3 Tips to Improve Conquest Auto Sales

Auto dealers have always looked to conquest sales to grow their businesses and increase car sales – and for good reason. Unless your dealership has some sort of far-fetched success with first-time car buyers, year-over-year growth can truly only come from winning customers from another dealer.

The key to a successful auto dealership conquest strategy is effective conquest marketing. But what is conquest marketing for dealerships?

Conquest marketing is when you convince potential car buyers to purchase from your dealership over a competitor’s dealership. This can include both new customers as well as service-not-sold customers.

In today’s hyper-competitive market, taking a data-driven approach is key to personalizing your conquest efforts and getting customers in car sales. In this blog post, we’ll share some key conquest marketing concepts and tips to improve your dealership’s conquest campaigns, including:

• How to use predictive marketing to improve the efficacy of your conquest sales efforts
• How your service drive plays a role in effective conquest marketing
• How to keep your customers from responding to someone else’s conquest campaign

How Predictive Marketing Drives Conquest Efforts

When you’re competing with another dealership to conquest their customer, they have one major advantage over you: they know the customer, and you don’t. Predictive analytics empower dealers to bridge that gap by fueling personalized conquest marketing campaigns.

Benefits of Predictive Marketing

Predictive marketing is a critical component of a successful dealer conquest strategy and the most effective marketing tool dealerships have ever had. Predictive dealership marketing tools leverage first-party and third-party data and powerful analytics to jump-start your relationships with customers by giving you information and actionable marketing insights that minimize your competitors’ advantage from the start.

Download the Whitepaper:
3 Step Guide to Dealership Conquest Marketing in 2022

Mastermind’s Role

Mastermind takes this process one step further by analyzing and distilling a wide range of automotive marketing data from across your dealership and the industry. This data is used to generate a single Behavior Prediction Score™ to identify and rank potential conquest customers. This 0-100 ranking helps dealers easily understand which prospects are the most likely to respond to their dealership’s conquest marketing efforts.

From here, Mastermind layers in thousands of data points to build dynamic buyer profiles and automatically engage the highest-quality prospects. Personalized mix of marketing communications is used to deliver the right message, in the right format, at the right time. Each communication builds off the previous to get car buying prospects on the phone and into the showroom – where your sales team can close the deal.

Leveraging Mastermind’s Market Conquest feature, our dealer partners report gaining up to 15 incremental new sales per month.

Conquest Your Service Drive for New Car Buyers

The service drive can be an underutilized department in many car dealerships. But with access to the right insights, the service drive prevents numerous opportunities for conquesting customers. In fact, Mastermind data finds customers who service at a dealership are 2.5x more likely to purchase their next vehicle from that dealer.

Download the eBook:
A Dealer’s Guide to Effectively Working the Drive

Benefits of the Service Drive

With access to detailed customer and vehicle insights, the service drive provides a perfect opportunity for dealers to grow conquest marketing efforts if they can deliver an excellent customer experience. According to research from Google, a customer’s maintenance and service experience was ranked No. 2 in influencing automotive brand loyalty at any stage.

Mastermind’s Role

By analyzing sales and service insights from your dealership’s CRM, DMS, maturity manager and data mining solution, Mastermind empowers your team to easily prioritize and engage your best conquest opportunities. This includes service customers who are:

·   Approaching the end of their warranty or lease contract

·   Over their lease mileage

·   May be interested and could benefit from pre-ordering a new product design

We’ve found that the most effective service conquest operations have a dedicated person or team working in the intersection between service and sales. Leveraging Mastermind’s service-to-sales solutions, this salesperson is responsible for maintaining a close relationship with service advisors and acting as a service-to-sales liaison. They do this  by engaging service conquest prospects with personalized offers that help transition them from the service lane to the showroom.

By breaking down the barriers between service and sales with Mastermind, our dealer partners report activating 55 percent of service-not-sold customers into qualified, in-market new vehicle sales leads. That’s roughly 4x the automotive retail industry benchmark!

Conquest-Proofing Your Customers Through CX

We’ve written before about dealership customer experience (CX) being a critical factor in improving dealership retention and loyalty. While the best CX strategies are powered by data and predictive analytics, auto dealership customer relationships ultimately boil down to the interactions your people have with your customers.

Download the Whitepaper:
3-Step Guide to Protecting Your Dealership Loyalty Customer Base

Benefits of a Strong CX

Simply put, if your customers’ loyalty is weak, your competitors will have easier targets for their own conquest efforts. But if your customers feel valued and cared for by your team, they’ll be less likely to even consider competing conquest offers. In fact, research from Google finds the #1 influencer of brand loyalty is a buyer’s purchasing experience.

Mastermind’s Role

Building and maintaining a dealership culture driven by CX is hard. But predictive analytics platforms such as Mastermind make it easier to:

·   Automatically identify and rank sales and service leads.

·   Provide sales and service teams with actionable insights that connect with your customers’ individual personalized needs.

·   Efficiently engage customers with automated and personalized marketing campaigns

Effective dealership leaders build on that foundation by measuring and managing behaviors that result in quality CX by everyone in a dealership. This is effective, especially in cases where a short-term mindset could come into conflict with a customer’s long-term satisfaction and loyalty to your dealership.

What does your automotive conquest marketing strategy look like? With customer loyalty reaching historic lows, now is the time to improve your dealership’s conquest marketing efforts. If you don’t think you have an advantage over your competitors when it comes to capturing their customers and keeping your own, contact us for a free demo.