7 Tips for Getting Started with Automotive Behavioral Marketing

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1 7 Tips for Getting Started with Automotive Behavioral Marketing With the innovation of new technology, data mining and channels available for interacting with customers and prospects, Automotive marketing is an evolving science. Savvy dealers are using these latest technology advances to power new customer acquisition, reanimation and retention. The concept behind Automotive Behavioral Marketing is straight forward. Knowing when prospects and customers are shopping for vehicles allows a dealer to gain insight into their market and act on the information with the right message at the right time. When you deploy your marketing to shoppers that have been identified as in-market you re able to stop defectors and conquest units with laser focused advertising. 1 Decide on your strategy. Behavioral Marketing encompasses several target segments including: new customer acquisition, reanimation and customer retention. Decide in advance which segment to target or focus on all three. As you begin to implement your strategy keep in mind the segment(s) you are marketing, the behaviors that offer you the most insight to generating a lead and eventually a sale. Next focus on how you will incorporate that behavior into your sales and marketing process. The idea is to start planning your advertising campaigns and messaging to speak to the behaviors which will initiate epic improvement of your results. This concept of implementing this type of strategy with the proper multi-channel approach presents its own set of challenges that many dealerships are not aware of. Follow these seven tips to lay the proper foundation and easily get on the fast track to realizing the massive benefits that can result from using Behavioral Marketing to power your advertising programs. epush!

2 2 Every day, new prospects are shopping for a vehicle in your market. The majority of these shoppers are planning to purchase within the next 30, 60, 90 days. Identifying these shoppers is the first step of the evaluation process. Some of the criteria you are trying to identify is: where are they in proximity to your dealership, what is their buying intent, are they planning to purchase today or 30, 60, 90 days out, and what are they driving. At the end of the evaluation process you will have a benchmark to gauge how many campaigns and frequency to target toward these shoppers. This allows you to move to the next step in your action plan. 3 Evaluate your market. Hygiene your data. Incorporating in-house data with outside Behavioral Data is the most promising process for the best ROI from your campaigns. For new customer acquisition you will want to target persons who have not yet done business with your dealership. This is achieved through suppressing 5 years of sales and 2 years of service customers in your DMS against the master target manifest. Then you need to go one step further and have your list source match every address against a universal opt-in list. You cannot market to prospects unless they have opted in to receive your offers. This match is critical, and your marketing arm must have these optins for your digital marketing to be legal. Matching in this manner will also uncover households with new addresses that can be added to the pool for marketing. In the background, while all this hygiene is processing, you should bounce the master list off several more respected data sources to find your highest propensity prospects. These are people who have been identified as driving the brands most likely to defect to your brand, trades that most likely are in a positive equity position, and trades that when a current incentive or rebate is applied will yield a positive or neutral equity position. This refined pool of data will become the target of your most aggressive campaigns using a multichannel approach to drive your offers home. If your strategy includes reanimating and retaining then you will also want to hygiene your CRM data correctly which includes: suppressing current sales and service customers and up to 60 days of current CRM activity, fixing all the entries that were entered with typos, bad postal addresses and incorrect or defunct addresses. Hygiening CRM Data. View the video epush!

3 4 Select your channels. There are multiple ways to deliver your message to your Behavioral Data prospects. The Four most effective are: Programmatic Targeting, Direct Mail, Live Calls, and . Let s break these down specifically. Programmatic Targeting employs a sophisticated automated bidding platform to deliver advertising. Many dealers already use a rudimentary form of programmatic commonly known as remarketing or retargeting. In this instance visitors landing on a dealer s website site or landing page trigger a program that serves up ads when these people move on to visit other sites such as news sources, vehicle review sites etc. Behavioral Programmatic Targeting uses an automated bidding platform within Google. The fundamental advantage here is that the prospect does not have to visit your dealership s site for specific ads to be served up to them. They are identified by their browsing behaviors on thousands of other sites across the web and, based on their search criteria, are then targeted with your custom ads. Direct Mail marketing allows you to put your message in front of the prospect with a medium they very familiar and comfortable with. Unique mailers, personalized letters, invitations, post cards and other formats allow you to stand out in the mailbox and also target the best prospects on your list. For example, you may want to target the segment that most likely has a positive equity position with a buyback offer. Live Calls are an ideal channel to follow up with prospects who have shown interest by requesting more information, or who fit the positive or neutral equity position and thereby increase your appointments, test drives, and sales. Marketing facilitates your ability to put custom OEM offers in front of these hot prospects. With direct links to your website on specific vehicles and service specials, you are able to drive traffic to your website and showroom floor. 5 Select your Messaging. The type of messaging you present plays an important role winning response. Remember: these in-market shoppers exhibited their interest by searching for your brand or like brands, as well as other behaviors that identify the best prospects for your messaging, and what it needs to be to drive them to respond. The main offers you should present are; OEM promotions and incentives, factory rebates, and buyback offers. In some instances special event offers will resonate along with service specials and test drive promotions. When your marketing resonates and moves the prospect toward a more personalized buying experience, your messaging becomes exponentially more compelling and effective. epush!

4 6 Tracking your ROI. It is imperative that you track and verify your campaigns in order to measure your success and make crucial adjustments. At a minimum you should use Google Analytics to track your site traffic and campaign response. Many programmatic platforms report on basic traffic such as impressions and conversions. Live Calls reports should show connection ratios and appointment metrics along with topic of interest. Ideally, you or your agency will have a KPI dashboard that aggregates these essential metrics. At the end of each month you should match your sales reports with your campaign prospects to determine your response rates and ROI. This is the only way to know for sure if the money you re spending is worth it. 7 Pick the right team. Not all agencies are alike and since dealing with Behavioral Marketing is a new technology, your best move is to look for specific capabilities when conducting an agency search. Does the agency outsource the key components of the program such as data? If so, you may find it negatively affects your ROI if they have to go outside to hygiene and suppress the data following the recipe in this report. Additionally, the data may not be as good as you would expect because key components that impact data quality are too expensive when outsourced to various vendors. Agencies who compile their own data and keep it updated are the key to keeping costs low and ROI high. Make sure the agency you choose uses a multichannel approach when targeting your prospects to insure a better success rate. Look for a KPI dashboard and end of campaign sales match report so you can track and manage your campaigns efficiently and effectively. Behavioral marketing is a mix of art and science. When you track specific events and deliver a compelling message at the right time, your results will pay huge dividends and pave the way for future sustainable growth at your dealership. epush!

5 Understanding Consumer Engagement Process The rise of Real Time Intent Based data driven marketing to consumers is the next evolution of Behavioral Data compilation and enhancement. Understand how the consumer of tomorrow will communicate and engage so you can evolve your dealership to engage the consumer effectively. Once you understand how behavioral data, online and offline purchase intent, and data enhancements are driving vehicle sales, you ll be able to position your dealership to engage the highly advanced and educated consumers of tomorrow. The epush! Behavioral Marketing Platform uses proprietary visibility into the real-time shopping behaviors and purchase intent of consumers inside your DMA. Our multi-channel intent-based marketing programs connect you with your competitor's customers and reanimate your CRM's missed opportunities to ensure you sell and retain more sales. Learn More by taking a demo of the epush! BMP Platform. About The Behavioral Marketing Platform The epush! Behavioral Marketing Platform, is a component of the epush! Data & Technology solutions portfolio. The platform powers the delivery of exceptional data & technology, leveraging customer data and behaviors. It provides analytical insights and cross-channel interactions. The cloud-based platform provides a robust solution for agencies and dealerships alike. To find out more, contact us at and visit epush.com/request-a-demo epush!