Text Messaging: New Way to Connect

April 24, 2014Automotive Marketing, Customer Experience 3

Did you know that while many emails go unopened and unnoticed, the majority of text messages are opened within just five minutes of being received? That means that text messaging, also known as SMS, is a highly effective and immediate way to communicate with your customers. An automated text message solution makes it easy and efficient to personally connect with customers. So now that you know, what are some of the best ways you can use text messaging to stay in touch with your customers and bring in more business?

How to Get Customers to Sign Up for Texts

Getting customers to sign up is the first step. You should advertise the benefits of signing up for your text message marketing campaigns everywhere: on your website, at the physical location of your business, on your social media pages, and in your email marketing campaigns. Also, think about this: why would a customer want to sign up? Advertise the benefits that will entice people to want to receive your text messages. Examples?

Never miss an automotive appointment again with our convenient text message reminders.
Receive instant text message notifications as soon as your vehicle part arrives.
Gain access to personalized text message promotions and exclusive contests!

Engage Customers from the Very First Text

Once customers have signed up, your automated text message solution should send them a thank you text, confirming their subscription and offering them a special promotion to get them interested. The promotion can be small, for example, a 15% off coupon for an oil change or tire rotation. The main idea is to provide immediate value and reassure the customer that signing up was a smart idea.

Provide Helpful Automotive Tips

A great way to build trust and loyalty with your customers is to send them helpful text message tips they can actually use. These tips serve to keep you connected throughout the year, even when the customer has not been into the shop in a while, and to establish your business as one that is always thinking about its customers’ needs. These can include safety tips, maintenance advice, links to buyers’ guides or industry news and so on.

Send Automatic Maintenance Reminders

Text message reminders can be sent automatically to each customer based on their vehicle type and history, date of last appointment, and time of year. Reminders make your customers’ lives easier because they don’t have to remember when to book an oil change, routine maintenance or inspection. They will be automatically notified at precisely the right time. These text messages encourage repeat business. Once the appointment has been booked, the customer will get an automatic reminder on the day of the appointment so they don’t forget, reducing no-shows and increasing your revenue.

Offer Personalized Promotions

Customers love to feel like they are getting an exclusive deal. Personalized promotions bring in more business and also grow customer loyalty and satisfaction. Your automated text message solution will keep track of each customer’s birthday, purchase date and other individual data so that promotional messages can be sent out on important dates.

Try using an automated text message marketing solution and track how much additional business comes in due to personally targeted text message campaigns.

Posted by Shawn Ryder

5 Questions to Help You Decide if You Need Automated Marketing

April 9, 2014Automotive Marketing

Automated Marketing

Automated marketing is a huge industry (and growing) and it’s also a hot topic for businesses. Is it really necessary? Will it truly benefit my business? The only way to know for sure if marketing automation is the right choice for your dealership is to try it out, but before you invest the time and money there are some questions that can help you make that decision.

Do you send out personalized campaigns?

Marketing messages are much more effective when they cater to each customer’s personal needs rather than vaguely appeal to a wide range of customers. If you do offer personalized campaigns to your customers based on information like vehicle history, location, date of purchase, seasonal promotions and more you know that these campaigns can bring in a lot of business. However, it can also be extremely time-consuming to organize the information and contact each customer.

If you do this type of targeted marketing or you want to do it in order to bring in more business, an automated marketing solution can save you hours each day and also enable you to connect with more customers than is possible manually. The automated solution can pull information from your DMS in order to provide a highly personalized message campaign for each one of your customers.

If you want to send out specific messages to groups of customers (for example, a different campaign for each different vehicle model), this is a quick and simple process as well with marketing automation.

Do you send out maintenance reminders?

This could include sending out notices to each customer based on their vehicle history such as when it’s time to change the oil, or it could be simply to remind customers of their appointment time once it’s scheduled, or both. Sending reminders to customers can consume a big part of your day.

With automated marketing, the automated solution tracks each customer’s vehicle: date of purchase, date of the last appointment, any issues with the vehicle and so on. Automated messages go out to each customer letting them know that three months have passed since their last oil change, or their maintenance appointment should be booked soon, or they need to get their tires rotated.

Is a lot of your day taken up with contacting customers by phone, text message or email?

This is the one that will probably speak most immediately to you. Yes, it’s great that automated marketing can help bring in more business but will it reduce my daily workload? Automated marketing can take care of all the little tasks that eat away at your time and reduce productivity.

Making a personal connection with a customer over the phone or in an email is a great way to show customers that you care, but you don’t have to manually contact them for every little thing. There is no need to go through your database to find out who needs an oil change and call each customer. Automated marketing frees up your time and staff resources while also efficiently reaching out to more customers than would be possible manually.

Do you have an accurate way to survey your customers?

Gaining honest feedback from a wide range of customers is essential for improving your services. Do you regularly survey your customers? If so, collecting, organizing and analyzing the data can be complicated.

An automated survey tool sends out surveys based on triggers such as when a customer visits the dealership. It organizes all the data into easy-to-understand charts and graphs and keeps track of it for future reference.

Do your customers keep coming back to you for maintenance?

Often, customers will make their initial purchase at a dealership but take their car elsewhere for maintenance because it’s cheaper. This takes away a source of recurring revenue from the dealership. Studies have shown that customers will pay more for services if the services are better or more convenient. How can you capitalize on that?

Excellent service is your specialty, but automated marketing can help with the convenience. Also, how many shops do you know that keep in touch with their customers each month with messages that are based on their personal automotive needs? Now that’s customer service!

Automated marketing helps build customer loyalty by keeping your dealership in the forefront of customers’ minds and also making their days simpler by providing relevant messages, reminders and promotions. Automated messages help keep your customers on track by looking out for their vehicles’ needs right on time.

So, do you need automated marketing?

If you have a small dealership and you have enough staff to handle all your communication needs then you might not want to invest in automated marketing. But if you’re finding it difficult to connect with all your customers, if organizing data is a challenge, if your days are busy because you’re always trying to contact customers, you might want to look into automating certain processes.

And personalized campaigns are proven to bring in more business. Automated marketing makes it simple to create personalized campaigns for each unique customer. Imagine the possibilities!

Posted by Shawn Ryder

Are You Serving up the Right Menu?

March 25, 2014Daily Tip, Digital Marketing, Service 1

Service Department Menus

The amount of time it takes to prepare a proper and profit-making service menu is more than one might imagine! This process involves research of one’s costs, pricing surveys, and so on. The time involved could be 60-70 hours! That’s a great investment of time, but considering that menus are, without a doubt, the number one source for selling maintenance in your Service Department, one doesn’t have any other choice but to expend the time and energy to create the very best menu.

One of the most important elements of effective service menus is the “Package Price” of the varying mileage interval services. Both the dealership and its customers can benefit from the package price and it is of vital importance that your customers are made aware of the benefit of purchasing the “Package Price.” When they know the benefit-when they know that the package price will save them more money than if every service were performed separately, they will appreciate and accept the idea of the package price.

Choosing effective price points plays an important role in the marketing of the menus.

Service Advisor Presentation

And then, most importantly, the way in which the Service Advisors present the menus completes the marketing circle. There are effective and logical ways of presenting the maintenance package. In many cases, unfortunately, some dealers decide to fill the list of services with ‘fluff’, such as the various checks and inspects that we do at no charge anyway and then increase the package price. When the package is sold, there is certainly more revenue taken in; however, do you really think customers bought this?

Better question – do you think these customers will be back or will these be the customers who maintain “dealers cost too much”?

However you structure your menu, if your service advisors don’t buy into its value, they’ll never sell it, and if it isn’t being sold, go ahead and charge $999.95 for it because it won’t matter.