Gaining business is the key aim of Marketing.  

The cost of acquiring a new customer is quite expensive.

However, a dealer will have a database of customers they have acquired previously (either by selling them a car, or maybe by doing a service or MOT).

A Dealer Management System should be able to help you make the most of this data to target customers for specific marketing campaigns as well as automating the day to day marketing.

But, there are a few key concepts that are important are part of this process

Keeping all your customer data together!

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You should seek to have a single database which is the source of truth for all your customers, prospects along with all their history.

This is easier said than done.   Many dealers will have several different databases of records  for example :-

• Their Dealer Management System
• a Separate CMS system
• an online system with Web enquiries in

To make the best use of your data, it is important that your data is synchronised and centralised in a single place. Normally, your Dealer Management System would be a good place as it has most transactional information in.

To achieve this means integrating online leads, sales prospecting and interaction into the DMS, either by integration of your CRM system with your DMS or better still having CRM as a core part of your Dealer Management System.

Once your data is all together, it provides a powerful way of segmenting and targeting your marketing  based on the wealth of information you have.   eg a Sales Prospect may also be an existing service customer which will change the levels of marketing that you may send to this audience.

Having your customer information centralised and accessible by all means that every customer interaction by anyone in the dealership is done from a position of knowing the total position.

For example, for a customer whose car was delivered last week, it might be useful for the Sales Executive to be able to see that the car is booked into the workshop for a warranty repair before he rings the customer up to see if he is enjoying the car!

Keep your data clean.

Typically dealers will collate more and more customer data over the years and the vast amount of old or out of data data hampers the marketing concept.  

It's important therefore to keep your data clean!

Keeping data clean is an ongoing task, this will enable a dealer to do the following :-

1. Remove deceased people!
2. Remove vehicles which have been scrapped
3. Flag vehicles which have had an owner change
4. Delete records from marketing when a customer hasn't visited the dealership for some time
5. Update addresses when a customer moves house.
6. Update MOT expiry dates even if the customer doesn't have you do their MOT

Systems such as Navigator should be able to automate this process.

But, what's the benefit of this process?

All marketing costs money. The cost may be through the cost of text messages, letters or the time and cost of making phone calls.     

Clearly, ringing someone to discuss the service of a vehicle they no longer own, is a waste of time - and money.

Even a "free" marketing process using email needs to work from an clean database,  as sending mail which gets marked as "junk" will reduce your online reputation and mean that your email will be more likely to hit the junk folder!

Keeping your customer database clean and tidy means that your marketing efforts can be more easily targeted and that you will not waste time in marketing or contacting people that are not likely to buy.

This follows the concept of having a Minimal Viable Audience - the key word being "viable".

Segmenting your marketing using data intelligence

When carrying out a marketing campaign, it's important to segment your audience, so that your marketing can be targeted.  This means you are sending relevant marketing to customers.

To do this requires you to categorise your customers into categories (some customers may fill more than one category).  For example :-

• New and Used Car purchasers who bought from you
• Customers who have had their car serviced in the past couple of years
• Customers who have visited the workshop but not recently
• Retail / Fleet customers
• Customers that bought their cars in the past few years, as opposed to older ones

With a centralised and clean database, this segmentation should be simple to achieve.  It means that you can send campaigns to these customers with relative ease.

Your DMS system should be able to create these lists, and then send emails, text messages or even letters to them with the ability to queue up for follow up by the telephone if needed.

Automate regular campaigns

One regular and key marketing effort is in Service retention - ensuring that customers return to the dealership time and time again for regular maintenance and statutory MOT checks.   This is a process that should be largely automated, with multi-layer contact by email/sms/telephone.

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The Navigator Aftersales Contact Manager does precisely this for example.

Conclusion

It's important to use all the tools you can to maintain an accurate, clean and valuable database of customer records which you can use to your advantage for highly targeted Marketing.    Your Dealer Management System in particular should become the key core source of truth for customer data and you should do all you can to ensure it has a full view of every customer and prospect interaction.

Once you have this, you can then continuously cleanse and farm this data.   Your DMS should help you to achieve this effortlessly.

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