Advantages of Technology-Driven Dealerships

Businessman Sitting In Car Being Driven Through

There are countless advantages of implementing new technologies in your dealership. Automation allows you to carry out new business strategies in order to lower your costs and reach more customers than ever. 

New workflows enabled by automatization will increase CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value) by keeping your customers engaged. At the same time, these new workflows will unburden your colleagues at the dealership, allowing you to optimize your staff.

SMS Automation

Studies show that SMS is the best way to reach your customers today. It’s not free like email is, but it’s more likely that the investment will pay back multiple times. 

By getting creative with SMS automation, you can raise awareness about your dealership brand, increase CLTV, generate very useful leads, and empower your colleagues at the dealership.

SMS automation can provide useful analytics on the performance of your messaging campaign. You will be able to keep the record of messages that failed to deliver, so you can correct or eliminate bad data.

You can compare campaigns by analyzing which texts were delivered and read (and by how many people). You will also be able to track how many people have responded to CTA (Call to Action) which can be very helpful to improve your overall strategy. 

By looking at these metrics you can keep tabs on each campaign’s effectiveness and compare it with marketing tactics on other platforms. That way you can make sure that your investment is showing positive results.

API (Application Programming Software)

Application Programming Software is a software bundle that defines the ways how applications request services from the libraries and operating systems. Simply put, it’s a connection between different computers and computer programs. 

There are various advantages of using API, depending on its type. Internal APIs will help you integrate every team in the dealership into one development plan and make sure everybody is updated in real-time, creating a more efficient workflow.

Partner APIs have restricted access that’s controlled through a third-party API gateway. This guarantees that only the partner companies will have access to each other’s operating systems, making the partnership highly functional and your data well protected. 

Open APIs are external APIs that are easily accessible to the broader public. It’s meant to make your online presence more engaging and interactive with your customers while reducing the need for in-person communication.

By implementing some of the APIs available today, you can collect valuable dealership data to help you improve your efficiency and marketing. For example, you can stay updated about your customers’ maintenance and registration due, allowing you to contact them in a timely manner and show that you care about them even after the sale (which will definitely increase your CLTV).

New Workflow Revenues

New technologies can help your dealership implement three key workflow revenues that will be the foundation of your long-term successful business strategy: acquisition, retention, and expansion.

Acquisition

Car dealerships in the US spend 90% of their efforts on customer acquisition. This year, they have been spending more than $600 per car on bringing new customers, and the expenses just keep growing. Not to mention the unmeasurable time and work invested by salesmen to bring new customers. It’s becoming clear that this business model is unsustainable. 

Implementing automated workflows to your dealership can lower these costs by 25%. You can achieve this by tightly controlling the experience throughout ownership through consistent customer conversational engagement driven by text automation. Automating your customer acquisition using SMS can help you improve the dealership’s CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value)

Creating a more engaging website and automating your approach to your potential customers by using tools such as chatbots can also help to lower your customer acquisition costs. This will also mean a load of the salesmen’s back, who will now be able to focus on closing the sales.

Retention

It is five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep the old one. Yet, many dealerships still look over this fact and keep spending most of their resources on traditional acquisition.

However, those who do realize this, often implement obsolete retention strategies that don’t seem to show results. The most common strategy is emailing the customers, but let’s face it, who reads those emails? Most of them end up in spam folders and never reach the customers. Those that do, end up being marked as read without opening. 

SMS marketing automatization, on the other hand, shows incomparably better results. In fact, SMS marketing seems to reach more audiences than any other messaging service. People tend to open all of their SMS messages because they perceive them as more personal and important. 

That means that you should keep all of your customers’ phone numbers and use them for your new retention strategies. There are many ways to approach your customers using automated SMS, but remember to keep it simple. Don’t forget that SMS stands for Short Message Service.

Your sales team’s workflow can still coexist with these new strategies and salesmen can even work on implementing them. Your staff mustn’t get estranged from the new business plan.

Expansion

Expansion is another positive outcome of implementing these new workflows. By keeping your existing customers happy and engaged, you will naturally expand to some of their acquaintances for free. That’s why you should implement workflows that will engage your customers to become a catalyst for new customer growth through casual conversations.

Customers who keep returning will refer to you in their everyday conversations, making your dealership pop in their acquaintances’ minds whenever they think of shopping for a car or an automotive part. A good word from a person you trust is the best marketing there is.

Overall

Technology-driven dealerships are experiencing a renaissance in this business climate. The acquisition costs they cut while attracting more customers than ever place them far in front of the dealerships that still nurture traditional workflows. 

Moving forward is imperative in every branch of business. We came this far because our predecessors were always brave enough to implement the latest innovations in their field of business. Technology is progressing faster than ever, which means that you should catch up too and thrive on its many benefits.

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