aren’t going to eliminate more than a century’s worth of history and habit. But they do give dealers a powerful set of capabilities to improve the quality of leads a salesperson receives, while lowering the cost of acquisition for dealers by identifying and targeting potential customers who are most likely to purchase a vehicle. Personalized dealership marketing tools are able to do this because they don’t rely on “spray and pray” advertising to broad demographics such as TV viewers, radio audiences, ZIP code residents, or the like. 

Rather, they consider essentially every consumer in the dealer’s entire market and analytically score them by the factors that make them more or less likely to purchase one of the dealer’s vehicles. Simply by doing this, they’ve already performed a valuable service to a sales team by identifying the best – and worst – prospects in the market, cutting down on time and effort wasted on unqualified shoppers. 

Other prospects will show up in your service drive. Industry figures suggest it’s five times cheaper to conquest a non-sales service customer than it is to acquire one through traditional marketing channels, which is where our Service Conquest marketing solution helps dealers turn this flow of potential prospects into qualified and actionable leads for their sales teams.

How to Arm Salespeople with the Customer  Information and Insights they Need to Succeed

“Know your customer,” auto sales professionals are told from their first day in the industry. Today, they can know more – and do more with that knowledge – than ever before. If knowing your customer is the key to success, then arming your salespeople with deep and actionable information about their prospects is one of the most powerful things you can do to help them confidently sell and consistently succeed.

That information comes from a variety of sources and includes both information that a good salesperson would likely have looked up already about a prospect as well as proprietary information from private databases, credit bureaus, and research firms. But time is precious for salespeople, and data overload is often worse than no information at all. That’s where the power of predictive marketing analytics comes in, working its way through the sea of data to identify the most relevant and important information and highlight opportunities and areas of concern in simple bullet-point form for the salesperson to have in hand before their first conversation. 

Of course, there’s both an art and a science to using all this information and insights. Mastermind’s technology is designed to be intuitive, and easy to understand and use at any skill level. Getting the most value out of new personalized marketing, analytics, lead management, and sales tools requires training. That’s why Mastermind offers not only introductory car sales training for new salespeople but also ongoing, personalized car sales training to ensure that every member of the sales team is able to use these tools as successfully as possible – at no additional expense to the dealer. Consider us an extension of your sales team!

Consistent Dealership Customer Experience

Salespeople can’t do it alone. They need tools, specialized support such as a well-designed and managed business development center (BDC),  great F&I colleagues and strong leadership. But what a sales team really needs to make a dealership successful is to be part of a dealership team that’s committed to delivering a consistently great customer experience.

Dealers know customers aren’t solely won or lost on the sales floor, but it’s only relatively recently that some dealers have started to truly embed a commitment to customer service throughout their entire dealership. For those that have been successful in doing so, the benefits are significant and quantifiable on the sales floor.

Happy customers come back, again and again, boosting your dealership’s retention and CSI scores. This isn’t news to dealers. But ongoing research into “customer experience” – or “CX,” as it’s known – and its value in the dealership environment has shown the power that a consistently well-treated customer has to make the sales process faster, more cost-effective and easier for the sales team. 

For maximum value in putting salespeople in a position to succeed, CX is much more than simply a philosophy of customer service. Rather, it’s a data and analytics-driven process that ensures everyone in a dealership who comes into contact with a customer has access to both the necessary information and the important insights about that customer.

Modern customer experience management tools are also constantly keeping track of those interactions, watching and learning more about the customer and how they behave. When it comes time for their next vehicle, analytics watching the automated interaction between the service drive, F&I team, marketing and sales functions will often be aware of the customer’s readiness for a new car before they are. A trained salesperson armed with these data-driven insights as they reach out to a highly-scored customer who’s had an excellent experience with the entire dealership is in the best possible position to succeed.

What would that look like in your dealership and what difference could it make for your bottom line? Contact us to set up a demo 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.

How Dealerships Can Increase Service Drive Profitability

How can your dealership increase its service drive profitability? As consumers wait longer than ever before between new vehicle purchases, refining your dealership’s service department process to generate more revenue can make a critical difference in your dealership’s bottom line. In this blog post, automotiveMastermind discusses:

-  Why the service drive has become a key component in dealership revenue & the importance of  service drive loyalty

- How to grow service revenue and loyalty with actionable tips

- How to dedicate a sales team member to the service drive – and equip them with the right tools

If your customers aren’t buying new vehicles, then they’re repairing old ones. American consumers are hanging onto their vehicles longer, to the point where the average car or light truck on the road today is 11.6 years old. Incredibly, that’s three years older than the average just two decades ago.

Why the Service Drive Has Become a Key Component in Dealership Revenue

As vehicles get older, they require more maintenance. This is one factor why new-car dealership service revenues across the industry have been growing strongly in recent years, increasing from slightly more than $80 billion in 2011 to $116 billion last year. According to NADA, last year the average new-car dealership netted 16.2 percent of its profit from service parts and labor, writing 18,544 orders per year for an average staff of 16 technicians (including body shop).

Service revenues are not only key to a dealership’s bottom line, but service loyalty also drives sales loyalty. For dealers who want to grow their share of both revenues and loyalty, below are some simple data-driven suggestions on how to run a dealership service department in today’s competitive landscape.

How to Grow Service Revenue and Loyalty:

Don’t Be Afraid to Compete on Cost

It’s no secret to anyone who manages a dealership service department that consumers believe it is the most expensive place to get their vehicle serviced. That’s one reason why far too many customers stop visiting the dealership service drive once their warranty expires. Dealerships that in the past have balked at putting pricing online or marketing based on price because of a fear of being comparison-shopped against lower-cost independents must meet this consumer concern head-on.

While industry data does show a price differential, it’s also usually less than customers expect – and that difference can be tied directly into the needs and desires of today’s consumer. For instance, dealers have long promoted the perceived quality benefits of dealership service technicians and genuine parts in their marketing outreach. But with the aging vehicle fleet on the road, it’s time for dealer service marketing campaigns to connect those perceived benefits to the customer’s desire to have their vehicle performing at a high level as long as possible. Consumers who hope to drive their existing car or truck for many years after their warranty has expired will be more open to quality messaging such as, “We have the expert technicians and factory-quality parts to keep your car or truck running great for years to come,” and more sensitive to suggestions that they would be sacrificing quality and long-term dependability by entrusting their vehicle to the low-cost competition.

Treat Service Business as a Local Business

Research regularly finds that consumers are unlikely to travel more than 20 miles for a car service, and almost three-quarters of vehicle service visits take place within 10 miles of a customer’s home. Rather than fighting this, focus on marketing to your existing local customers with proximity and convenience messaging to try to keep as much of their business as possible out of the hands of local independents, tire stores, quick lubes and other competitors.

That 10-mile radius should also be prime service drive conquest territory for your marketing campaigns, starting with local brand owners who purchased their vehicle from another dealership and expanding into other owners whose vehicles your technicians are prepared to repair.

Today’s social media and digital advertising platforms have powerful geographic capabilities, and your service drive marketing campaigns should be taking advantage of them to ensure you’re not spending marketing dollars trying to sell service visits to consumers who are outside your local market. Is the team managing your service department marketing campaign focusing tightly on the consumers who are most likely to visit your service drive, or are they spending your resources on unlikely audiences?

Dedicate a Drive to the Most Time-Sensitive Services

Many consumers believe independent mechanics or specialized franchise tire, lube, air conditioning or brake shops are much quicker than dealership service drives for standard maintenance services or state safety inspections. In order to keep your existing customers and effectively conquest that business back from those competitors, you need to address the speed/convenience concern head-on by reducing or eliminating their advantage.

Review how those kinds of orders are handled within your dealership service department process and consider setting up a dedicated service drive or repair bay for those kinds of repairs, and marketing it directly against local competitors on speed, cost and competence.

How to Integrate the Service Drive with Sales

Great service performance supports great sales performance and service loyalty drives sales loyalty. In fact, industry data suggests that after five service visits, a customer is three times more likely to purchase their next vehicle from your dealership. Service conversion, when done effectively, is a tremendously powerful and efficient method of sales prospect generation. It depends not only on ensuring that your service drive is providing an excellent customer experience, but also on ensuring you have the right people and processes in place to connect your service and sales departments so you’re taking advantage of that connection.

Does your dealership have someone dedicated to converting service customers into sales prospects, reaching out to high-quality sales prospects with service appointments to schedule a quick discussion while they’re in the dealership? What tools have you provided that dedicated person to identify the best prospects, and how much do they know about the people who will be showing up in your service drive that day? Do they have the right resources and authority to structure an offer and close a sale? If the prospect isn’t quite ready to close but still worth keeping as a prospect, how is that relationship handled and who is responsible for keeping it active and working it toward closure?

Dealerships that are doing the best at converting service customers into vehicle sales have answered those questions, using processes and tools such as serviceMastermind, part of the Market EyeQ sales platform. Contact us to set up a consultation 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.

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.