Funnel, funnel, funnel! That’s all we ever hear but what good is a funnel if you don’t nurture conversion? The average automotive dealer regularly pumps money into at least a dozen different lead sources, but most drop the ball on follow up.
At RMN Marketing, we’ve been following the marketing habits of automotive dealerships and discovered that over a 90 day period, 75% of dealerships made two attempts or less to contact a build and price web lead and that 15% of dealerships ignored them completely.
You’ll never convert a lead you don’t interact with, so the first rule of thumb for converting leads quickly is to follow up multiple times and in multiple ways. Here are some of the ways we attract and retain leads that convert for our clients.
Digital advertising: Digital ads are cost effective, and they work really well when your content is top notch. We like to rotate ads and use attractive video content to support our clients’ success.
Contests: At RMN Marketing, we’ve given away tons of cash and automobiles to help our clients attract new customers. We’ve got a formula that we’ve been tweaking for the Effective Selling Program and the results get better every time we run a contest.
Email: Once you secure consent, you can email your leads to entice them to book an appointment, take advantage of an incentive, or to register for a contest. Reaching out to your loyalty customer list and your new leads on a regular basis will help keep you top of mind. Don’t waste any opportunity to repeatedly connect with people who know your brand and connected with you first.
BDC Calls: If your sales team is not into making phone calls to your leads, then it is best to have professional appointment setters do it for you. We offer that service at RMN and it is a key component in our Effective Selling Program.
SMS: Some people respond better to text messaging, so we also use SMS in our Effective Selling Program to help secure and confirm appointments and to encourage people to sign up for our contests. SMS is a great tool to use in tandem with your other outreach tactics and should not be overlooked.
Direct Mail: Hey, don’t forget direct mail. Sending an old fashioned post card directly to your web leads is also an effective way to entice people to come into your dealership. Use it in tandem with your other efforts for maximum results.
Loyalty Marketing: What do you do to secure loyalty after someone has bought a car from your dealership? There are plenty of opportunities to make sure your loyalty customers remain truly loyal, but many dealerships miss the mark.
Another interesting thing we discovered through our recent research is that there really is no such thing as loyalty. Most of the new leads we were able to generate for our clients were from off brand retailers. Even more interesting was that many of those so called loyalty customers stayed loyal to the brand but not the dealership.
One of the most important marketing principles we were able to verify through our work with automotive dealerships is that loyalty is something that must be cultivated, and so must new lead generation. Both your conquest and loyalty business need to be nurtured. Using a multi-pronged approach to uncover and touch potential buyers is the fastest and smartest way to sell more cars.
We’ve doubled the conquest conversion rates for our clients through our Effective Selling Program and shortened their buying cycle, too. Dealerships who fully and correctly participated in our pilot program saw the customer buying cycle shrink by about 60%. In other words, we attracted new customers and targeted them so perfectly that they bought a new vehicle in a third of the time it would normally take!
Yes, we’re taking this opportunity to brag because we know what works and we know how to make your marketing efforts a true success. Whether your focus is on car sales or service, RMN Marketing can bring you customers who are primed and ready to buy faster than ever!
To learn more about RMN's marketing programs and the success we've been having with our clients, call 844-306-7323 to book a consultation with one of our account managers!