Marketing Automation: A must-have tool for getting the most out of prospects and customers

By Bob McCann

Last year, I shared with you a roadmap to help you turn leads into lifelong customers. The roadmap provided tips and recommendations/best practices for before, during and after the sale. The roadmap was meant to help you put a program in place to cultivate relationships to help sell more products.

How are you doing with the roadmap? Hopefully, you created a program that began to turn ideas into action. If you’ve captured the names, mailing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses for every prospect and customer who entered your dealership or sent you an inquiry from your website, you’re well on your way to developing a successful program. Now, it’s time to reap the rewards of your efforts and start growing your business.

While no two dealerships are alike, all dealerships have one thing in common: They want to increase sales and profits. And that’s where establishing a marketing automation program comes in.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is an increasingly important tool for dealerships seeking to increase their revenue and grow their businesses. Put simply, marketing automation is a tool that helps you easily streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks so that you can efficiently and effectively reach out to customers and prospects to sell more stuff.

Currently, there are many solutions available to you, and some marketing automation tools may be included in your current business management system or other solutions that you use. Depending on the tool you are using to automate your marketing tasks, you may have access to tools that will help you generate and nurture leads and customers, cultivate relationships, target prospects by interest, cross-sell and up-sell, and measure return on investment (ROI). 

Marketing automation enables you to nurture prospects who aren’t ready to buy and convert turn them into buyers and lifelong customers when they are ready to purchase. At the same time, it allows you to sell more products and services to your current customers.

Getting the most out of a marketing automation program

Once you’ve made the decision to invest in a marketing automation program, here are some things to consider as you begin setting up your program.

* How often is too often? The verdict is out on how often you can “touch” a prospect or customer via email before your message becomes perceived as spam. I tell dealers that, as long as your message is relevant and provides valuable information, up to 16 times a year is a good target.

* Set your goal. Before you put fingers to keyboard and write your message, decide what goal you are trying to meet.

* It’s all about the content. Gleanster reports that 50 percent of buyers are not ready to purchase immediately. What does that mean to you? Your initial responses should be focused on providing product or service information, not closing the sale. Make sure your messages are providing value and delivering quality content. If you use your marketing automation program to send emails that are focused on closing the sale, you’re likely to turn off the buyer and lose the sale.

* Be responsive. “Responsive” doesn’t mean just “fast.” Responsiveness is an absolute value. You either are or you aren’t. If you are fast to respond to your prospects, but do not give them the data and information they requested to move forward in their buying process, then you are not being responsive. Being fast is good for gold medals. But without pertinent content, speed is not a virtue; it is a detriment to closing the sale.

* The right message at the right time. Marketing automation allows you to target your communications based on the prospect’s interests and sales stage. For example, you can set up programs that send educational information to new prospects based on the equipment they are interested in (e.g. “Get Ready for Spring” messages to prospects and customers who have expressed an interest in lawn mowers, as well as “Get Ready for Winter” messages to those interested in snowblowers).

* Be mobile friendly. Mobile use continues to grow at an amazing rate. More and more consumers use their mobile phones to check emails. When creating emails, make sure that you optimize them for mobile. If you don’t, your message can be cut off by the browser, too small to read, or contain images that get blocked. Your solution provider should be able to provide you with specific rules to follow when you create email to avoid missing out on reaching a vast number of potential customers.

* “No” doesn’t mean “never.” Not every opportunity results in a sale immediately. A marketing automation program enables you to reach out to “lost” prospects with timely, informative, personalized reminders that could move them to express renewed interest in your dealership and the equipment you carry.

* Increase customer satisfaction and retention. I tell every dealer I talk to, your job isn’t done when you close a sale — it’s the first step to your next sale. Marketing automation can be used to set up programs to support customers after their initial purchase. These can include tips on how to get the most out of the equipment they purchased; a special discount on service or accessories a year after the purchase; and service reminders.

* Measure your results. I continue to preach to dealers that you can’t measure what you can’t see. Be sure to set up a reporting system that goes beyond seeing how many people open your email. You need to capture how many people visit your dealership or your website, as well as how many call or email you. And, most importantly, you need to measure what is the impact on your sales. Based on those results, you can continue with the ones that work and tweak or eliminate those that don’t.

When set up and implemented correctly, marketing automation can help you generate and nurture leads and customers and, most importantly, help you sell more stuff. You don’t have to implement every tool in a marketing automation program immediately. Start slowly and add more components as you gain confidence.

 Bob McCann, a 20-year sales education veteran, is the author of the nationally recognized e-business sales method known as TIPS (Traffic, Interactive Website, Process, Sales). As Director of Education at ARI, McCann has developed proven e-business sales processes to support the company’s growing list of dealer and manufacturer clients in the outdoor power equipment, powersports, automotive tire & wheel, marine and RV industries. McCann can be reached at (877) 806-2150 or mccann@arinet.com.