Accommodate Every Customer with Marketing Automation

The transition to a digital-first world makes many aspects of running a business easier. In most ways, having an online presence allows for a more effective business strategy as well. However, keeping track of every customer’s wants and needs as well as offering personalized outreach to each customer is made much more difficult with digital marketing. When someone enters your showroom and heads over to a specific display, it is clear what they may be interested in buying. It’s easy for your sales team to offer input and to answer questions that the customer may have, and it’s simple to be sure that each customer receives the proper amount of attention and follow-up. But when someone visits your website or interacts with your business digitally, being able to accommodate their needs becomes much more challenging.

Marketing Automation helps clear the path and show your sales team how to interact with each and every online prospect. While nearly every website visitor is anonymous without the use of a Marketing Automation tool, all can be identified and tracked using Marketing Automation after filling out a lead form. Typically, 98% of website visitors leave a website without converting¹, but with Marketing Automation you have a much higher chance of engaging prospects in the right ways to encourage them to return. Personalized outreach and lead nurturing through Marketing Automation makes 91% of consumers more likely to give you their business² and generates 50% more sales opportunities³ for your dealership.  

Let’s consider a possible customer’s journey to purchase:

• At the very beginning, the customer is simply an anonymous website visitor. After filling out any lead form on your site, Marketing Automation begins tracking all actions the person takes related to your dealership online – including retroactive data that shows the actions they took before they were identified. This gives you a full picture of what each prospect/lead is interested in and how serious they are about buying. The Lead Score that your dealership assigns to each website visitor is based on what actions and qualities are most important to your business in a potential buyer.  
• Perhaps your dealership has set up an automated “Welcome” email for all website visitors who submit an email address on your site, then they are added to a weekly or monthly email list. These emails allow recipients to click, reply, and request more information. All email-related activity is tracked and recorded for overall Lead Score and outreach opportunities.
• Next, your prospect may choose to visit one of your dealership’s social media pages. Any “likes,” comments, shares, or other forms of engagement will be tracked and accounted for in the prospect’s Lead Score – again, helping to paint a full picture of that prospect and their likelihood to convert to a purchase.
• Let’s say that the prospect decides to visit your dealership website again. This time, they browse specific units on the site. Thanks to Marketing Automation, this activity will prompt an automated email that is custom to the inventory they viewed as well as sales opportunities related to the inventory. If the prospect were to reply to that email, that would clearly signal an enormous opportunity for a sale. A text message alert to one of your sales representatives would assure that the hot lead received follow-up immediately, creating the highest possible chance that the prospect would follow through with a purchase.

The life of every lead will be different, but that’s why Marketing Automation is so important to help move customers down the pipeline. Without activity tracking and automated follow-up in place, it would be easy for likely prospects to fall between the cracks. Marketing Automation helps your dealership create a digital environment that mimics the in-store experience, maximizing opportunities and accommodating customers’ personal needs every step of the way.

¹Digital Associate

²SmarterHQ

³Forrester