Netflix is one of the most successful disruptors of the digital age. How did they do it? By developing a business model built on customer obsession and personalization at scale. So take note of their strategy: here are three takeaways from Netflix’s meteoric rise that you can use at your dealership.

Personalization is king.

If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you’ve seen the “Top Picks for You” and “Because You Watched X” sections. Netflix tracks your viewing habits and adjusts what it shows you based on your preferences. And since these recommendations are curated just for you based on first-party data—data you already have (not purchased)—chances are good that you’ll be interested in checking them out.

So your lesson here is this: no one knows your customers like you do, and you can leverage the data and knowledge you have to serve your customers better, just like Netflix does. That’s where smarter marketing comes into play. With the right software platform, you can better appeal to customers, plus you can manage all your marketing in-house—even while personalizing it for each and every customer. For example, send your service customers special offers toward a maintenance service you know they’ll need soon. Add in offers for other similar services, and not only will you drive upsell, you’ll improve customer satisfaction by engaging them with offers they’ll actually use.

As for sales customers, provide them with more than just an upgrade offer; give them one for a vehicle you know they’ll be interested in. Offer the option to tailor that upgrade offer to their specific needs, and you’ll quickly establish your store as much more accommodating than the competing retailer down the road.

Market like a giant.

Netflix is great at keeping customers informed of new content. At least once a week, they send out an email detailing new releases. And there’s always a section of New Releases near the top of their interface.

Your dealership can do its own version of this—we know that consistent contact helps boost customer retention and recapture inactive customers. So stay in front of your audience with e-newsletters, monthly offers, and more, and your dealership will be their first thought whenever they consider their vehicle needs.

Embrace change. Then evolve.

Netflix was founded in 1997 (back when we thought calling the Internet “The Net” was going to be a thing forever). At first, they sent subscribers DVDs through the mail, effectively disrupting the video-store industry before we even knew what “disrupting” was. It may seem old-fashioned now, but it was radical for its time, and offered customers a level of freedom and convenience that simply was not an option before. Then, crucially, when digital streaming gained prominence over DVDs, Netflix was quick to adjust its business model to better fit subscribers’ changing preferences.

By adopting this kind of evolution mindset, your dealership can continue to serve customers’ changing needs. Because remember, just like mail-order DVDs during their heyday, what’s radical now will likely seem downright old-fashioned down the road. The key is to keep paying attention so you can continue to meet customers’ demands and exceed their expectations.

A recent Google search for “customer experience” produced around 1.49 billion results. And refining the search to “customer experience in the automotive industry” reduced this to about 251 million results. Clearly, this is a subject that has already garnered an endless amount of research and discussion—a clear sign of the transformation taking place in the industry. 

Driven in large part by big retail disruptors such as Amazon and Uber, consumers have fundamentally changed their expectations of, and demand for, a vehicle purchase experience. What seems to be less obvious, however, is that what consumers have always preferred hasn’t changed at all. Of course, buyers never wanted a mediocre purchase experience—they often just didn’t have a choice. Customers simply want a personalized experience that reduces friction and saves time. Now, with increased competition, new technologies, and unprecedented access, customers do have a choice. And they’re exercising that power of choice to determine where they spend their money.

People buy experiences

This fact was driven home in a recent PostFunnel article identifying seven powerful customer experience trends for 2019. The key eye-opener is at #1: Experience Above All. The article states, “In today’s world of choice, the entire customer experience should be one that leaves the customer not even pondering cost for a moment, but instead relishing the sheer joy they feel each and every time they interact with your brand and its offerings. Aside from simply being the right approach, there’s no escaping the universal trend.”

In other words, consumers want the entire act of purchasing—not simply the purchase itself—to be highly enjoyable, even delightful. According to the article, 86% of them are even willing to pay more to make that happen. Which brings us to the obvious question: why is this a surprise? Why wouldn’t customers prefer that?

Instead of convincing sometimes reluctant buyers to hurry up and make a purchase, then, the goal becomes more about collaborating with them in various ways to create a memorable experience they’ll want to continue after the sale. Impractical as that might sound, the article paints a mutually beneficial picture: the revenue growth of CX leaders is over five times that of those who fail to make this factor a top priority.

One-to-won personalization

Unlike retailers a decade ago, dealers striving to create a customer-centric climate in 2019 have a wealth of industry-leading tools to deliver the experience consumers demand and gain an edge over the competition. Today’s buyers want proactive engagement almost to the point of mind-reading—they like knowing about all available solutions before they’re ever faced with a problem. To accommodate their preference, dealers can harness the power of on-demand sales, accessories, and service marketing campaigns to engage regularly with their customers. With the set-it-and-forget-it functionality provided through automation, shoppers can stay continuously engaged via multiple channels: email, mail, SMS, voice, and social media. And dealers can rely on built-in machine learning to know their customers are consistently receiving the most relevant communications at just the right time.

Consumers also place a high value on real-time personalization at every level, though. As with engagement, shoppers are looking for businesses that interact with them on an individual basis—ones that can anticipate their needs and have a wide variety of options to choose from. One sure-fire method for long-term customer engagement? E-newsletters. Unlike the “one-size-fits-all” communications of the past, digital newsletters now can target every customer personally with unique offers, including those based on an individual’s service history, current incentives, and even equity positions.

In addition, digital content keeps customers up to date about upcoming events and exciting promotions at your dealership, educates them about vehicle maintenance, provides awareness about local attractions, and more. In fact, retailers have an abundance of options when it comes to curating their own newsletters. And the payoff? Customers highly engaged in a dealership’s digital property (their website, email communications, SMS text messages, mobile app, Facebook page, etc.) are six times more likely to make a vehicle purchase and twice as likely to have their vehicle serviced there.

So we know it’s important to maintain customer engagement with personalized messages to give them the experience they’re looking for. But here’s where automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning capabilities can really up the ante. In keeping up with the consumer preference for receiving solutions prior to being confronted with problems, dealers can pinpoint ideal trade prospects at optimal times and offer them attention-grabbing, personalized equity offers either onsite or via email and direct mail. Creating this unique, individualized, and transparent experience is easy with tools that offer customized features, such as allowing the sales staff to personalize the vehicle and trim for specific customers. Or giving shoppers access to their own web portal where they can swap inventory, change payment options, and/or contact the salesperson regarding the offer at their convenience.

Adding total transparency

As a recent industry blog will attest, the demand for transparency, flexibility, and consistency is particularly critical for buyers trading in a vehicle as part of a purchase. And this can often be one of the most emotional and contentious aspects of the sale. So what are you doing to ensure transparency during the trade process?

If the customers are directly involved in each step of a trade-in appraisal, confusion, suspicion, and possible defection can be virtually eliminated. Tools that offer prospective buyers guaranteed pricing, a quick and easy appraisal process, and total transparency from start to finish create invaluable trust and enable you to close more sales. 

Putting it all together

Today’s consumers are asking significantly more of all retailers. And automotive dealers have the unique responsibility of shaping the majority of the vehicle ownership experience—so they should do their best to tilt that experience in their favor. Advanced technology to manage multi-channel campaigns, e-newsletters, personalized equity offers, the beginning stages of the trade-in process, and more can be the ideal solutions for pleasing customers and delivering the experience they’ve come to demand. Even better, these tools simplify sales processes for dealers, thus creating happier buyers and sellers for the long term.

Walk-ins are a major source of dealership traffic. On the one hand, that’s great for dealerships, because it means less time chasing down leads, since customers simply show up at your door. But it also means that when walk-ins dry up, so does a major portion of revenue. So how can you get more people in the door, prepped and ready to go?

Start with Killer Marketing

Every day, the average person receives 118 non-work-related emails. And that’s not including social media advertisements or physical mail. As you can imagine, most people don’t read them all. You have to have great marketing to cut through the noise and get that oh-so-important click or open. That means you should be staying top-of-mind with consistent, highly relevant messages to get a leg up on the competition.

But your marketing should give customers more than the latest features in your vehicle lineup—they can access tons of specifications, comparisons, video walk-arounds, and reviews online. Instead, give them a glimpse of the vehicles you have to offer, and focus more on what differentiates your store from the rest: your amenities, your expertly trained staff, and your hottest sales offers. This is what marketing is for, and by educating customers on why they should be visiting your store, you’re well on your way to influencing their next buying decision.

The Expectation Gap

Unfortunately, there’s a large gap between what dealerships think matters to customers and what customers actually care about. Customers aren’t interested in how many vehicles your dealership sells or how loudly you yell in TV and radio commercials. The benefit that customers are really looking for when purchasing a vehicle is simple and easy: they want a hassle-free experience. And there are a number of ways you can make it clear to your customers that that’s exactly the experience they’ll get when they purchase from you. Advertise up-front values for trade-ins, competitive pricing, fast and convenient paperwork, and a no-pressure experience. And be transparent on pricing, as it’s the most important aspect for many customers.

Speed of Response is Key

It takes more than sending the right message at the right time to resonate with your customers, though. The other aspect of killer marketing is clear intent. If you’re serious about selling vehicles, show it. And that’s where real-time responsiveness comes into play.

If you’re sending owners specials on a specific selection in your inventory and they respond, the battle is only half won. You’ll want to give customers a straightforward path to connect with you, be it over live chat or through a direct line to your cell phone, so you don’t miss their attempt at contact. In addition, your marketing is only as targeted as your platform makes it. So it’s important to utilize real-time reports, predictive customer scoring, and more to ensure you’re kept up to date on the status of customers visiting your showroom.

And if your customers aren’t responding? Segmented marketing will have a bigger impact than mass marketing. If your intent is to help your customers into a new vehicle, follow up with reminders on those special sales offers you sent them before. Keep following up with incrementally better offers for all non-responders. Deliver other relevant messages to keep them engaged or start new conversations. And most importantly, once they do respond or walk in, give them the prompt attention you’d look for if you were shopping for a new car.

It’s a Jungle Out There—Get a Guide

Fortunately, there are companies that can make this easy for you. It’s their job to stay on top of the quickly-changing marketing industry and ensure your messaging is clean, professional, and hard-hitting. Make no mistake, what works for email isn’t necessarily what works for mail or social media. And limiting yourself to a single mode of advertising isn’t doing your business any favors. AI-driven marketing is a major up-and-coming element, and it can help you target highly-engaged customers and keep costs low. Some marketing companies even focus on different avenues; make sure the one you work with understands the differences and when to use each for maximum effect. That way you can drive more walk-ins—and more vehicles sold.

Like any sales company, dealerships want to get their messaging and advertisements out to as many people as possible. It’s historically been a numbers game: throw as much as you can at a wall and see what sticks.

That is no longer the case.

Customers expect more personal interactions, and targeting the wrong customer is more than just wasted money—it’s potentially damaging to your dealership’s reputation. Here’s how.

Third-Party Data is Often Wrong

Third-party data is purchased from an external source, like an insurance company or media publication, and is sometimes used to market to a larger audience. Unfortunately, that data is often incorrect or incomplete. Aside from the fact that you have no idea when the data was acquired, sometimes third-party companies only have the information for a small share of the market. To try to make the data seem better or more complete, those companies will simply estimate and fill in what they think is the right data. But that means you’re paying for guesses.

Third-Party Data is Easily Accessible

Let’s say your dealership pays $1,000 for 20,000 prospects. That also means that every dealership in the country (and every other company as well) can purchase those same 20,000 prospects for the same price. That data is not exclusive to you in any way. And after scrubbing the data for geographic region, viable contact information, and deduplication, you may have few to no prospects left at all. That’s $1,000 of your marketing budget down the drain. And even if you do find a few hundred prospects in that list, so did all your competitors, and those targets are going to be pelted with emails that may very well seem like spam to the customer.

Marketing with Third-Party Data is Sketchy at Best

There are laws in the US and across the world like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that protect people from being targeted with advertisements without their consent. Crossing that line could cost your dealership hundreds of thousands of dollars. By marketing with third-party data, you’re toeing that line. And when email service providers see the high bounce rates and number of emails going straight to the spam folder, your company’s reputation takes a nose dive. You’ll likely get blacklisted, meaning that none of your emails will make it to your customers’ inboxes—even customers in your DMS.

What You Can Do Instead: Use the Data You Already Have

Get the most out of your dealership’s first-party data—that’s the information you have about your own customers. It’s free, you already have a relationship with the customer, and it’s much more likely to be accurate. You’ll be able to spot trends and then use those trends to start sending the right message to customers at the right place in the buying process. And if you’re not tracking it or don’t know what to do with it, it’s easy to get help from someone who knows the landscape. Some companies even offer AI-driven targeting to help you segment and identify specific groups of high-quality prospects in your DMS, which can result in massive improvements in engagement and revenue.

First-Party Data Allows Customization, Too

Customizing marketing messages has a surprisingly large effect on customer behavior. According to a study by Accenture, 56% of customers are more likely to purchase from a retailer that recognizes them by name and 65% are more likely to purchase from a retailer who knows their purchase history. And first-party data allows you to market to customers based on their relationship with your company, which can dramatically affect conversion rates.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Data

To save your store’s reputation and stretch your marketing dollars, we recommend relying primarily on data that’s yours—not the kind that’s compiled through a third party. Tapping into your own DMS, tracking trends, and customizing your marketing for your customers is a simple—and cost-effective—way to strategically increase sales and ROs without putting your business at risk.

When you buy something online, checkout can take mere seconds. And chances are good that your credit card was saved from previous transactions, meaning you just have to click the checkout button and your order is submitted. At the grocery store, checkout takes maybe a few minutes—if you have to insert your card and wait for a receipt. So it comes as no surprise that customers expect this level of expediency in all transactions.

Not meeting these expectations can cause a lot of customer frustration, though. In fact, in our recent study, customers identified ‘speed of service’ as one of the primary reasons for not returning to a dealer for service. The paperwork and payment for vehicle service can take several minutes, if not longer. And that’s not accounting for backups or bottlenecks in the checkout process. What if a vehicle repair needs customer approval, but the advisor hasn’t been able to contact the customer? Then the repair doesn’t start until the customer comes back, expecting their vehicle service to be completed. Obviously, this puts the dealership in an awkward position. So how can it be avoided?

Better Communication

The first step a dealership can take to speed up transaction times is to implement better, more efficient communication. Most dealerships use phones and email already, but few have taken the next logical step and started using SMS text messaging for customer communications. By adding text, dealerships can contact customers how they want to be contacted. Plus, texts have an incredibly high open rate—98% by some estimates—and are usually responded to within minutes. That means dealerships can get approvals for service while the vehicle is still up on the lift. Not only does this minimize downtime during that vehicle’s service, it cuts down customer wait time overall.

But text messaging doesn’t just streamline dealer-customer communication, it also makes for better internal communication. For example, sometimes a repair can get held up because of a missed call from the Service to the Parts Department. With more reliable internal communication, delays like this are far less likely to happen.

Faster, Smoother Bill Pay

The next step to speeding up transaction times is to go digital. The less paperwork the customer has to fill out, the faster they can get their vehicle. And dealers should get the bill in front of the customer faster—ideally, before their vehicle service is even complete. This can be accomplished with an email or text message containing a link to a secure payment portal. It’s even faster than paying in person. And if the customer can pay the bill before their vehicle is ready to go, then, once it’s finished, all they have to do is pick up the keys.

Get the Right Tools

The right tools can make service transactions so much faster. Have you ever tried cutting down a tree with a butter knife? The same is true in business, too. But by equipping your staff with digital tools to speed up your processes, it’s easier than ever to drive retention and loyalty to your store.

As countless studies will attest, the effectiveness of texting, email, social media, and multiple other digital media in attracting customers to your business has consistently increased over the past few years. In fact, given all the proven advantages of digital, some may consider the phone to be almost outdated as a means of communication.

Actually, the reverse is true, according to findings reported in a recent MediaPost article. Not only is the phone regularly used by prospective car buyers to contact a dealer, sales calls actually convert to purchases four times more than emails on average. As if that weren’t surprising enough, well over a quarter of consumer-initiated phone calls to dealers subsequently result in the caller buying a vehicle from that dealership.

With that said, however, it’s important to dig a little deeper into both customer preferences and dealer participation to better understand your role in effectively capturing those callers and turning them into purchasers. As with the phone itself, engaging your customers to the point of sale completion is an ongoing and two-way process.

Knowing why they’re calling

Understanding why customers call in the first place is crucial. Rarely, if ever, is it for general information, as this can quickly and easily be obtained online. In one of his “Straight Talk” videos, David Lewis lays out the primary reason most prospective buyers phone a dealership: to see what type of people they’ll be dealing with. Due to decades of predominantly negative sales practices, customers are fearful and apprehensive about the car-buying process. But calling ahead of time lets them hear your voice and get a taste of how they’ll be treated. And needless to say, if their initial encounter is off-putting in any way, they’ll simply end the call, cross your store off the list, and move on to someone else. Letting calls go to voice mail is even worse, as it defeats the caller’s basic purpose and can also paint your dealership as unconcerned, out of touch, or even poorly staffed.         

This supports a corollary finding of the MediaPost article, that a dealer’s top-performing salespeople are significantly more likely to set up an appointment over the phone than low performers. With the volume of calls that your dealership receives in a given day, however, expecting every call to be answered and handled successfully by the best salesperson – or by any staff member – is extremely optimistic, if not unrealistic.

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression

If the vast majority of callers to your Sales Department have at least some intent to purchase, how can you ensure that those first-time conversations result in the highest possible number of booked appointments and subsequent visits – and not in added business for your competitor?

Dealers who utilize a professional call center to manage the lines are getting a true win-win. Every caller is able to interact with an engaging, knowledgeable person, every call is immediately routed to the right person or team, and salespeople aren’t tied up on the phone. In addition to handling inbound and outbound calling for both Sales and Service Departments, a full-service call center can offer other advantages such as customized call campaigns, extensive monitoring, and in-depth reporting to pinpoint any missed opportunities.

Going seamlessly from sales to follow-up to service—and beyond

As you well know, capturing prospective buyers is just the first step. But keeping them engaged throughout the ownership lifecycle is the key to maximum long-term profitability. Once customers have made an initial purchase, a good call center will follow up by obtaining documented, firsthand customer feedback and ratings about their experience at your store. And there’s opportunity in prospects too: those who failed to purchase a vehicle can receive follow-up as well to address their key purchase objections, resolve potential CSI issues, or go over any other concerns in order to bring them back.

Dealers who make full use of their call center resources can also significantly improve effectiveness in their service lanes. By relying on agents to assist customers and function seamlessly as representatives of your Service Department, managers can ensure:

1. All calls are handled professionally

2. All appointment opportunities are maximized

3. All basic service questions are answered on the line

4. All customer contact information is kept up to date

3. And your Service Advisors are able to focus all their attention on in-lane customers

As we noted earlier, customers embarking on the vehicle-buying process are likely to call your dealership just to see what’s in store for them. So use the phones to your advantage—make sure your customers are pleasantly surprised by an experience that turns out to be both valuable and hassle-free.