4 Types of Automotive Data to Help You Sell More Cars

April 14, 2023

Success in the automotive industry requires personalized marketing and sales strategies that recognize each buyer’s unique needs and preferences, at every stage of the buying journey. As lingering effects of the inventory shortage push buyers to wait longer and drive further to purchase a vehicle, proactively engaging and nurturing buyers has become more important than ever.

Dealers must understand their buyers on a deeper level to fuel personalized communications that keep customers engaged over time. In today’s highly competitive market, this requires dealership teams to take a data-driven approach to targeting, nurturing and, eventually, converting well-qualified leads into customers.

Wondering how to sell more cars using your dealership’s data? In this blog, we share four automotive data types to help you do just that, including:

Demographic and behavioral data to personalize predictive marketing campaigns
Cost of ownership data to build trust with customers
Vehicle history data to maintain a top-notch used car lot
Historic customer data to predict future car buying behaviors

Personalize Auto Marketing with Demographic and Behavioral Data

Understanding your audience and their purchasing behavior is critical to both nurturing buyers and maximizing your dealership’s marketing ROI. Instead of the old-school method of making guesses about your target audience based on gut feelings, relying on automotive market data is a more secure and dependable method based in fact.

Additionally, monitoring your dealership’s social media activity and customer engagement is a valuable way to obtain information on your car shopper demographics and behavior. Your dealership can analyze what type of content or offers are most attractive to your social media followers, or which demographics your offers tend to resonate with the most. This insight, in turn, helps your dealership identify consumer trends to best target your marketing campaigns.

By utilizing predictive marketing tools like Mastermind, dealerships can identify and segment customers who are most likely to be long-term, high-value customers based on their:

Purchase history
Service behavior
Other key factors

By generating personalized campaigns directed at these customers across channels, including targeted social media marketing, dealerships can build stronger, more profitable relationships and increase customer loyalty.

For instance, a dealership could leverage Mastermind’s tools to identify a group of customers who were most likely to be in-market for a new car and also have a high potential lifetime value. The dealership could then create a targeted campaign designed to deliver customized messages and incentives to each individual customer, including:

Personalized emails
Direct mail pieces
Social media ads

Build Rapport with Cost of Ownership Data

For many customers, purchasing a car is typically the second-largest expense most consumers make, second only to their home. Critical factors for customers deciding where to purchase include:

Make
Mode
Available features
Pricing

By proactively providing customers with access to data that informs them about the costs associated with owning a car, dealerships can better communicate the value of their products.

Transparency is the key to customer retention, and it helps to build rapport with customers as well. Additionally, dealerships can utilize this data to target and nurture specific car buyer personas who have budget constraints and prefer cost-effective options when purchasing a vehicle.

Better Manage Used Car Inventory with Vehicle History Data

For many dealerships, their used vehicle inventory and fixed ops department is the bread and butter of their business, as the profit margins tend to be way higher than new vehicles. It’s essential that your dealership can access existing customers’ and prospects’ vehicle history data, especially if you are in the business of:

Selling used vehicles
Servicing vehicles (new or used)
Utilizing your used car sales data

Vehicle history reports, such as those from Carfax, can help your dealership maintain a high-quality used inventory and help give customers peace of mind when purchasing pre-owned. Although providing this data for leads is not free for the dealership, it’s worth offering complimentary vehicle history reports to convert high-intent shoppers. When coupled with a behavior prediction tool, these reports can help convert buyers on the cusp of purchasing, as well as enable your dealership to manage leads more efficiently.

Be Forward-Thinking with Historic Customer Data

One of the best ways to predict future trends in the automotive industry is by analyzing historical customer data. Leveraging this kind of data means dealerships can make informed decisions about their business strategy and determine where to allocate their marketing budget to retain customers, before they start exploring other options.

For example, while dealerships may know that lease customers should be contacted X number of months before their lease-end date, they may not always follow through. This leads to customers shopping around and defecting, something the industry has seen spike since ongoing inventory challenges.

Using a customer data platform like Mastermind, dealerships can identify when to reach out to customers and deliver personalized messaging that resonates with their specific needs and preferences. This approach goes beyond just offering competitive pricing; in fact, customers may react positively to a personalized offer that includes a monthly payment increase if it aligns with their lifestyle and purchasing goals.

There’s no need to guess who your audience is or wait for customers to return to your dealership with such a wide variety of automotive data solutions available. By utilizing historical customer data and modern technologies, dealerships can: