Without relying on the sales reps – or anything else!

It is a Sunday afternoon. The dealership is closed. A couple pulls onto the lot and spends time looking around, comparing models and prices. They leave, but with several unanswered questions. The dealership has no record of their visit…

That opportunity is not completely lost. With AutoPulse Insights, many of these unknown prospects can be identified and with a great deal of information including their name, street and email address, plus the vehicle they own. More importantly, all this information is what marketers call “permissible” which means the consumer has provided their consent to receive a marketing communication.

To make this even more interesting, without anyone at the dealership doing a thing, a personalized email can be sent to that prospect as soon as the day after the store visit. The message can include product information, competitive benefits or perhaps incentives to return to the store. Think about that. All this can be done without the dealer or OEM doing a thing once the campaigns are set up. The ability to recapture what would otherwise be a lost opportunity – with no effort on behalf of the dealership – is a game changer.

Every day, dealers lose valuable contact information for prospects who visit their lot. Today, technology exists that enable lost opportunities to not only be identified, but automatically contacted on the dealer’s behalf with an offer to bring them back to the store.

This same data set also enables dealers and OEMs to identify customers who own a particular make and who are shopping competing dealerships. This can be used to send conquest messaging or test drive incentive offers as soon as one day after they visit the competitor’s lot.

How does it work? Geo-fencing or beacons? It’s a lot more sophisticated than that. Precise mapping must be set for every dealership. Next, dealership location data is combined with shopper mobile phone location data. Then rich consumer data from over 90,000 websites and apps are combined. Fragments of available and permissible consumer information are stitched together from over 200 different data bases to create a record of an individual visiting the store.

All of this data alchemy is being executed by a new firm called AutoPulse Insights. AutoPulse Records are the result of this data being carefully merged together and combined with location data that is sourced from a shopper’s cell phone. Every dealership in the US and Canada have the AutoPulse tracking in place today and traffic counts go back to 2016.

What kind of insight can come from this? There are a variety of uses including: Identifying the number of shoppers on a dealer’s lot, tracking the change in traffic month over month, and measuring marketing and advertising effectiveness. Manufacturers and Dealer Groups can also compare traffic from store to store either within a market or from brand to brand. OEMs can now track brand defectors (those who own a brand but are shopping for another) as well as loyalists (those who are shopping for the same brand they own).

Who is behind this data? We are pleased to announce that Root & Associates is partnered with Digital Data Solutions. Stay tuned. We will have much more on this in the following months.

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Cheers,

Kevin

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