4 Steps to Closing More Sales with Marketing Automation

Wouldn’t it be great to know who was visiting your dealership website, what they were clicking on, and when they were visiting? It seems too good to be true, but there is a way with Marketing Automation. This tool integrates with your website platform to simplify and streamline your marketing efforts. It is customizable, unique to your dealership’s business goals, and fully automated to help you convert more leads to sales.

While Marketing Automation includes a vast range of capabilities and can incorporate various settings that are unique to your dealership, there are four basic steps involved:

1. Lead Identification. 
   As soon as a website visitor fills out a lead form, their information is stored, and they become a lead.
2. Lead Tracking. 
   Once the lead has been identified, Marketing Automation begins to track all the actions that the lead takes on your website. This includes buttons they click on, pages they visit (and frequency of visits), forms they fill out, and more. Marketing Automation also tracks a lead’s engagement with your emails and activity on your social media accounts.
3. Lead Scoring. 
   Based on a lead’s behavior and the actions they take on your site, Marketing Automation assigns them a score. Your dealership decides what kinds of actions are important and how important they are. For example, you may consider a click on your “Request a Quote” button to be more valuable than a click on your “Send to a Friend” button – so you’d assign scores to those actions accordingly. The total score of each lead, which takes all their online behavior into account, indicates to your sales team how high of a priority each lead is.
4. Lead Nurturing (+ Custom Messaging). 
   Because you can see exactly what each lead is doing on your site, you know what that lead’s interests are and how best to follow up with them. Again, settings that your dealership creates can trigger emails to your leads based on the actions they take. And, when your sales team sees a high enough lead score that they are ready to reach out, they’ll know exactly how to customize their sales pitch to best entice that lead.

While there are too many powerful aspects within Marketing Automation to cover in one blog post, this outlines the ways it can solidify online leads that convert to sales for your dealership. The key to Marketing Automation is that it improves the online experience by allowing your business to get personal with website visitors. It makes them feel recognized and understood on an individual level – something that would be impossible to do otherwise. Marketing Automation improves your dealership’s bottom line by reaching the right customers with the right messages at the right time.