Taking a Data-Driven Approach to the Marketing Nurture Cycle

March 8, 2019

Not all leads are ready to make an immediate purchase. Most top-of-funnel leads don’t even recognize they are in the market for a new vehicle until much further along in their prospect journey. It’s crucial to be able to identify and communicate with prospects before they are ready to purchase so that you can earn their business ahead of them shopping the competition. This is where dealers can benefit from highly-targeted marketing nurture cycle campaigns and where behavior prediction analytics play a critical role in developing and delivering relevant and timely messaging in a consistent manner to drive prospects through the sales funnel and into your store to buy.

Utilization of the proper datasets to be able to get ahead of a prospect and begin to nurture them through personalized marketing is a great competitive advantage. Our Market EyeQ sales platform uses a combination of proprietary and public data sets to enrich your existing DMS data and rank all potential buyers within your market with a Behavior Prediction Score® so your marketing efforts are targeted opposed to a spray-and-pray approach.

Nurturing a relationship with a potential customer through marketing involves just as much listening as it does talking. That’s where automated marketing tools that pay attention to, understand and modify future interactions based on how the prospect responded in the past come into play. The more you learn about what a prospect is interested in or responds to, the more your interactions with them become relevant to them and targeted within your broader, consistent messaging strategy. As the sales cycle eventually draws to a close, what you learned about how that customer interacts with you through the marketing nurture cycle forms a part of the personalized messaging and proposed selling points in your sales team’s hands when the customer comes through the dealership door.

Throughout this entire process, however, consistency is the key. Of course, specific message points certainly change as the prospect moves through the marketing funnel, becoming more targeted as they learn more about them and become more engaged in considering a specific purchase. Those sales fundamentals haven’t changed. But as customers become more empowered to interact with you at their own speed and in their own preferred manner, the risk of damaging a nurtured relationship through an inconsistent outreach cadence is very real.

If you start with properly identifying your greater prospect pool and then efficiently communicate with those prospects through a nurture cycle, you’ll close more sales every month and build the foundation for long-term success even in a flattening marketplace.