Betsy, Bessie, Baby, Betty and The Beast.
Each of the top five names Americans give their cars begin with the letter B. Why people prefer B names for their vehicles is unclear, but what is clear is that car ownership is personal. People love their cars; they are proud of them. Many of these proud car owners are even celebrating National Name Your Car Day today. Is your dealership helping customers celebrate by giving them personalized experience they expect?
To best connect with customers and build loyalty, dealerships must take the same care creating a positive customer experience that owners do choosing the perfect name for their car.
This National Name Your Car Day, check out our top tips for making your dealership’s customer experience as personal as your shoppers’ car ownership experience.
Keep your data clean.
Good data habits are critical to providing both your sales and service customers a personalized experience. And yet, dirty data is a huge issue for businesses, including dealerships. Bad data costs U.S. businesses more than $3 trillion annually, and an estimated 30% of sales and marketing data is unusable.
This data inaccuracy translates directly to the experience your customers have with your dealership. Incorrect customer data in your CRM or other dealership software platforms means your customers are getting inaccurate or irrelevant offers. And many people are receiving those inaccurate offers more than once; 36% have been sent duplicate communications.
These errors don’t go unnoticed. Nearly half of people are annoyed by a business getting their personal information wrong, and more than a third say they have less faith in the business to do a good job when they make a data quality error.
Target your marketing campaigns.
While it is tempting to send all of your customers all of your available offers, you won’t be able to cut through the clutter and capture customers’ attention with mass marketing. You’ll see much better results creating smaller campaigns, customized to meet the specific needs of smaller segments of your customer base.
In fact, MailChimp users saw 101% higher click rates when using segmented campaignshttps://www.vinsolutions.com/dealer-resources/blog/decrease-marketing-volume-to-increase-sales/ than non-segmented ones, and our TargetPro users have seen great results from using more targeted approaches. One of our dealers has had great success running as many as 30 different targeted campaigns a month using our targeting and marketing automation tool: 30-40% open rates and opt-out rates less than half of 1%.
Understand your customers – as people.
There is more to your customers than what they include on their lead submission form. To create the best experience for your customers, you have to not only take the time to learn about them as people, but also act on those learnings. Every interaction you have with your customers should be added in your CRM with notes on everything you talked about, from their vehicle color preference to their dog’s name.
Your customers’ website behavior is also an important source of information when it comes to understanding them personally. The data collected using a web behavior tracking tool like VinLens can provide insight into what your customers are looking for before they ever tell you. Learning to read these ready-to-buy signals gives you a chance reach out to proactively reach out to your customers, showing them you understand their needs before they ever step foot in your showroom.
Happy #NationalNameYourCarDay! Share your favorite car names with us on Facebook and Twitter.
Dealers who use both Dealer.com websites and VinSolutions’ Connect CRM can automatically track website behavior with VinLens.
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