Digital and social media marketing is a necessity for auto-dealerships these days. Research conducted by Deloitte in 2020 shows that 71% of consumers prefer buying vehicles in-person. However, as every dealer knows, consumers these days educate themselves thoroughly on the type of vehicle they want. They treat a visit to the dealership as an opportunity to haggle over prices.
Auto dealers have invested significant amounts of money into digital marketing. However, their approach to digital marketing amounts to throwing up a few ads and waiting for clicks. These days, personalization and tailored customer journeys are the keys to closing sales.
Integrating your automotive CRM software with your digital marketing platform is the key to getting to know your customers better. Here are 4 CRM best practices that will help you design better ad campaigns that bring more sales for your business.
Attribute traffic sources accurately
Everything that is measured can be improved. This is a truism in digital marketing. The key to measuring the progress of your marketing campaigns is traffic attribution. Most digital marketing platforms allow you to link prospect information to a completed sale, along with recording checkpoints along the way.
However, you need to connect this information to your CRM so you know how your customer entered your marketing funnel in the first place. A simple way to do this is to use automated pixel tracking features that most marketing platforms give you.
Using a pixel, you can tie your marketing campaigns back to individual customer listings in your CRM software and receive an end-to-end view of what your customer’s journey was like.
Also, track UTM parameters (attributes that you attach to a URL), ad network value parameters, and any other custom URL parameters you might have created. Track your prospects in as granular a manner as possible.
This approach gives you valuable data that you can use to create better campaigns in the future.
Automate lead nurturing
Most digital marketing departments rest after knowing that a prospect has entered their funnel. At this point, they turn their attention to generating more leads and trust that their existing content and copy resources will do the job to push prospects deeper into the funnel and to a sale.
The problem is that consumers these days are used to being drawn into funnels. They demand nurturing and reward the companies that spend time engaging with them and providing them with more information. Lead nurturing is a practice that is easily automated, so it isn’t as if it costs your marketing department additional resources.
Examples of automated lead nurturing include redirecting people to a page that gives them more information based on what they told you, assigning them to a sales executive, adding them to a lead nurturing newsletter, prompting them to book a visit by directing them to a calendar tool, and so on.
Continuous engagement is the key to converting prospects into sales. Create an automated follow-up workflow within your CRM to get in touch with a prospect as soon as they give you their information. An automated message followed by a phone call or message will give you an edge over your competition.
Record all of these interactions in your CRM and use them as data to inform your marketing campaigns.
Prefill data to reduce opt-in friction
Opt-in friction is one of the biggest reasons for low conversion rates. CRM, married to marketing data, can help you spot holes in your funnel and identify areas that need optimization.
Many digital marketing teams make the mistake of asking for a ton of data upfront. For instance, if a customer wants to join a mailing list to receive price updates, it doesn’t make sense to collect anything other than their name and email address.
Asking them for their phone number, home address, marital status, their gender, etc only builds friction. A better approach is progressively collecting more data throughout their journey. At the first step, collect their name and email. In the second step, collect their phone number and so on.
All of these data are stored in your CRM, and you can use them to pre-fill data in forms that are deep in the buyer journey. This way, your prospect doesn’t have to enter all their information once again. Thus, you reduce friction and gather valuable marketing data thanks to using your CRM strategically.
Leverage CRM for lookalike audiences
The secret to digital marketing success is retargeting and creating lookalike audiences. Retargeting can typically be done from within your CRM software. You can design campaigns to re-engage cold leads and push old MQLs to convert to SQLs.
Lookalike audiences can be created by leveraging CRM data to identify people who display similar behavior to your existing customers. The key to creating good lookalike audiences is to segment your audience accurately.
Creating a macro-level lookalike audience will only result in you gathering a list of people who marginally resemble your best customers. The more granular your audience segments are, the better.
A wealth of data
Auto dealers these days collect a wealth of data, but deriving insight is tougher than it looks. Use your CRM software in conjunction with marketing software to achieve the best results. These 4 best practices will help you convert more of your leads to customers, and increase your bottom line in the process.
