Hosting an event at your dealership can be costly and if not done properly, you can spend a lot of money without a lot of return. To get the most bang for your buck, you’ll need to harvest your database to ensure you communicate to the right customers to drive them into your dealership for your event. Here’s how you can increase foot traffic and make the most out of a fall event.

What Type of Event?
First things first, you will have to determine what type of event you’ll host. Will you host an end-of-summer BBQ to thank customers for their loyal patronage or will you host a model year close out event to move 2015s off your lot to make room for the 2016s? The possibilities are endless and are only limited by your imagination. Be sure your event fits your dealership needs and budget.

Which Customers Will You Invite?
Once you’ve determined your event type, you need to decide on the target audience to invite. Be sure to segment your database so that you invite the right people. For example, if you plan to host an end-of-summer BBQ, you’ll want to only invite your most loyal customers. You don’t want people coming to mooch off the free food; you want to demonstrate your thanks to your most loyal customers. If you plan to host a model year close out event, be sure to exclude anyone who has recently purchased a vehicle from you. Instead, target customers who are in a favorable equity position, have owned their vehicle for three or more years, or are driving a 2012 and older vehicle. By segmenting your database, you reach the customers who will be most impacted by your event.

Will You Entice Visitors?
The last thing you want to think about is the offers you’ll include in your marketing piece. To make a big impact, be creative with your offers. You could offer recipients something if they come to your event, create a unique offer that highlighting the details of your event, or simply offer savings on services or products at your dealership. When coming up with your enticing offers, remember to think outside the box.

Now is the perfect time to host an event at your dealership. Be sure to harvest your database and entice visitors to drive them to your store.

Every OEM sets key performance indicators for their dealer franchise owners. Most OEMs look at the same type of metrics, but often have slightly different measurements to determine the success of their dealers. One metric almost every OEM is looking to capitalize on is recapturing lost customers. Harvest your database to find your greatest potential with lost souls and use creative marketing and incentives to drive them back to your dealership.

Segment Your Database
When looking at your database, you have four types of service customers:

1. Your most loyal customers – they spend a lot and visit a lot.
2. New vehicle owners – they visit often, but don’t spend a lot.
3. Big ticket customers – they only visit for major services but go elsewhere for minor services.
4. Bargain hunters – they shop around for the best deal and go there.

By understanding your customers’ shopping patterns, you can ensure you target the right segment to maximize results and save money by not marketing to lost opportunities.

Determine Lost Soul Time Frame
Since this post is specifically about targeting lost souls, you’ll need to understand what it means for the specific vehicle makes that you service at your dealership. Some manufacturers consider no service in five months a lost soul, but others define it as a year with no service. In today’s market, the lost soul time frame really depends on your manufacturer’s maintenance schedule. Once you’ve determined your lost soul time frame, be sure to scrub out all active customers.

Target with Creative Marketing & Incentives
Once you’ve reviewed your customers’ shopping behavior and scrubbed out any customers who do not fit into your lost soul time frame, it is time to put together your marketing and incentives. Remember all the tips and tricks we’ve talked about in previous blog posts. You’ll want to use an eye-catching, multi-channel approach to maximize the effectiveness and reach of your campaign. Make sure you include service offers that are enticing and relevant to grab your customers’ attention and drive them back to your Service Department.

By understanding your customers’ shopping behavior, removing active customers, and leveraging creative marketing and incentives, you can bring lost souls back to your service drive.

Every year, dealers across the country try to keep pace with the current marketing trends for the fear of falling behind and losing out to the competition. Not only do you need an excellent retention marketing strategy to ensure customers come back to you, but your dealership also has to find a way to attract potential buyers. Not to mention there are thousands of to-do items that you have to check off every day to keep your store running properly. With so much going on, how do you find time to put together a conquest strategy that works without breaking the bank? Today you’ll learn how to keep your summer momentum going by energizing your conquest strategy.

Start with Data
Every good marketing strategy starts with data. Often times for conquest programs, this data comes in the form of a purchased list simply because it is not readily available at our fingertips. When venturing out to acquire a purchased list, be sure the consumers have opted-in to receive information about vehicles and are currently in market. Without these two elements identified in the consumer profile of your purchased list, you may end up wasting money. Once you’ve acquired your conquest list, scrub out any customers who have had recent sales and service transactions at your dealership. Ensuring you have a clean list of ready-to-buy prospects who are not in your current database will result in a higher return for your conquest marketing efforts.

Determine Delivery
The number one reason most companies do not execute conquest marketing is the cost. Acquiring a list and then paying for the delivery of their message can be a huge expense, not to mention the rate of return on conquest marketing is low compared to customer retention marketing. For this reason, you’ll want to select a method of delivery that is low cost. Most companies choose direct mail as their method of delivery, and although it is a great option and will be seen by every recipient, it can be pretty costly. Another option is to go with is email. Although it’s very cost effective, your message may not be seen by every recipient. Either option is a great choice and you really can’t go wrong, so it will depend on your specific budget and needs which choice is best.

Leverage Multiple Channels
If every single one of your customers was standing on your lot, chances are you wouldn’t want to deliver the same message to each individual the same way. This is also true when putting together a conquest strategy. Not every person on your purchased list is the same, has the same needs, or wants to consume their content in the same manner. That’s why it’s important to leverage a multi-channel approach. With so many choices of media, you’ll want to make sure your delivery methods are complementary and the imagery and messaging you use are similar. When done properly, a multi-channel marketing attack is more effective than a single channel delivery. It provides your dealership better brand awareness, multiple touch points for consumers, and increases the reach of your campaign.

Retarget, Retarget, Retarget
If you have the opportunity to utilize your purchased list for retargeting purposes on social media, you should absolutely do so. Nowadays everyone is taking part in the social media phenomenon and like any good marketer, you have to be where your customers are. Think about taking your conquest strategy one step further and advertising on popular social media networks. A lot of these networks have an advertising platform with the ability to retarget data sets. Others allow you to use consumer demographics to target your ads. Regardless you should use complementary creative and social media advertisements to extend the reach of your conquest strategy.

Promote Online Brand
Even if you have the best data, deliver a stellar multi-channel piece, and retarget specific owners through social media, your conquest strategy may fail. The truth is consumers today always go online before they enter a brick and mortar business. While online, these consumers are looking to see how you handle your customers by reading reviews and searching your dealership locally to find its exact location. If at any time these potential buyers can’t find your dealership or see that your dealership has a poor reputation, then chances are you will lose their business.

Measure Results
Most marketers have an extremely hard time measuring the success of their conquest efforts, especially if their sales are not completed online. Through Google Analytics and other website measurables, you can determine how many leads were driven to your website through various channels, but how do you know if they actually made a purchase? By leveraging the conquest strategy laid out in this post and completing a match-back report, you can determine true ROI. Simply take the initial purchased list and match up recent sales since the launch of your conquest campaign to see how many targeted customers came back to you for their vehicle needs.

We can spit out numbers that tell you the effectiveness of this conquest marketing strategy, but you won’t really understand its power until you try it. But don’t wait, keep your summer momentum going by finding in-market buyers, influencing them to visit your dealership, and measuring the effectiveness of your conquest campaign.

Finding the right marketing message to keep customers coming back to you can be difficult. You either have to know exactly where they are in their ownership cycle or you have to have extremely relevant content. Good news! This week’s campaign ideas will give you three ways to connect with current customers with pertinent fuel savings messaging to keep your summer momentum going.

Offer DIY Tips
Every consumer in America wants to save at the pump, but how? With the majority of the country paying close to $2.50 for a gallon of gas and some parts reaching as high as $3.50, fuel economy is still a hot topic. Think about offering your customers fuel savings tips. For example, you could inform them that properly inflated tires and clean air filters improve a vehicle’s fuel economy. Or, you could tell them things like driving with the windows up and the AC on actually helps a vehicle’s fuel economy. By leveraging a current topic and providing helpful DIY tips, your dealership will stay top-of-mind for future vehicle needs.

Capitalize on the Back-to-School Frenzy
Not only do Americans want to save on their monthly fuel bills, but most of them are in back-to-school mode. You can leverage this time of year to deliver relevant marketing about fuel savings. Think about offering fuel savings facts to customers about their specific driving habits to reduce their vehicle’s fuel consumption. For example, tell them that every extra 100 pounds in their vehicle reduces gas mileage by 2%. Or, that idling for longer than 30 seconds uses more gas than starting up their vehicle’s engine. Utilizing current events like back to school is a great way to raise brand awareness for your dealership.

Promote Your Lineup
It doesn’t matter which OEM your dealership is a part of; each year your lineup becomes more and more fuel efficient. Any customer who purchased a vehicle three or more years ago probably doesn’t even realize how much more efficient a new vehicle is than their current model. Think about delivering a message to this audience that highlights your new lineup and each vehicle’s fuel economy. You could even include a metric for how much weekly savings they could be receiving by driving a more fuel efficient vehicle from your new lineup. Your dealership will grab the attention of any customers who have thought about fuel savings or upgrading their vehicle.

You’ll want to tailor your campaign messaging to fit your dealership’s specific goals. By delivering relevant marketing to your customers about fuel savings, you’ll keep your summer momentum going.

It’s hard to believe Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, is just around the corner. Since Labor Day weekend is one of the most popular times of the year to buy a vehicle and often there are additional incentives from your manufacturer, you’ll want to make sure you are top-of-mind with customers, potential prospects, and your community. Here are three ways to leverage the Labor Day holiday weekend to keep your summer momentum going.

Host an Event
It doesn’t really matter what type of event you host for the holiday weekend, drawing people to your dealership in a non-sales manor will increase foot traffic. Think about hosting a BBQ, customer appreciation event, or even an end of summer party. Whichever you choose, make sure you have activities planned to keep people on your lot and have your sales staff present to ensure they build rapport with your attendees.

Meet or Beat
If your dealership has great customer service, your employees care about your customers, and you’ve worked to become part of your community, logically anyone in your area should be coming to you for their vehicle needs. Unfortunately, consumers are driven by price and if the guy across town is offering a better deal, they’ll drive there to save a few dollars. The way you combat this is by advertising that you’ll meet or beat any advertised price. Now this idea isn’t feasible for every dealership, and yours may be one of them, but if you have the capabilities, this is a great idea to ensure you aren’t losing sales because of price.

Be Creative and Fun
We’ve talked a lot about this, but let’s review again. Consumers are inundated by marketing now-a-days. They receive so much, they actually have become numb to its impact. This is why you have to get creative and have fun with your marketing; it makes your dealership memorable and likeable. There are so many different ways to accomplish this feat that listing them here would literally take pages and pages. All you have to do is look through the marketing you get and decide what stands out. Then, apply those ideas to your own brand.

Keep your summer momentum going and market your dealership for Labor Day at the same time. You’ll drive more traffic, create more brand awareness, and drive more revenue to your dealership with these three easy to implement ideas.

Can you believe it? The back-to-school season is already in full swing. If you’ve visited any major retail outlet, checked your mailbox, or watched commercials, you’ve probably noticed that marketers are promoting back-to-school savings. This means, now is the perfect time for your dealership to capitalize on the season with relevant back-to-school marketing. Here are three ways you can promote your dealership, drive business to your store, and generate additional traffic and revenue to keep your summer momentum going.

Offer Back-to-School Tips
With the hustle and bustle of the back-to-school season, many parents are thinking about new schedules, prepping their kids for the first day, and getting organized. Chances are these parents are not thinking about their vehicles or the maintenance it will need to be ready for the carpool lane. Think about offering customers helpful back-to-school vehicle tips and service savings to ensure their vehicles are in proper working order for the new school year.

Host a Back-to-School Supply Drive
According to the National Retail Federation, an average family will spend more than $600 on back-to-school supplies for their children in grades kindergarten through 12th. Although these numbers account for all economic statuses, it’s no secret that many families just don’t have this kind of money. Your dealership can help these less fortunate students by hosting a school supply drive. All you need to do is work with your local school district to determine what items are needed, communicate your efforts to your customers, and setup bins in your dealership to collect the donated school supplies.

Show Your School Spirit
A great way to promote your dealership and form ties with your community is by getting involved with your local school district. You can do this in several different ways, but it will most likely depend on your school’s need and your dealership’s budget. An easy way to get involved with your local school district is by sponsoring a particular sport like football or basketball, but be sure in return you get an advertisement on the field or court. Another way to get involved and raise funds for your local school district is by giving away a certain dollar amount for every test drive. The possibilities for getting involved and connecting with your local community are endless, but you’ll want to speak with your local school district to see how your efforts will make the most impact.

The back-to-school season is here, make sure to leverage the new school year to drive more traffic and revenue to your door.

Is your dealership looking for more vehicle sales? Do you spend an exorbitant amount on advertising and marketing to acquire new prospects? How many times have you lost a potential sale because you don’t have a proper follow-up process for these incoming prospects? The only way to truly master your dealership’s follow-up is to figure out a way to maximize results and minimize effort. Check out these six easy tips to revive your unsold prospect follow-up.

Implement Data Collection
One of the most important things a business can do to improve prospect follow-up is collect pertinent information. So many times salespeople are unable to follow up with a prospect because they don’t have all the necessary information to do so. You’ll want to set a standard for data collection among your sales team. This standard should reflect what type of marketing you’ll be doing to follow up with these potential buyers. For example, if you plan to use email marketing to communicate with potential buyers and bring them back to your dealership, then you’ll want to make sure your salespeople are always collecting an email address. Other data points to think about collecting are physical address, phone number, vehicles of interest, trade information, and financing details. With all necessary information about your prospects, you can properly follow up with them and encourage meaningful interactions with your sales team.

Qualify Prospects Properly
The truth is there are plenty of prospects who walk through your doors and visit your website every day, but this doesn’t mean these individuals are all potential buyers. Properly qualifying prospects can save your sales team a lot of time and energy. How you qualify a particular prospect should also dictate that specific prospect’s follow-up process. For example, if your team qualifies someone as a “hot lead,” then the salesperson should follow up with them almost immediately, otherwise they may find themselves at your competitor’s dealership to do business. On the flip-side, if someone is qualified as “just looking,” then you may want to follow up with them differently and probably not as aggressively. This tip is one of the most important in this article because without properly qualifying each prospect, your team is literally shooting in the dark, which causes missed opportunities and wasted time spent on unqualified prospects. If your sales team is properly qualifying each prospect, then they understand what that individual is looking for and how to sell to them.

Measure Follow-Up Process
The statistics show prospect conversion goes up significantly after six contact attempts have been made; however, statistics also show most salespeople give up after making one or two attempts. Do you know how many follow-up attempts your salespeople are making to bring prospects back to your dealership? Do you know how many attempts they should be making to convert prospects? With a measureable follow-up process, you can rest assured that no opportunity gets lost in the shuffle and each prospect is followed up with enough times to generate a conversion. Think about it, if each prospect receives the same follow-up for their specific lead type, then you can begin to see trends for how much follow-up is needed and begin to tweak your process to receive optimal conversion.

Make To-Do Lists
In a perfect world, your sales team would come to work each day and they would have a follow up item in their to-do list for each unsold prospect. Depending on your specific process, they should have calls to make, emails to send, and notes to take to move each prospect closer to the sale of a vehicle. A salesperson’s to-do list must be very easy to follow and execute, although it may have a couple dozen tasks to complete. The to-do list for a salesperson should be ready for them each morning and be worked on throughout the day when they aren’t attending to new prospects. If possible, to-do lists need to be finished before your sales personnel leave for the day. By making daily actionable to-do lists, your team is not wasting time but rather working each prospect to ensure they purchase their next vehicle from you.

Enforce Prospect Follow-Up
This tip is easier said than done, but should definitely not be taken lightly. Probably the most important tip for maximizing your dealership’s follow-up process is to enforce it among your entire sales team. From collecting the proper data to following a precise follow-up sequence, from qualifying each prospect properly to creating daily to-do lists, each and every step you designate in your follow-up process is important and should be accounted for and required. It’s easier to enforce rules and processes when using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. With a CRM solution, you can set up your ideal follow-up process for each type of lead and then have the system enforce the rules.

Utilize a Dashboard
Visibility is important when trying to run an efficient and actionable sales team. Without a dashboard, you will have a difficult time figuring out where each customer is in the process, how they are being qualified, who is responsible for the next to-do item, how many prospects have been converted today, and so on. If you don’t have one already, now is the time to create a customer dashboard. Ideally you should be able to use your current CRM to compile all pertinent metrics for your sales team into one location for easy viewing. Just think about it, if all the information you needed on a daily basis was presented to you in one spot without having to pull and re-pull report after report, you’d save time and increase the overall performance of your sales team.

If you’re looking to sell more vehicles, it’s time to revive your unsold prospect follow-up process. Really focus on maximizing the results from your sales team and minimizing their efforts needed to close a deal. Organization, recording proper information, and timely follow up are the keys to the solution. With these six tips, it’s time to track more, bring back more, and ultimately close more.

Every year, thousands of Major League Baseball games are played with millions in attendance. These same baseball fans are gearing up for the long awaited All-Star Game coming up July 14^th.  Believe it or not, your dealership can leverage these enthusiasts’ excitement to drive sales and service business. How, you ask? With creative, relevant marketing. Check out these three ideas to celebrate summer with All-Star baseball.

Get Active
Here in Cincinnati, if the Reds combine 11 strikeouts during a home game, LaRosa’s (a local pizzeria) allows every fan with a ticket from that game to redeem it for a free pizza. This is an example of how a local business can get involved with the sport of baseball to promote their brand. Similarly, your dealership could offer discounts for events that transpire during the All-Star Game, such as offering $10 oil changes if a local player hits a home run or a similar promotion that may fit your particular business model. 

Create a Contest
Everybody loves to participate in a contest, especially if the contest does not cost anything to enter. There are so many ways your dealership can leverage the All-Star Game to create a contest and drive top-of-mind awareness for your store. Your contest could be guessing the final score of the All-Star Game or who will hit the first or most home runs; the possibilities for a contest are really only limited by your imagination. Whichever contest you decide, be sure to leverage social media to extend the reach of your campaign, clearly advertise how the winner will be selected, and what participants and the winner will receive.

Have Fun
If you can’t decide how you will leverage the All-Star Game to promote your dealership, just remember to have fun with your marketing. You could simply utilize baseball imagery in your email or direct mail campaigns, supply your audience with interesting baseball trivia, or even sprinkle in some baseball terminology, like home run savings, to spruce up your marketing. Not only will having fun with baseball themed marketing create interest from your audience, but it will also grab the attention of any customers who are baseball lovers.

Regardless of your affinity for America’s favorite pastime, the upcoming All-Star Game provides your dealership the opportunity to drive additional traffic, brand awareness, and revenue to your door, all while celebrating summer.

Video has become one of the most important mediums for marketers and is quickly becoming the preferred method of media consumption for consumers. Every marketer dreams of the day when they produce a video with content worthy of thousands and possibly millions of viral shares. But let’s dial these dreams back a little and save ourselves the pain of wasting endless hours devising the perfect video scenario to be viewed by the world wide web. Instead let’s focus on how your dealership can utilize video in everyday marketing to engage current customers and keep them coming back to you for future vehicle needs. Today we’ll share six things you need to know about marketing with video.

Get Noticed with Video
It’s no secret that people like to consume their content through video. When looking at major video platforms like YouTube, you quickly understand the impact video has on our society; YouTube reports every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube to generate billions of views and this number each month is up 50% year over year. Video popularity is definitely not dying, but quite the reverse; more people are posting and watching videos daily. Are you leveraging this powerful medium to reach out and connect with your customers?

Power Your Marketing with Video
How do the growing numbers of video consumption affect your marketing strategy? Great question! Similar to how people prefer to consume content, marketers are finding video marketing to be highly effective. In fact, 70% of marketing professionals report video converts better than any other medium and 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. These statistics demonstrate how video makes a brand relatable to consumers; it puts a face or personality to a brand and allows the audience to connect and build trust with the brand. And let’s be honest, everyone prefers to buy from someone they know and trust.

Determine Your Goals with Video
If you decide to venture into video marketing, you’ll need to lay out what your goals are, otherwise you can waste a lot of time and money. Dealerships across the nation are using video in a variety of ways, but just because they are using it doesn’t mean they are seeing any results. Will you use video to put a face to your dealership and build brand awareness? Will you use it to deliver short, sweet, concise messages to your clients for things like service reminders? Will you use video marketing to set your dealership apart from your competition? Only 24% of brands are actually using online video to market to consumers today, which means there’s a huge opportunity to reach out, connect, and be different.

Understand Your Hosting Needs
Once you understand your goals and have chosen your content, it’s time to figure out the logistics of how your videos will reach your customers. You can’t simply create videos and, poof, they appear for your customers. You first have to decide where your videos will live online. There are really two options, free or paid hosting sites. There are pros and cons to both; for example, YouTube is free, but you aren’t able to control the entire user experience, whereas paid hosting sites give you full control of the user experience, but they can also be very costly. This decision is totally up to you and there is no right or wrong answer. It’s really about your specific needs and budget.

Share Videos with Customers
Next, you’ve got to determine how you will share your videos with your ideal audience. There are several ways to do this, but if we’re staying with the idea to create videos for your current customers, then email is the best channel to use. This is mostly because it’s a one-to-one direct marketing channel that links you directly with your customers. Email also provides you access to increased analytics, like impressions of people who saw your content but didn’t view your video. But always remember, the method used for delivery will depend on the content of your video and the audience you are trying to reach.

Benefit from Video in Email
If you decide that email is the best delivery method to reach your ideal audience, then you should know that marketers who are currently using this method are seeing open rates increase by 20% and click-through rates increase by 200% to 300%. Simply put, pairing video with email turbo charges your marketing and creates more interaction with your content. We all know that consumers have overflowing inboxes and it is more important than ever to stand out in the inbox and get your message heard. With these statistics, video is a clear answer.

If you haven’t ventured into video marketing, now may be the time to jump in. Be sure to plan out your marketing to determine the best content and delivery method that supports your goals before you get started. Although that perfect viral video would bring a lot of brand recognition to your dealership, it may not be the best way to return the results you desire.

Source:
"Statistics." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 23 June 2015.
"The Top 15 Video Marketing Statistics for 2015." Adelie Studios. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 June 2015.
Cote, Sabrina. "10 Powerful Video Marketing Statistics (and What They Mean to You)." Brainshark. 11, 11 Mar. 2014. Web. 24 June 2015.
 

The official start to summer is Sunday, June 21^st and this day presents the perfect opportunity to reach out to customers with a seasonally relevant campaign. For many American families, the summer months mean packing up the kids and heading on a road trip to see family or spend some time vacationing. Today we’ll share three ways you can leverage these summer road trips to make your marketing shine.

Leverage Timely Marketing
When families pack for a trip to the beach or a week at grandma’s house, they think about essential items they will need for their trip. Some families even remember to have their vehicle serviced and maintenance items inspected before hitting the road. You can drive these families to your dealership by delivering a timely message with service discounts specific to their needs. Think about it; if you know most families will be taking a vacation in the next 60 days, then right now is the time when you should be communicating a road trip service package that will ensure their safe arrival.

Help Customers Be Prepared
Some families are super prepared for road trips, remembering to check their spare tire, engine fluid levels, tire pressure, and have their recommended maintenance performed. Often times these families don’t have any emergency backup in case of a vehicle breakdown. Think about offering customers an emergency vehicle kit with every service over $100 or selling them in your Service Department. These emergency kits can include things like roadside flares, a first-aid kit, jumper cables, etc. with your dealership’s branding.

Remember Roadside Assistance
Getting ready to take a family road trip can be overwhelming. There are so many things to remember to pack, endless errands to run, and don’t forget the directions to get to the destination. Sometimes information for roadside assistance is not always stowed in the vehicle and can be forgotten in the clutter of to-dos before a big road trip. Send a helpful reminder to customers to remember their roadside assistance information when traveling this summer. If applicable, offer the roadside assistance information from your dealership’s manufacturer so it’s handy and accessible for customers. For customers who may not have roadside assistance for their vehicle, offer up a recommendation for where they can purchase it.

The summer travel season is in full swing and families everywhere are loading up the kids and hitting the road. Don’t miss this opportunity to drive additional business to your Service Department and top of mind awareness for your dealership.