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Tips for Automotive Appointment Scheduling

admin | Automotive BDC, Automotive Marketing | ,

As the manager or owner of a dealership, we’re guessing that few things annoy you more than an empty service schedule. After all, service appointments are a huge source of revenue for a dealership, so a sparsely populated service schedule presents a huge problem for any automotive operation.

From our experience, one of the best ways to enhance your appointment scheduling is to outsource it to a third-party automotive BDC. In this article, we will discuss why outsourcing your appointment scheduling will help you schedule more appointments and increase your dealership’s ROI.

Why Outsource Your Automotive Appointment Scheduling?

Outsourcing your automotive appointment scheduling has numerous benefits for your marketing efforts. The following are just a few of the most prominent benefits:

  • More Calls Answered: If your service advisors are responsible for answering the phones and scheduling appointments, they will miss many calls because they will be busy helping customers at the dealership. And each missed call is a potential missed appointment. On the other hand, outsourcing your appointment scheduling ensures that nearly 100 percent of your calls are answered, which leads to more appointments scheduled.
  • More Appointments Scheduled: Another reason why third-party BDCs schedule more appointments is because most service advisors are hesitant to fill their schedules during certain times of the day. For example, many service advisors don’t like to schedule appointments on Friday afternoons or afternoons before holidays because they may want to leave early. If you outsource your appointment scheduling, however, you will ensure that your schedules are filled as much as possible, regardless of the time of the workday.
  • Better Customer Experience: Automotive BDCs that offer appointment scheduling services have agents who are highly trained and experienced in providing the best customer service possible. This is important because the customer experience for your dealership starts with the customer’s first phone interaction, and you want to make a positive first impression.
  • Increase in Upselling: Agents at third-party BDCs are trained to upsell customers when they call to schedule an appointment. This means that your appointment schedulers can act as salespeople for your dealership while also ensuring your service schedule is full.

Enhance Your Automotive Appointment Scheduling by Partnering with Customer Traac

If you would like to improve your dealership’s operations by outsourcing your appointment scheduling, or if you would like to speak with an expert in the field to learn more, please reach out to us to see how we can help. At Customer Traac, we work with you to understand your specific goals and needs, so we can provide a personalized service that optimizes your dealership’s marketing and communication efforts. We offer a full range of automotive marketing services, including a full-charge contact center, appointment scheduling, outbound calling campaigns, and a full-service automotive BDC. Our agents go through extensive training to make sure they provide the best customer service and help your business grow.

We partner with dealerships across the United States. Please call us at 763-553-2989 or fill out our contact form to learn more.

omnichannel marketing tablet

How to Improve Your Dealership Marketing Strategies

admin | Automotive Marketing | , ,

Take a look at these five tips for improving your automotive marketing strategy and how Customer Traac may be able to help your dealership grow.

Spend More Time Identifying Your Goals and Needs

Too often, marketers jump right to the strategy without taking enough time to figure out exactly what the problem is and what the goals of the initiative are. This is the best way to ensure your strategy fails; after all, how can you succeed with your marketing strategy if you aren’t even sure what you are trying to accomplish?

Albert Einstein put it best when he said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” In fact, the first tip marketing students learn in business school is that while devising a strategy, spend at least 80 percent of your time identifying the problem and fully understanding what you are trying to accomplish.

So, while devising a marketing strategy for your dealership, be sure to take as much time as possible to fully understand your business problem, business needs, and specific goals.

Take More Time to Understand Your Target Audience

Similarly, while creating your marketing strategy, it is crucial to ensure you understand all aspects of your target audience so you can develop as targeted a message and strategy as possible. This means going beyond the typical demographics of traditional marketing, such as age, gender, income, etc.

In fact, in the digital age where marketing is done primarily online, it is important to understand the digital behaviors of your audience. For example, what are members of your target audience searching for on Google? What are they interacting with on social media? The answers to these questions will allow you to create a targeted digital advertising and marketing strategy that reaches your potential customers where they interact online.

Focus on Automotive Digital Marketing

It’s 2021 and your target audience lives online, which means your marketing efforts must be focused on the digital sphere. This is crucial to keep in mind because not only are your future customers interacting online, but they are also searching for their cars online. So, if you want to keep up, you must build an effective digital marketing strategy.

Building an effective digital marketing strategy involves a diverse range of marketing tactics that aim to capture consumers’ attention online. This involves focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), social media, Google Ads, and much more.

Your Strategy Should Revolve Around Your Customers

As a manager or owner of a dealership, you know that customer service and providing an exceptional customer experience are crucial for a dealership’s success. So, be sure to devise your marketing strategy based on providing the right experience for your customers. While planning your marketing, always ask yourself, “How will this impact our customers? How will our customers react to this?”

Outsource Your Automotive BDC to Enhance Your Marketing and Customer Experience

One of the best ways to ensure a successful dealership marketing strategy is to outsource your automotive marketing efforts to a trusted third party. Outside automotive BDCs can provide expert and objective consulting, while also possessing the resources to create and implement full-scale marketing campaigns. Plus, they can save your dealership lots of time and money, as you will not have to hire and train a team of marketing professionals and spend the time to oversee the campaign.

If you would like to improve your dealership’s marketing by outsourcing your BDC, or if you would like to speak with an expert in the field to learn more, please reach out to us to see how we can help. At Customer Traac, we work with you to understand your specific goals and needs, so we can provide a personalized service that optimizes your dealership’s marketing and communication efforts. We offer a full range of automotive marketing services, including a full-charge contact center, appointment scheduling, outbound calling campaigns, and a full-service automotive BDC. Our agents go through extensive training to make sure they provide the best customer service and help your business grow.

We partner with dealerships across the United States. Please call us at 763-553-2989 or fill out our contact form to learn more.

digital marketing for the automotive industry

What is Digital Automotive Marketing?

admin | Automotive Marketing | ,

Digital marketing is the future of marketing, especially in the automotive industry, where more and more consumers are searching for cars and how to service them online. So, as a dealership, it is crucial for you to be on top of the latest digital marketing trends and how they impact the automotive industry.

While we don’t have the time to go through all trends in digital marketing, this article will discuss three of the most important aspects of digital marketing in the automotive industry, along with a few tips for each. We will also discuss how you can receive outside help on your digital marketing efforts to more effectively optimize your marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an excellent way to reach lots of consumers all at once and for a low cost. In the automotive industry, we recommend using email marketing as a way to engage and follow up with current customers. To illustrate, you can use email marketing to invite customers who bought a new car from your dealership for service check-ups, oil changes, and more. You can also use email marketing as a way to promote service discounts and upsell products and services.

Moreover, sending these emails is easy, as you only need to create one email template that you can send to as many people as you’d like. You can also create different email campaigns for different types of customers to better target your messaging.

To create effective email marketing campaigns, we recommend using email marketing software companies such as HubSpot, Constant Contact, or MailChimp. These platforms allow you to organize customer data and create easy-to-use email marketing templates. We also recommend seeking outside help from experts in the field who can help optimize your campaign based on industry best-practices. We’ll discuss this further at the end of this article.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Paid advertising is a huge aspect of digital marketing and usually comes in the form of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or other online advertising platforms. This is referred to as “pay-per-click” advertising because as the advertiser, you usually only pay for ads on which consumers click. In other words, your ad could be shown 10,000 times, but if it is only clicked on five times, you only pay for those five clicks.

Pay-per-click advertising can be effective for two main reasons. First, because you are paying for exposure, it is much easier to reach consumers who may be interested in your products or services. Secondly, it is easy to target your ads to a specific audience to ensure that only certain people see them. To illustrate, with Google Ads, you are able to target your ads to people who search for specific phrases (or “keywords”) on Google.

For example, as a dealership, you may decide to advertise a discount for oil changes. If you do, you can target your ads to Google searchers in your specific geographic area and only show your ad to people searching for “oil change near me,” “cheap oil change,” and other related keywords.

Social Media Management

As you are well aware, social media is everything in today’s world. All of your customers and potential customers live and breathe Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. So, it is crucial for your dealership to be active on social media to reach customers where they interact the most.

While managing your dealership’s social media, there are many things to keep in mind. Here are three of the most important tips to remember:

  • Respond Quickly: Social media is all about communicating with your customers. So, if a customer asks you a question or interacts with a picture or post, you should respond right away to keep them engaged.
  • Employ Different Strategies for Each Platform: Not all social media is the same, as each platform has different guidelines and ways it operates. For example, Instagram is entirely picture-based; Facebook has almost no organic reach; and Twitter is about being as brief as possible. We won’t go through the ins and outs of each platform here, but be sure to study each platform before you use it and employ unique strategies for each that are tailored toward that specific platform.
  • Commit to Your Social Media: If you are going to be active on social media, be sure you devise an all-out strategy that will allow you to take advantage of each platform. In other words, don’t “half-ass” it. Either spend the time and money to fully optimize each platform, or don’t bother wasting your energy. We highly recommend the former, as social media is where your customers are most active.

Enhance Your Dealership’s Digital Automotive Marketing with Customer Traac

If you are looking for digital automotive marketing help for your dealership, or if you would like to speak with an expert in the field to learn more, please reach out to us to see how we can help. At Customer Traac, we work with you to understand your specific goals and needs, so we can provide a personalized service that optimizes your dealership’s marketing and communication efforts. We offer a full range of automotive marketing services, including a full-charge contact center, appointment scheduling, outbound calling campaigns, and a full-service automotive BDC. Our agents go through extensive training to make sure they provide the best customer service and help your business grow.

We partner with dealerships across the United States. Please call us at 763-553-2989 or fill out our contact form to learn more.

email marketing

Tips For Automotive Email Marketing

admin | Automotive Marketing | ,

Gaining a competitive edge in marketing can make or break a dealership, so it is important to master the art of automotive marketing. While there are many aspects of automotive marketing worth studying, for this article, we will focus on email marketing.

Specifically, we will go over some tips for ensuring you run your email marketing as efficiently as possible. We will then discuss why outsourcing your email marketing efforts may be best for maximizing your ROI.

Tips for Effective Automotive Email Marketing

While mastering the art of automotive email marketing takes time and sufficient resources, we recommend taking into account the following to ensure you start your dealership off on the right track:

  • Understand Your Specific Marketing Goals: Before you begin your campaign, be sure to understand exactly what you are trying to achieve by using email marketing. While this may seem obvious, too many dealerships don’t take the time to set specific goals for their campaigns, which results in low ROI and lots of unnecessary spending. We recommend making sure your goals are specific, measurable, and achievable. In other words, a goal of “increasing service appointments” is too broad. Instead, create goals more along the lines of the following: “Increase service leads for oil changes by 10 percent among customers who purchased from my dealership within the last five years.”
  • Become Experts on Your Target Audience: One of the core values of marketing is effective communication. And you must be able to communicate with your customers in a way that works for them. So, before you start your campaign, be sure to learn everything there is to know about your target audience. Learn who they are, how they like to receive their emails, when they like to receive them, whether they read their emails on mobile or desktop devices, and anything else you can find out that may influence how you market your products and services.
  • Don’t Send Too Many Emails: One of the worst things that can happen during an email marketing campaign is having your recipients list your emails as “spam.” And one of the best ways to get customers to label your emails as “spam” is to send too many emails. In other words, don’t annoy your customers with a bombardment of messages. The amount of emails you should send depends on what you’re trying to do and who your target audience is. To illustrate, if you’re trying to reach customers who are already active with your dealership, you can probably send them 1-2 emails per month. However, if you’re trying to engage new customers, you may want to limit your communication to one email every 1-2 months. Anything more than that may be taken as annoying and could prompt your customers to unsubscribe or label you as “spam.”

Outsource Your Automotive Email Marketing to Increase ROI

While abiding by the tips listed above will help you enhance your marketing, we recommend outsourcing your email marketing efforts to fully optimize your campaigns and increase your ROI. The following are just some of the benefits your dealership will receive by outsourcing your email marketing campaigns to a third-party automotive BDC:

  • Save Money: One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing your email marketing campaigns is the money you will save. If you manage your own campaigns, you must cover all of the costs associated with this operation, including:
    • Finding and hiring marketing experts
    • Conducting exhaustive company and marketing training
    • Salary, benefits, and other overhead costs for employees

On the other hand, if you outsource your email marketing, you only pay one cost. And while this exact cost depends on many factors, it is never as high as the combination of the costs listed above.

  • Save Time: In addition to saving money, outsourcing your marketing efforts saves you valuable time. Finding and hiring employees, training them, and overseeing the extensive operations of a full-scale email marketing campaign takes lots of time that could be better spent on selling cars or servicing customers at the dealership. We recommend working with a trained third-party BDC, so you can focus your time and energy on growing your business.
  • Work with Email Marketing Experts: We’re guessing that you specialize in selling and servicing cars, not automotive email marketing. So why waste your time and money hiring and training new employees when you can work with professionals who are experts in automotive email marketing? Moreover, working with an outside BDC allows you to run a campaign with experts who can view your goals and needs from a neutral standpoint, which will help eliminate internal biases that can negatively affect marketing efforts.

Enhance Your Dealership by Partnering with Customer Traac

If you would like to improve your dealership’s email marketing, or if you would like to speak with an expert in the field to learn more, please reach out to us to see how we can help. At Customer Traac, we work with you to understand your specific goals and needs, so we can provide a personalized service that optimizes your dealership’s marketing and communication efforts. We offer a full range of automotive marketing services, including a full-charge contact center, appointment scheduling, outbound calling campaigns, and a full-service automotive BDC. Our agents go through extensive training to make sure they provide the best customer service and help your business grow.

We partner with dealerships across the United States. Please call us at 763-553-2989 or fill out our contact form to learn more.

automotive marketing making money

Automotive Marketing Best Practices

admin | Automotive Marketing |

Automotive marketing can be challenging and time consuming, but we’re here to give you some best-practices so you can optimize your marketing efforts and increase your ROI. The following are four automotive marketing best-practices, followed by how Customer Traac can help your dealership grow.

Prioritize Customer Experience

Providing an excellent customer experience is crucial for any type of marketing, especially in the automotive industry where direct competition is fierce. As a dealership, you sell a lot of the same products as your competitors, so it is important to find a way to differentiate yourself from the competition. And one of the best ways to do this is by providing the best experience for those looking to buy or service their vehicles.

So, when coordinating your marketing efforts, always prioritize your customers’ experience. You must build their trust and make them feel as though you are their best option. You should also always communicate your messages to your customers in ways that are best for them and that will lead to the best experience for them.

Optimize Your Web Presence for SEO

In today’s world, many consumers begin their search for buying or servicing their vehicles online. It is sometimes as simple as searching for “buy a car near me,” “best Toyota dealership near me,” “service my car in New York,” or something similar. If you want to stand a chance at being recognized by the thousands of potential customers searching for vehicles online, you must build a web presence that is optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In other words, you should tailor your online marketing efforts toward ranking highly on a search engine result page when consumers search for terms related to the products you sell and the services you provide.

To illustrate, if you specialize in repairing Honda CRVs, you want to rank close to the top of a search engine result page when someone searches for “repair Honda CRV near me.” For more information about SEO and to learn some best-practices for improving your dealership’s search rankings, read this article about SEO and how it works.

Focus on Customer Retention

Customer retention is vital in the automotive industry because the lifetime value of a customer can be astronomical, seeing as one customer may purchase numerous vehicles and service each one multiple times throughout his or her life. In other words, one customer can be worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue over the course of that customer’s life.

One of the best ways to focus on customer retention is to “play the long game.” In other words, while creating your marketing strategy, don’t only focus on short term revenue goals. Rather, focus on how your marketing actions may affect how a customer thinks in the long run. To illustrate, while taking a certain action may seem appealing in the short term and may provide an increase in revenue now, if it could hurt your customers in the long run and possibly impact customer retention down the line, it may not be the best idea to implement.

Partner with an Automotive BDC or Contact Center

Speaking of customer retention, one of the best ways to increase customer retention is to partner with an automotive BDC or contact center. So, we recommend doing so as a part of any automotive marketing strategy.

One of the biggest ways dealerships lose customers — and especially prospective customers — is by having low call answer rates. It is often difficult for service advisors to answer calls for a number of reasons: sometimes they are working with customers at the store and cannot pick up the phone; sometimes they are on the other line; sometimes they are on a break; and sometimes they choose not to answer, especially if it is late in the day and they want to leave early. Regardless of the reason for missing calls, each missed call is a missed potential customer for life, or a current customer who is now upset and impatient and may look elsewhere to buy or service his or her vehicle.

Outsourcing your inbound and outbound call management will ensure you miss fewer calls and fill your service calendar with appointments. Partnering with automotive BDCs or contact centers will ensure trained agents answer nearly every call, schedule more appointments, and keep your customers satisfied, thus increasing your customer retention and ROI. Moreover, BDCs and contact centers will streamline your marketing activities and ensure everything is done properly, so you can focus on selling and servicing more vehicles.

Enhance Your Automotive Marketing with Customer Traac

If you would like to improve your dealership’s marketing efforts and customer experience, or if you would like to speak with an expert in the field to learn more, please reach out to us to see how we can help. At Customer Traac, we work with you to understand your specific goals and needs, so we can provide a personalized service that optimizes your dealership’s marketing and communication efforts. We offer a full range of automotive marketing services, including a full-charge contact center, appointment scheduling, outbound calling campaigns, and a full-service automotive BDC. Our agents go through extensive training to make sure they provide the best customer service and help your business grow.

We partner with dealerships across the United States. Please call us at 763-553-2989 or fill out our contact form to learn more.

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