Education
Attribution’s Role in Building Customer Loyalty and Retention for Auto Service
Are you paying attention to your attribution model?
Picture someone managing a dealership service department, constantly addressing staffing issues, putting out fires with difficult customers, and managing the on-the-ground details every day.
Sound familiar? It can be challenging – to say the least – to focus on improvement and growth, especially for your marketing budget that’s paltry compared to the one the sales team has.
Customer loyalty and retention are critical to your success. However, achieving customer loyalty and retention can be challenging in an industry where competition is fierce, even between departments working towards many of the same goals, albeit at different stages of the customer journey.
The key to retaining your customers and building brand loyalty is to know what drives them, from pain points to perks and more. These pain points drive their behavior and ultimately, their consumer journey.
Attribution plays an essential role in achieving these objectives – making the most of whatever ad spend you’re allotted for service campaigns – so your service department can flourish.
But how can you monitor campaign performance, marketing effort, and differentiate between situational factors and internal attribution? It’s challenging!
Education
Is All Data Valuable, Accurate, and High-Quality? No, and Here’s Why
The work you do on a daily basis produces valuable data that provides insight, clarity, and a competitive advantage for your dealership.
Your team grabs engagement stats from social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Clickthrough rates from email blasts. Traffic from web lurkers on your website through Google Analytics (have you migrated to GA4 yet?). And any traffic from your CRM system factors in there somewhere too. Inbound marketing data streams in from every source you’ve invested in, but what does it all mean to you?
Are you even collecting the right data? What about relevant data? Can you trust your data source?
The car biz is worth billions upon billions of dollars in the US alone, and all you want is to get a fair share of the pie… and perhaps a little extra. Smart marketing can give you an edge against the competition and help you figure out what methods are working well to compel clients and would-be customers to come back for a visit. And that requires a good grasp of the raw data piling in from all of those channels.
But looking at the raw data may not serve the purpose you’re after. As it is, it could mislead you, making you push all your chips into a marketing channel that’s not as effective as it appears. Not all data is equal, and it needs to be put through a filter to determine what stays and what goes.
Education
Data Privacy Blurs Analytics Data. Here’s How, and Why It Matters
In the ever-evolving digital age, data privacy has become an increasingly important factor in the way we do business. This is especially true in the automotive industry, where car dealerships are struggling to keep up with customer attribution details due to new privacy laws.
There’s no question that safely using and storing data is important, and every one of us wants our data protected too. But these data privacy laws affect analytics data. It matters to car dealership owners, general managers, and marketing managers especially. Explore what the challenges are and how you can navigate the murky waters.
Education
What Metrics Are Commonly Used in Attribution, and What Do They Mean?
If you’re in the automotive industry, it’s highly likely that you use attribution metrics to measure and generate insights on customer journeys. Understanding how customers interact with your online and offline marketing channels is essential for optimizing ad campaigns, adjusting pricing strategies, and targeted messaging.
But when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of what these types of metrics actually mean – well, that can be a bit more complicated. In this blog post, we’re breaking down the basics of what five common attribution metrics are as well as their underlying meaning so dealerships and marketers alike can have easy access to a high-level understanding of these key topics.
Education
Four Challenges In Using Attribution
Is the automotive industry complex? Absolutely.
Regardless of which department you’re exploring – service, parts, collision repairs, or sales – more than two-thirds of all leads come from online while virtually 100% of sales happen in person. But aside from sales, what dealer principals and general managers are most interested in is where their customers are coming from.
Which channels are drawing the most traffic and generating the most revenue? What campaigns have proven most successful in converting shoppers into buyers? While attribution can help answer these questions and others, doing it at the dealer level can pose challenges that can render the results less effective than they could be, or they could be altogether misinterpreted.
Marketing Efficiency
How to Sell your GM on an Attribution Tool
“What brought you in today?” It’s a common question car salespeople ask every customer. It’s a tactic to get the shopper talking and opening up, and it can help find out what channels bring in dealership traffic. But it’s inaccurate, and it doesn’t account for much more than the most recent touchpoint a customer recalls. And it’s not the best way to measure marketing metrics. That’s where attribution comes into play.
It can be hard to justify the investment in attribution: why do you need it, what are potential benefits and how can it help meet your dealership’s goals? You know that there is a great deal of value in having an attribution tool, but what about convincing others? This blog post will give you some ideas for selling your general manager on investing in an attribution tool.
Education
How to Prepare for Falling Used Car Prices
The strength of the US economy has pushed interest rates up, attempting to slow inflation to near-normal rates. Caught in the crossfire between outrageous spending and government policy is the fifth-largest industry in the country: auto retail. And sure as the day is long, pricing is bound to soften as consumers’ budgets are constricted by rising everyday costs of groceries, mortgages, and utilities. That’s particularly true for the used car market.
How-To
HOW TO WIN 2023
No one really knows if there will be a recession, or a challenging economy, or what will come next given the last 3 years have been so unpredictable, but it’s good to be prepared. The best way to win when you get thrown curveballs, is to get back to basics.
We’ve scoured the automotive community for insights and some of these are sure to help. (ASOTU and the All Things Used Cars podcast were great sources of information for this piece – they are fantastic resources we recommend subscribing to if you don’t already.)
Marketing Strategy
Setting Your Dealership Marketing Budget for the new year
It’s that time of year again. Time to look back and evaluate what went wrong, and what you did right. No one can really tell you what next year will bring, but somehow you’re expected to know and plan for it. A dealership marketing budget doesn’t define itself, you do.
Even if you aren’t a novice, it’s always good to review your process.
Marketing Strategy
Making Marketing Decisions in A Tough Market
Making Marketing Decisions in A Tough Market
Head of Customer Experience
When I started to write this, my initial thought was to write about how dealers and the automotive industry are facing some upcoming challenges with inventory and inflation… but I stopped myself because in all reality the automotive industry and dealers in particular have been turned on their heads for the last 3 years. So I’m going to start with,
“Hold on to your hats. We’re in for another wild ride.”
