What Does Personalization Mean for Your Dealership?

Automotive manufacturers are moving towards mass personalization to dealerships, offering expanded self-serve options on their website. This modern trend is causing every element in the automotive retail industry to get a lot more personal.

In an industry that provides numerous unique products, options and trims to choose from, this evolution in the buying journey is empowering customers to find the exact vehicle they’re looking for. This also empowers dealers to provide their customers with a personalized buying experience. 

By deploying predictive marketing campaigns personalized to each customer, dealers can target customers at the right time, with the right messaging. This communication is tailored to each buyer and builds off any previous touchpoints. In today’s competitive market, taking this sort of data-driven approach to personalized marketing is key to winning conquest customers, as well as proactively defending against customer defection.

Download the Whitepaper:
Predictive Marketing for Dealerships 101

Mastermind Overview

Using dealership marketing tools powered by predictive analytics, dealers are empowered to set the tone for an exceptional customer experience by focusing on the channels and messaging that works for each specific customer. To do this, Mastermind combines customer data from a dealer’s CRM and DMS with high-quality, third-party data to build dynamic customer profiles, such as:

• Financial records
• Household insights
• Socioeconomic details
• Buying preferences

The details within these dynamic customer profiles are key for dealers to prioritize and optimize their personalized marketing efforts. By utilizing behavior-predicting technology, dealers can eliminate old spray-and-pray strategies to identify prospects who will likely be ready to purchase soon by automatically analyzing data from:

• CRM
• DMS
• Sales platform

These tools can also empower dealers to make a great first impression by creating targeted messaging that taps into each prospective buyer’s unique wants and needs, meeting them where they are in their buyer journey. By nurturing them through the buying journey, dealerships can win these customers over from the competition. With this type of data-driven approach, dealers who leverage Mastermind’s Market Conquest feature gain up to 15 incremental new conquest sales a month.

The Future of Personalization

Looking ahead, dealers are continuing to invest in new technology to engage buyers. In a 2022 industry survey, 83% of dealers said that digital tools are a necessary component to maintaining a competitive edge — a 22% increase over 2021. In order to build trust with today’s buyers, dealers may need to rethink their approach. In the same survey, 87% of dealers reported innovation is important, a 43% increase YOY.

The process of building trust with buyers doesn’t end after that first marketing communication. Today’s dealers need to personalize every touch point with each buyer — from sales and F&I offers to service and ongoing loyalty communications.

To stay ahead of customer demands, dealers need to proactively identify opportunities to engage buyers before they return to market. By engaging buyers with personalized messaging and tailored resources that educate them on their various purchasing and maintenance options, dealers are empowered to build trust with customers, while standing out from competitors.

Learnings and Benefits

With countless evolving factors impacting OEM production and deliveries, now is the time for dealers to focus on the elements they can control to adapt to ongoing inventory challenges.

By adopting a data-driven sales and marketing strategy, backed by powerful predictive analytics and personalized campaigns, dealers can increase profitability across their loyalty, service, and conquest portfolios by:

• Maximizing available inventory
• Proactively promoting loyalty
• Conquesting new customers

Maximize Available Inventory

With the success of dealerships’ sales efforts dependent on the vehicles you have in stock, taking a data-driven approach to making inventory decisions is critical, especially with new vehicle inventories being historically low. By adopting a data-driven dealership inventory strategy for pre-owned acquisitions and portfolio management, dealers are empowered to maximize their entire portfolio regardless of what new obstacles lie ahead within the market.

Dealership marketing tools powered by behavior prediction technology enable dealers to proactively map prospective buyers to their available and incoming inventory. This approach helps deliver a personalized buying experience tailored to the buying preferences of each customer. Ultimately, this helps dealers maximize their inventory by reducing the number of days a vehicle sits on the lot.

Proactively Promote Loyalty

Easily the most valuable asset in a dealership’s portfolio is their existing customer base. Amid increased competition, it’s critical for dealers to focus on preventing customer defection by proactively promoting customer loyalty. 

With unique access to insights about their customers, dealers can leverage the same previously mentioned predictive marketing tools to automatically search through their CRM and DMS to identify and engage loyal customers before they start shopping around with personalized messaging that speaks to their unique buying situation.

Conquest New Customers

As brand loyalty diminishes, now may be the time for dealers to conquer new customers that possibly wouldn’t have considered their brand in the past.

Personalizing your messaging is especially important to build trust with buyers who haven’t shopped at your dealership before. Without access to a prospect’s history, dealership marketing tools powered by predictive analytics are critical to identifying and engaging prospective conquest sales leads with personalized marketing.

Download the Whitepaper:
Predictive Marketing for Dealerships 201

Maximizing Dealership Sales Efforts

Personalization doesn’t end at a dealership’s print and digital advertising. With the ability to desk deals on the fly with customer insights at their fingertips, dealership sales teams can turn cold calls into personalized conversations. This allows them  to address each prospect’s wants and needs and, ultimately, sell more cars.

Effective personalization is dependent on high-quality data. Ensure your dealership’s customer insights can be collected and analyzed in a single environment, integrating data from your:

• CRM
• DMS
• Inventory management software

Dealership marketing technology like Mastermind is especially valuable in breaking down the silos between departments to personalize the entire dealership buying experience. By utilizing predictive analytics to offer personalized customer recommendations, dealers can create a dealership sales experience that is centered around their customer’s individual wants and needs.

For example, as vehicle prices reach new highs, affordability is playing a bigger role in many shoppers’ decisions. Personalized F&I conversations should be an integral part of your dealership’s marketing and sales process earlier in the sales process.

CONCLUSION:

Today’s dealers need to rethink the ways they engage and retain buyers to stay competitive due to the market’s uncertainty regarding:

• New vehicle inventory
• Evolving consumer demands
• Changing buying models

The data locked away in your DMS, CRM, and sales platform is essential to personalizing your dealership’s sales and marketing efforts. This will empower your team(s) to confidently engage customers with relevant and compelling messaging appropriate for their stage in their buyer journey.

Proactive dealerships are leveraging predictive marketing technology like Mastermind to leverage this data to prioritize their customer outreach, personalize their messaging, and maximize their profitability. Interested in learning how Mastermind can help your dealership personalize its sales and marketing efforts? Request a Demo.