If 2020 taught automotive retail any lessons, it’s that digital experiences are no longer just a part of our business. Instead, the way dealers engage customers in digital environments is equally, if not more important, than showroom experiences in 2021.

The future path to increased profits starts with a solid foundation of technology. But it’s the buying experience you deliver with that technology that makes all the difference with today’s shoppers.

So, how we actually deliver the engaging experiences, we’ve been promising consumers for the last decade? Here are some tips….

Get Personal or Get Left Behind

Auto shoppers have more choices than ever before. According to McKinsey, 70% of a customer’s buying experience is based on how they feel they are treated.

For dealerships to remain competitive in today’s shopping environment, it is essential to embrace the power of hyper-personalized conversations. To truly engage customers along their car buying journey, tracking and learning shopper behavior is critical.

The average dealership collects thousands of customer data points, but 60% of businesses still struggle to execute an effective personalization strategy.

Why? Without the right dealership CRM, it’s often challenging to find the hottest leads, making it tough to reply with customized messages that fit your buyer’s preferences.

If you can’t rely on your CRM to aggregate your customer data, activities and conversations in one place so that your team can engage in real-time, then it’s time for a change.

So, what turns a conversation into an engaging experience?  🤔

Here’s an easy checklist to keep in mind when you evaluate how your dealership interacts with customers:

Highly-personalized to the customer journey – Use your customer data to gather key insights that help you engage shoppers with tailor-made conversations and messages that answer their questions.

Communicate like a trusted friend  – If you want to build relationships, empower your sales team to communicate with engaging text messages and personalized videos that result in meaningful conversations. Using a customer’s preferred method of communication is key.

Lean into AI for real-time interactions – Buyers want information on their own schedule. Don’t be fooled by buzzwords. Lean on true artificial intelligence tools that can truly engage consumers in a conversational manner when your sales team is occupied with other customers. 

Mobile is mandatory – Mobile tools that make it easy to engage from anywhere are essential to giving your sales team the competitive edge. If you value quick responses and the ability to work deals from anywhere, then mobile CRM cannot be an afterthought.

Strengthen your social reputation – As word-of-mouth referrals move to digital spaces, don’t let social conversations and online reviews overshadow your brand. Look for technology that fully-integrates social media to expand your reach and meet customers where they spend the most time online.   

• Seamless experiences win – Providing first-class, omnichannel retail is just as critical as brick-and-mortar experience. If you’re not offering shoppers a seamless experience from online to onsite visits – your competitors will. 

Embracing an Engagement Mindset

Rethinking dealership conversations means shifting employees from a task-driven mindset to one where reps consistently engage customers with informative, genuine conversations to build relationships. The result is better customer experiences and increases in gross profits.

A BETTER EXPERIENCE

Customers in any industry, want a better experience. Yet all we do is email, email, email. Engagement rates (responses from the customer) are only around 10% on a good day. Engagement with text is 3 times as great as email, hovering around 30% greater on average. Texting initiatives totally make sense for dealerships, but how do we change the dealership mentality of email as the default form of communication?

TEXTING IS QUICK AND EFFECTIVE

Ask your sales team if they had a party, and wanted to invite their friends, how would they contact them? By email? Probably not these days. One person doesn’t make a very good party. Let’s talk to customers the way most people communicate today. Texting is quick, short, personal, and can be effective in getting people on the phone.

ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS

If we know texting creates higher engagement, how can we measure it to ensure sales people are texting their customers? Below is a chart of several stores showing their texting and email activity in one month. Challenge your team to be at a 1 text to 1 email ratio (1:1). Meaning, if your store sends out 5000 emails, you should also have 5000 texts. Once this metric is practiced, it won’t be hard to achieve your goals. In the case studies below, you can see that some very successful stores are at 2:1 ratio (twice as many texts as emails).