MEET THE CLIENT
The client is an award-winning auto dealership based in Texas, USA. They had a strong team that catered to commercial and institutional sales.
They were catering to retail as well as fleet orders in a fast-paced business environment where the competition from other dealerships is pretty stiff. They are driven by the understanding that business owners and fleet manager, don’t have the time for the hype and hassle that is typically associated with vehicle shopping.
They were going by the ethos that purchasing fleet motor vehicles, service vans, pickups, or larger delivery trucks, fleet managers are to be provided with the right vehicle, for the best price — without having to spend hours at a dealership to get it.
THE KEY CHALLENGES
Though they had their business practices in the best shape their fleet sales representative were not equipped with the right ammunition – in this case, data – to penetrate bigger markets.
Without a doubt, data has become the currency of today’s economy, fueling competitive advantage. The concept of data-driven marketing has become a fundamental approach across a wide number of businesses, including the automotive sector. Consumers want relevant messages to be delivered on their preferred channels and at their preferred times. Customers are irritated and, in some cases, driven away when brands fail to deliver. A data-driven marketing approach is required to successfully deliver this type of hyper-targeted marketing.
Customer acquisition and retention will improve, as will customer experiences and revenue, for automotive brands that include data-driven marketing into their overall plans.
Fleet sales reps, for the most part, understand that you don’t have time to waste, and with a data-backed sales model, they can most often interact with prospects and leads with more relevance and effectiveness. This also amplifies the customer experience to a great extent. They are often better equipped to provide competitive pricing upfront, without the back-and-forth by having data backed perspective about the customer.
What Happened Next?
Data is bigger and more prevalent than it has ever been, and the Dealership realized they couldn’t rely solely on internal data. They quickly discovered that data stored in CRM systems, billing and shipping databases, and customer service centers are a wonderful place to start, but that they needed to tap into third-party sources of highly specialized automotive intelligence to boost their competitive advantage.
Every day, consumers generate mountains of data. When sifting through mountains of data to locate the knowledge that can genuinely make a difference, “analysis paralysis” might set in. This is the point when this dealership decided to partner with Lake B2B to fulfill their data-related delivery and marketing operations. We having sifted through thousands of data sources, aggregating the most comprehensive automotive intelligence and marketing data that helped to have a direct impact on the fleet Dealerships bottom line.
THE SOLUTION
Lake B2B was able to include a host of data intelligence in a CRM or prospecting database by scouring its data repositories.
“You can receive the best value, but if the fleet vehicle is underpowered or too tiny to accomplish the job, you’ve overpaid, regardless of how good the deal is.”
With preconceived data intelligence at their fingertips enabled streamlining of the sales process to a considerable extent.
This included insights of fleet requirements of prospects like:
- What exactly will they be hauling in the vehicle?
- How much space will that require?
- How much payload will the truck need?
Also the vehicle type (pickup, van, or box truck) and size (half-ton, three-quarter-ton, one-ton, and so forth) of the fleet has already inducted.
With fleet representatives backed with this data insight of their prospects – upfront – they were able to match the right fleet vehicles for their customer’s application.
Lake B2B also captures data insights that help maintain their inventory more efficiently.
This included answers for:
- Will you need a regular cab, extended cab, or crew cab?
- How will the payload be organized?
- Will the vehicle need special shelving, toolboxes, ladder racks?
- Will the vehicle need to pull a trailer? What size and how much weight?
- Will the vehicle require a two-wheel or four-wheel drive?
- How many people, including the driver, will be in the vehicle at any one time?
- Will the vehicle need to be driven off-road enough to justify the added expense of a four-wheel drive?
We were also able to provide the dealership with several specialized data insights of what fleet managers have already inducted into their fleets. This included information such as Make, Model, and Year as derived directly from VINs; selections such as engine size, fuel type, drive train, engine block, and engine cylinders; response performance indicator models, and auto equity data. This enabled highly targeted marketing.
By extracting this data into their Business Intelligence tools this Auto dealer was able to target consumers who may be ready to purchase within the next several months with statistically modeled values that indicate an inclination for an enterprise to purchase a vehicle for its fleet. This entails pursuing the customer before they visit a competitor’s showroom. This, when combined with other consumer characteristics, helps dealerships locate ready-to-buy, sell, or lease for prospects in a certain geographic area.
Also identifying the vehicles that a dealership sold or performed regular service or after they are sold to a new owner, the dealer was able to contact the new owner with service offers.
This means less wasted marketing efforts sending vehicle-specific pieces to consumers who may not own that automobile anymore. This enables identification of service prospects by targeting new owners of vehicles that the center is familiar with, and optimized audience targeting with enhanced data and consumer insights.
This data also enabled to capitalize on manufacturer incentives tp align offers to the most prospective fleet owners via marketing campaigns.
THE RESULT
Multi-channel marketing campaigns were formulated based on these data insights.
Email Marketing
Email marketing brought about 42% of a dealership’s leads. The key to the success of email marketing revolved around using analytics and data to segment marketing lists. Email segmentation enabled to cut through the clutter by providing offers and communications based on segmented audiences or groups of consumers.
Direct Mail
With the rising emphasis on digital channels, old-fashioned direct mail was also not overlooked. However, the advent of Big Data has given new life to direct mail marketing, giving this dealership new ways to pinpoint consumers with tailored offers.
By enhancing 1st party dealership data with our 3rd party specialty automotive data, fleet marketers were able to achieve a holistic customer view to craft highly targeted offers based on shown purchase indicators like searches, likes, conversations. Now it’s pretty evident to marketers what type of marketing message fleet managers will most likely respond to.
With auto data appending enabled effective automotive direct mail marketing because in this case, the 360-degree customer view isn’t complete without the consideration of the current vehicles owned by the prospects. Some fleet car customers are extremely loyal to a single brand, and this knowledge is required so that marketers don’t waste money making offers for vehicles that the customer would never consider. This information can also be used to target consumers with positive equity who are wanting to buy and for buy-back offers.
With direct mail the client was able to see positive results,that showed the most ROI when it’s implemented as a multichannel campaign. Lake B2B also utilized popular channels to integrate with a direct mail campaign such as email and social media that was cited by 48% of survey respondents, and this included web leads as well. Analytics revealed that 43% of customers visited the dealership’s website after receiving direct mail marketing. We also ensured that the website is optimized for mobile and ready for traffic before a direct mail piece is sent out.
Digital Advertising
When the Consumer purchase path spans more digital channels, there is a tremendous opportunity for automotive brands to influence consumers at key stages of decision making.
With the use of our data, it was possible for sophisticated use of digital advertising, allowing for finely tuned audience targeting. Our data enabled us to target consumers by a range of criteria and across platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and more. The segments used for targeting included a mix of vehicle type, make, model, year, in-market consumers, vehicle history and garage data, demographics.
This data and insights from Lake B2B enabled dealerships in knowing who is buying what, what types of fleet vehicles they drive, which geographies they serve, and which channels and messages are most likely to compel them to act.
On a closing note, Lake B2B’s marketing data-enabled multichannel marketing with increased open rates. We were also able to provide better content relevance and reduce opt-out and unsubscribe rates. This ensured better campaign deliverability that resulted in greater revenue.
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