How well do you know your sales and service customers? Not just the customers who have purchased a car in the last month, or the ones who get their cars serviced on a regular basis, but all of your customers?

Considering your dealership has thousands of contacts in its DMS, it’s highly unlikely —and unrealistic—that you know your customers well. Yet as a business today, it’s critical that your customers feel like you know their needs and appreciate their business.

Sending out the wrong marketing communications at the wrong time sends a glaring message to your customers; that you don’t really know them and you’re just looking to make a sale.

How do you think your customers feel when they receive a coupon for an oil change, and they just had an oil change a week ago? What if they just bought a car from you and receive a message for an upcoming sales event? One time I received a coupon in the mail but forgot to bring it to the dealership when I took my car in for service. The dealership did not honor the coupon. Needless to say, I never went back there for service.

Effective marketing is not about sending out offers, then counting how many coupons were redeemed or dollars in ROI you received for every campaign. Marketing is about building and maintaining a relationship with your customers. If your marketing strategy isn’t equipped to accomplish this goal, it’s failing.

To gauge the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, answer the following questions:

• * Is your messaging the same across all marketing channels?
• * Does your dealership send out consistent, ongoing communications to your customers?
• * Are your sales marketing efforts communicating with your service (aftermarket efforts) and vice versa?
• * Have you identified any unnecessary communications that were sent to customers who just recently took an action at your dealership?
• * Are your communications always relevant to each of your customers?

Building a Comprehensive Strategy

To build a marketing strategy that’s personalized and relevant for each of your customers, you need to ensure that all of your marketing solutions and products work hand in hand, and not against each other.

Many dealers are expanding their marketing channels from traditional print and email into the digital realm. Digital ads, SEO/SEM and social media are all great channels to use for different purposes.

But are all these channels working in sync with each other? If you’re using different products from different vendors, probably not. Yet keeping multiple channels in sync with each other is critical to creating a consistent customer experience.

Ideally, your customers will see the same message delivered across all of your channels. When a customer clicks on a Facebook ad, that click becomes a piece of data that is analyzed along with other data, to determine what the next message should be for that customer, and which channel it should be delivered on.

Integrating the in-store customer experience with your marketing efforts is also important. When a customer declines a service, when and how do they receive a message reminding them that the service needs to be taken care of? When a customer schedules an appointment online, do they see the same offer that they saw in their email or mailbox yesterday?

A unified marketing platform solves many of these issues, but it’s not enough to just have all the different channels talking to each other. Every message that gets sent out, and every offer delivered, must be for a particular reason. The fact that your service revenue is still 30% away from goal with one week left in the month is not a good enough reason. The reason must be individualized and relevant for each of your customers.

This can only be accomplished with a unified platform that utilizes customer data and machine learning. When every piece of customer data and every customer action is analyzed, it’s possible to predict with a high degree of certainty what that customer needs and where they are in the ownership lifecycle. Then, an individual offer or message is created that’s appealing to that customer. We know what’s appealing based on that customer’s past behavior; which ads did they click on and which did they ignore? Do they respond more to emails, print or social media?

When it comes to marketing, the more customer specific you can be, the better the results. Studies show that customers prefer a personalized shopping experience, even more than they want savings.

It may be impossible to get to know all of your customers, but your customers don’t have to know that. With a unified marketing platform that integrates messaging across multiple channels and utilizes data-driven algorithms to deliver a personalized experience, your customers will feel valued. As a result, your dealership will see a boost in both marketing ROI and customer satisfaction levels.

When we think of using customer data, it’s often in the context of marketing. I’ve written previously on how data can be used to drive action and build better relationships with customers by sending them the right message on the right channel at the right time.

But customer data has another important use that’s underutilized in dealerships. When a service appointment is scheduled, data can and should be used to create a better experience for that customer.

What role does data play in the service lane?

Think about the steps your customers take to get their vehicles serviced. Each step coincides with a service department process.

Schedule> write > inspect > track > retain

If you provide a stellar customer experience, the cycle will repeat.

When your service lane technology solutions are integrated with your marketing platform, data can be collected and used at every step to educate your employees and help them better meet the customer’s needs. Here’s an example.

Schedule

Customer Catie is on Facebook one day and sees a notice in her newsfeed that her vehicle is due for a brake job. Coincidentally, her brakes have been squeaking lately, so she knows its probably time. Fortunately, the dealership’s notice includes an offer for $50 off. When she clicks on the offer, she is taken directly to an online scheduler, where she can choose a day and time for her service.

While scheduling her appointment, Catie sees another offer for an oil change, and realizes her vehicle could use one of those, too. Best of all, she sees an offer for a free loaner car, which she really appreciates because she has no other way to get to work. She clicks on both those offers and into the scheduler they go.

The offers that Catie sees when she’s using the online scheduler are not there by accident. Those offers don’t show up for everyone. The offers are generated for Catie based on data from her customer profile, her past service experiences and vehicle needs.

Already, Catie is happy. She’s getting discounts for her brake job, oil change and a free loaner car!

Write

When Catie arrives in the service lane, she is greeted by an advisor. During the write-up process, the advisor checks for recalls and “Vehicle like mine” recommendations. Based on the VIN, he sees that a recall has been issued for the vehicle’s airbags. He asks Catie to approve the replacement, and she does. The advisor then offers Catie a cup of coffee, which she gratefully accepts. A valet runs to get it for her while she gets into her loaner car.

Inspection

Catie drives to work. As she settles down at her desk, she receives a text from the dealership. During the vehicle inspection, it was discovered that the rubber seal on her fuel cap is worn and needs to be replaced.

At first, Catie’s annoyed because she thinks she’s being taken advantage of. But the text came with a video attached, so she plays the video and sees that the seal does indeed look frayed on one edge. She texts her approval back to the dealership.

Track

Late that afternoon, Catie receives another text. Her vehicle is ready for pickup. When she returns to the dealership after work, the service advisor tells her that her rotors are beginning to wear and should be replaced, but it’s not urgent. He also shows Catie that her tire treads are starting to wear, but they should still be good for another 10,000 miles.

Catie declines to have her rotors replaced but makes a mental note. She knows her car is getting up there in mileage, so she’ll have to start putting aside some money for these repairs.

Catie’s in a hurry because she needs to pick up her daughter from soccer practice. The advisor tells her about a mobile pay option. Catie is thrilled. Last time she waited at the cashier for fifteen minutes. Today, all she has to do is sign on the mobile tablet and she’s free to go!

Retain

The next day, Catie receives a message thanking her for her business, along with a customer survey. She fills out the survey and gives the dealership a high rating. After all, she got two discounts, a free loaner car, and most important, she felt that the service advisor respected her busy schedule. She also appreciates being forewarned about upcoming repairs, so she can budget for them.

Several times in the next six months, Catie receives reminders that she declined the brake rotor repair and that she should bring her vehicle in. But her brakes seem fine and she’s busy, so she puts it off.

A couple months later, Catie receives a special offer for a discount on new tires. In the last newsletter that the dealership sent her, she read an article about tire safety. Winter’s coming, and Catie decides that she should go ahead and purchase the new tires. While she’s at it, she’ll get the brake rotor repair.

She logs into the dealership’s online scheduler, and sure enough she sees another offer for a free loaner car. Sweet! She schedules another appointment.

In this scenario, you can see how using data helps to improve Catie’s customer experience.

Catie has a demanding career and is a busy mom, so a mobile check-in and check-out process limits the time she has to spend at the dealership. Because she’s a loyal, repeat customer, the dealership offers her a free loaner car with every service. Although Catie loves to save money whenever possible, convenience and trust are more important to her than whether she can save twenty dollars somewhere else. Besides, she doesn’t have time to shop around for quotes.

No matter which advisor services Catie when she returns, that person will have the data available at their fingertips to provide Catie with an experience and messaging consistent with her last visit.

Using data in the service lane can help your employees connect the dots so they can provide your customers with a better experience. The more you know about your customers and their vehicle needs, the better you can meet their expectations.