Taking control (Part 2)

IN OUR SECOND AND FINAL INSTALLMENT OF THIS SPECIAL SERIES, STEVE SOUTHIN TALKS MORE ABOUT SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES FOR UPGRADE SALES AND THE BENEFITS THEY CAN OFFER

(Read Part One of this special series.)

The best practice behind a successful upgrade sale process is to engage your audience and build into every event clear steps for the customer to follow (essentially stages designed to bring them into your showroom for a test drive and ultimately reach a buying decision).

PERSONALIZED LANDING PAGES
The use of a personalized landing page has proven to be one of the best focal points to lead this process.

Many dealers who have attempted to build their own upgrade sales events have often used either a Facebook event page or have added a special registration form page to their dealer website for this purpose.

There are two main drawbacks to this approach. Firstly, that it is inferior to providing a customer with their very own URL that leads them to a page that is personalized. Having a Facebook event page or website registration page reduces the sense of exclusivity (the very idea of an effective database marketing campaign is to ensure personalization at every touch point).

Secondly, by going this route you lose the ability to tie your database to every landing page. When you connect any data collection to an existing database it allows for the use of intelligent short-forms that require less input from the user as well as the ability to capture valuable new information that is added to your database.

EMAIL FOLLOW-UP
Creating an attractive HTML email that’s personalized and captures the same look and feel of your combined event theme is a great way to reach out and provide your customers with an easier method to visit their event page through the use of unique links.

Services like MailChimp or ConstantContact enable you to design an email without needing to know how to code it. Additionally, it allows you to manage the sending of it more efficiently to your uploaded database compared with using your current email client.

However, there can be problems when, as a result of touching your database too many times you end up with undesired results when trying the personalized approach. The other major roadblock is to get those links into every email. Considering every customer should have their own URL, this is something most dealers would have trouble trying to accomplish using these email services.

LOYALTY VOUCHERS
From a customer’s landing page you should provide an option to be able to print off some kind of additional voucher that is rewarding and exclusive to them. People tend to like having something in-hand, especially when talking to a salesperson during their first visit to the showroom and it can serve as a good conversation starter. A voucher should be consistent with the importance of personalization and the customer should be notified that it is for their exclusive use. However, trying to produce 2,500 personalized printable online vouchers can be challenging for a dealership to tackle in-house.

LEAD GENERATION
We all know how important it is to get involved at an early stage with every potential prospect as soon as they show interest in what we have to offer. Many great studies have taught us the profound effect of the differences that exist in results when we compare the effect of a 15 minute delay in dealer response times to customer inquiries.

Having a good response means being notified immediately when a prospect either registers for your event or when they have printed their loyalty voucher.

You can accomplish this to a degree using webhooks, with MailChimp for actions taken when people click-through on your email campaign. You can also direct your form on Facebook or web-page you created for the event to send you an email.

You want as much information as possible contained directly inside your lead notice, such as salesperson, vehicle year, make, model and customer contact information. You also want to know what action they took. This is also your opportunity to ask buying questions and gain valuable insight into their buying motivations and intent.

Your notice should contain answers to important questions like what the current mileage is on their trade, how they purchased their current car (i.e. if it was through financing, leasing or cash) and you need to be able to ask them important questions about the vehicle such as whether it’s safe, whether it’s reliable, what remaining warranty coverage it has, the technology and features on it and finally, in what time-frame the customer intends to make their next car purchase.

When using short-form technology tied to your database, collecting this information is extremely valuable and the shorter form allows the input effort of your customers to be focused on providing this critical information instead of their street address or what car they currently own (since you already know these details due to the information contained in your database). Some dealers have even gone as far to ask what car their prospect would be most interested in buying. Don’t build your form full of required fields — you’ll be surprised at how many prospects will actually take the time to inform you on what will sell them a car. Do bear in mind that in addition to this you’ll also want to hear from the ones that don’t as well.

“The best practice behind a successful upgrade sale process is to engage your audience and build into every event clear steps for the customer to follow.”

EVENT MANAGEMENT
Having a dashboard where you can log into and see all your activity is an important tool for your sales manager. You can use your current CRM if your salespeople do a great job of logging their traffic and can identify prospects as upgrade sales respondents.

It is more effective however, to have a dashboard that instantly tracks your prospects and insures nothing is missed while keeping your follow-up and team management flowing as rapidly as possible. This dashboard should list every prospect that has visited their page, printed their voucher and most importantly which ones have registered or book an appointment for your event. This dashboard should behave as your call list filter. You have just reached out to 2,500 previous customers and now we want an easy place to visit and focus our phone follow-up on the 10 per cent who have expressed interest and are most likely to buy.

REGULATION COMPLIANCE
As databased marketing has gained traction among dealers over the last decade, it has drawn increasing interest among regulatory bodies in each province, not helped by reports of customers being mislead by some campaigns.

As a result, there are a number of things to consider to ensure your dealership remains compliant and preserves its reputation with previous clients. One of them is to not imply that your store was authorized by the OEM to perform a special sale. (You cannot say a customer is exclusively invited to take part since it isn’t exclusive when more than one invitation is sent out). In most provinces you can no longer compare the original new car MSRP to that of the savings being offered in your event and if you are promoting low interest rates you have to also include your credit disclosure.

Every regulatory body in Canada tends to be open when it comes to car dealers reaching out to them and having any print or digital content reviewed for compliance before it is sent out.

Given that Canada’s new anti-spam regulations will take effect this year, now is a good time to do some housekeeping. Turning your gaze south of the border to the U.S. and anti-spam regulations there, can prove to be a good indicator of what we can expect to see implemented here in Canada. Some of the primary aspects to consider are ensuring all mass email contains your dealership’s name, address and phone number and that you should have the recipients’ permission using an opt-in program. It’s also important to have an easy-to-use unsubscribe link contained within every email.

THIRD PARTY PROVIDERS
The workload and technology required to ensure a dealership’s upgrade sales event has all the needed moving parts listed above, has forced many dealers to look for outside partners to perform their valuable database marketing efforts. A handful of these third party services have popped up in Canada over the past decade to perform these sales on behalf of dealerships.

The challenge is that many charge relatively high prices for the services they provide. For example, a two-week event targeting 2,500 prospects ranged in price from $7,500 to $11,000. Nevertheless, many of these same sites appear to be busy — some boasting that they have performed 700 to 1,000 sales in Canada during 2013 alone.

Until recently, dealers really haven’t had much of an option other than paying these high prices since by not doing so they risk losing the effectiveness of their event by skipping critical parts of a proven process. As we have looked at these needed parts, many of them are technically demanding and beyond the scope of many dealerships’ in-house capabilities.

Besides the high cost, another issue with such firms is that in many cases, dealers are forced to pass on the biggest opportunity technology has offered every business over the past decade — the ability to control and expand on information collected in their own database of previous customers.

There are alternatives, such as do-it-yourself dealer tool kits that gives dealerships the ability to produce every needed component of the upgrade sale process entirely from within their own showrooms.

DO-IT-YOURSELF SOFTWARE
Some programs, like DealerHacker’s Willupgrade.me have been designed to replace the need for third parties when it comes to launching an upgrade sales event. Using the software in-house can require less time and effort than outsourcing, yet a dealer is still able to have every component of the traditional proven event process we have explored in this article.

This software empowers dealers to have the same technology in their own showroom that every third party uses and can provide them with significant savings when it comes to marketing costs. Anything that can reduce a dealership’s overhead while also empowering them to do more for themselves is therefore worth considering.

SHOULD YOU RUN AN UPGRADE SALE?
The results speak for themselves when you start asking dealers about their previous successes with this type of database marketing approach. If you are looking for a way to stimulate immediate sales (especially during the slower winter months) then it might be prudent to consider adding an upgrade sale into your marketing plans. We have even seen a small group of dealerships who have adapted this approach on a monthly ongoing basis and are reporting success.

Taking on the challenge to run your own upgrade sale will not only reward you with immediate sales but could be beneficial for the overall growth of your dealership by permanently increasing your capability to perform these tasks within the store.