One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is the ability it gives car dealerships to deliver personalised offers and customer communications at just the right time. This can all be done in-house, too, which means you can reduce agency fees and undertake dealership marketing campaigns which leverage automotive touchpoints and key dates to boost customer engagement, trust and brand advocacy.
Here’s how you can lead your own marketing campaigns, using customer data you’re probably already collecting.
Start by segmenting your data
Highly-targeted, narrow audiences can be easily built by interfacing your campaigns management system with your CRM, importing vehicle ownership data and key dates such as services and MOTs.
To do this, you’ll need to segment your customer database by combining demographic data such as age and address with lease expiry dates, current mileage and the current or last service due, tire change dates and similar.
Rid your database of duplicates
To avoid unnerving or upsetting customers, it’s important to put the emphasis on data quality – remove duplicate data from the final segment and prevent people from being hit with multiple marketing messages.
However, this is clearly a task which takes too much time manually or continually, therefore a system which is capable of synchronising every data entry point (vehicle, customer and enterprise data) and resolving conflicts is always a sensible investment.
Pay attention to previous interactions
One of the most powerful sources of data you have at your disposal in marketing today is customers’ previous interactions with your brand.
The last time they visited the service department, their car or parts buying history, choice of finance options and preferred model derivative are all data points which can be recorded and used to send only the most relevant, personalised marketing messages their way.
Leverage automotive key dates
We all lead busy lives, which is why it’s unfortunately far too easy to forget those all-important automotive dates.
Even with modern cars capable of reminding their owners about upcoming service dates, these can still be missed, and MOTs or recalls are even easier to slip from one’s diary.
If your dealership marketing platform is aware of these key automotive dates for each customer, it can help automate e-mailing of reminders that are branded, personalised and capable of further wedding the customer to your dealership.
Take advantage of real-time monitoring
Automated marketing means your dealership communications are constantly working for you. They never sleep, and consequently enable you to focus on delighting customers and running the rest of the business.
The same goes for monitoring. All systems that play a role in your marketing campaigns should work in harmony to provide you with real-time results for each stage of the process. From the initial marketing communication to the purchase of a new service plan, optional extra or vehicle, you’ll gain a bird’s eye view of customer activity and spot any potential roadblocks they’re encountering.
Here’s an example: let’s say you’ve set a campaign goal to boost sales for a specific service package using a discount voucher; you can monitor both CTR (how often potential customers click-through to your landing page from a Google ad or promotional email) and conversions (how often this click-through results in a sale) in real time.
Review, review, review
Using actionable data to lead marketing campaigns is only worthwhile if you take the time to review results. Modern dealership digital marketing software can provide huge benefits here, delivering intuitive campaign reporting without having to learn how to customize complex Google Ads reports or email automation tools.
How many conversions and how much revenue was achieved following each campaign? By using a marketing automation platform that’s integrated with your CRM and DMS, you’ll gain a 360-degrees insight into each campaign’s ROI, which in turn will inform future campaigns and enable you to repeat your successes – and continually improve.
Wrapping up
As the owner or marketing manager of a modern dealership, you need full control over your marketing campaigns, and they should be driven by customer data, but that can only happen if you have the right systems and integrations in place.
Is it time you upgraded your dealership marketing platform?
