How well do you know your sales and service customers? Not just the customers who have purchased a car in the last month, or the ones who get their cars serviced on a regular basis, but all of your customers?

Considering your dealership has thousands of contacts in its DMS, it’s highly unlikely —and unrealistic—that you know your customers…

What are your marketing goals in 2020? One of the biggest pain points for dealers is deciding where to spend their marketing dollars to get the results they want. Many dealers feel like their marketing strategies don’t perform as well as they used to, which, when combined with declining sales profitability, puts extra pressure on marketers to up their…

Most auto dealerships do some, if not all of their service marketing with their manufacturer owner retention programs (ORPs). The purpose of ORPs is stated in the name: to build customer loyalty. But how well do these programs deliver on that promise?

The results from ORPs are all over the board. Some dealerships effectively use ORPs to…

Owner retention programs (ORPs) are one of the most used marketing tools and have been used by dealerships for many years. However, most ORPs are run in a silo, separate from the rest of the dealership’s marketing strategy.

This practice results in an inconsistent, less than optimal experience for dealership customers. The way it currently…

Your dealership has probably been using an owner retention program (ORPs) for years, but when was the last time you evaluated the effectiveness of each communication?

One thing is certain. Sending out the same communications with the same messages via the same channels, again and again, isn’t a winning strategy. The goal of an ORP is to…

When we think of using customer data, it’s often in the context of marketing. I’ve written previously on how…

For such a small word, the word ‘data’ packs a pretty big punch. Some marketers get overwhelmed when they hear it because they believe it’s complicated. Others give it a bad rap without really understanding the benefits.

Yet it’s difficult to deny the advantages of data-driven marketing:

• 2 out of 3 leading marketers admit…

Most marketers think of third-party data as something to be used in conquest marketing. While it's true that we must rely on 3rd-party data to acquire new customers, it's important not to overlook the value of this data in marketing to your current customers.

Most companies use only 12 percent of the data they have on hand, which means 88…

Most people think about marketing as a way to generate immediate ROI. For every email campaign sent out, we measure its success with metrics like open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), number of sales or ROs, or even dollars generated.

While it's important to expect accountability from your marketing partner, sometimes it's easy to get lost…

One of the biggest challenges for dealers today is knowing which marketing channels deliver the best reach, frequency and ROI. For marketers everywhere, it can be difficult to reach an intended audience, and when they do, many times the audience isn't paying attention.

Take television, for example. Many dealerships still create and air…

How long does it take to build customer loyalty? It might start with a great sales experience, but if a customer feels like they've been taken advantage of in the sales process, it will be hard convincing them to come back for service. True customer loyalty is built over a period of several years in the service drive.

But providing a great…

As many dealership marketers know, search campaigns are a necessary part of a multi-channel marketing strategy. The danger with search campaigns is the potential for pay-per-clicks to become very expensive, which tends to happen when marketing vendors use a single strategy for all dealerships, and set up campaigns as…

When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook reigns supreme with Instagram a close second. These are ideal platforms on which to raise brand awareness, bring customers down funnel and generate leads.

For dealers, a presence on Facebook and Instagram is essential, because quite simply, this is where your customers are spending their time.…

For car dealers, the opportunity to create loyal customers might start with a sale, but true loyalty is created in the service department. According to a 2017 IHS Markit study, the average length of car ownership is nearly seven years. That's a long time to maintain a relationship with someone until the next sales cycle.

So, the focus must be…