Shaping the automotive customer experience with event-driven marketing

Sometimes known as ‘trigger marketing’, event-driven marketing helps businesses identify key moments during the customer lifecycle – and act.

As a car dealership, event-driven marketing gives you the chance to jump in at just the right moment. That might be when the customer visits a specific page or section on your website, a key date arises, or a certain set of conditions are met. And this makes it an incredibly effective form of marketing.

But how can event-driven marketing improve the experience of car buyers and drive more sales into your pipeline?

Can event-driven marketing grow my car business?

Absolutely! The key to this lies in the switch from calendar-driven marketing that typically takes place in automotive CRM and dealership DMS systems, relying on potential customers reacting to special offers, messaging, and perceived brand loyalty, albeit on your brand’s terms.

But what if those messages and offers are sent at the wrong time? What if the brand loyalty simply isn’t strong enough (or even present at all)?

By contrast, event-driven marketing is always timely, by definition. Those offers and marketing messages appear when the potential customer is most likely to interact with them, without feeling in any way forced or intrusive.

What sort of events should my automotive marketing be driven by?

Operating in vehicle sales and aftersales, you can benefit from lots of useful events that can be used to automatically trigger marketing activity.

Here are a just a few that might relate to your audience:

• registration of interest in a specific car model or requesting a test-drive;
• e-commerce interactions, such as adding items to cart or reaching various steps in the checkout process;
• lease renewal date;
• servicing package expiration or tire change date;
• customer birthday;
• sharing of one of your blog posts;
• billing details or address change, or
• a reaction to a news item on your Twitter feed.

These events trigger some form of marketing or sales activity. This activity is originally reflected as a trigger in your workflow-based CRM. This then prompts a customer-facing action, such as an email or messenger campaign, telephone follow-up call or web tracking cookie, but whatever it is, the opportunity to reach out to your customers (both potential and existing) should not be wasted.

What if they don’t respond?

Event-driven marketing does not guarantee responses from potential customers, but it gives you a much better opportunity to impress them at the right moment.

There are two factors to consider here:

• Timing really is everything. The chances of gaining a response via event-driven marketing comes down to timing – always. Most importantly, remember that the type of event will determine the window of opportunity you have to engage with them. If you are late, you will be too late.
• You need to know what they will respond to. You can’t read the minds of your audience, but you can make educated assumptions about what they’ll respond to. This is why you need to have a decent understanding of the type of content and approach which will most likely trigger a response.

When it comes to event-driven marketing, you need to always think about your customer; gather analytics to work out what they’re doing on your website and how they react on social media; leverage data to discover what turns them on, and what turns them off.

Knowing as much about your customers as possible will ensure your event-driven marketing results in more responses -and confirmed deals- and less wasted budget.

Why should I invest time in event-driven marketing?

If you’re still wondering whether or not event-based marketing is right for your car dealership, here are five reasons it shouldn’t be ignored:

1. You’ll be able to increase the average transaction and lifetime value for every customer.
2. You’ll gain purchasing behavioural data like never before, enabling you to fine-tune not just your marketing strategy but also the entire car buyer journey.
3. The effectiveness of your automotive campaigns will be far more apparent thanks to reliable data and customer feedback.
4. You’ll be able to drive more traffic to the digital presence of your brand and make that the starting point for more buyer journeys, ensuring a consistent, omnichannel experience.
5. Personalised offers will help you build a far more engaged and loyal customer base.

Lastly, remember: analytics matter most

Just like any form of marketing, event-driven marketing will only be effective if you keep track of progress, experiment and make changes based on the information you find within the data you collect.

The good news is that you can do this easily with the right Cloud automotive platform; particularly if it’s all contained under one roof.