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Equity mining your own database before you buy another lead
You already own the cheapest buyers in your market. Here is how to segment and message them.
There is a group of people in your DMS right now who are more likely to buy from you this quarter than anybody you will pay a lead provider for. They have a payment history with you, a vehicle you know everything about, and a relationship with somebody still working on your floor.
Most stores send them the same monthly newsletter that goes to everyone else.
Who is actually in equity
Equity mining gets described as though it requires software. Software helps at scale. The idea does not.
The customers worth contacting are the ones whose vehicle is worth enough more than their remaining balance to cover the down payment on the next one. In practice that clusters in three places:
- Thirty to forty-two months into a seventy-two or eighty-four month term, on a vehicle that held its value.
- Coming off lease in the next ninety days.
- Anyone who paid cash and is now three or more years in — the group almost every store forgets, because there is no maturity date to prompt anybody.
The middle group is the one stores handle reasonably well. The other two are usually untouched.
The message is a payment, not a price
"Come in and see what your car is worth" is a message about your interest. "You could be in a 2026 for within twenty dollars of what you pay now" is a message about theirs.
You need three numbers in the email and nothing else: what they pay now, what they would pay, and the difference. If the difference is not close to zero or better, they do not belong on this month’s list.
An equity email that does not contain a payment is a newsletter.
Three lists, pulled monthly
- Term position — bought thirty to forty-two months ago, current on payments, ranked by current book value against payoff.
- Lease maturity — sixty to a hundred and twenty days out. This one carries a deadline, which does more work than any copy you could write.
- Service equity — in the drive within ninety days with a repair estimate over your threshold. A $2,400 estimate on a seven-year-old car is the most persuasive trade conversation in the building, and it happens in the service lane rather than the showroom.
What to actually send
Plain text, from a real person at the store, with a reply-to that reaches them. Not an HTML template with a hero image of a trim level you do not stock. It should look like an email a salesperson wrote, because one should have.
- A subject line naming their vehicle: "Your 2022 Escape".
- Two sentences, three numbers, one question.
- A reply address monitored by somebody who will answer inside the hour.
Response rates on a well-built equity list run several times what any purchased lead produces, and the gross is better, because you already know the trade and you are not bidding against four other stores for the same shopper.
The part stores skip
Somebody has to own the replies before the first email sends. A list that generates twelve responses on Friday and gets nine of them answered on Monday is worse than sending nothing at all — you have just taught twelve loyal customers that you do not answer.