Drawing customers into your dealership with fantastic car deals, great perks and a fine-tuned service is one thing, but keeping your customers loyal is another – and can require a little more thought. Delighting your customers during the buying process isn’t enough to earn the loyalty of the customer. The key to retaining customers at your dealership often lies in aftersales and the future service you provide – you can’t expect to smile and wave as the customer drives off the forecourt and consider it to be job done.
Now more than ever you need to consistently wow your customers, even after they’ve made a purchase. While we recognise how important new business is for your dealership, we’d hate for you to lose out on future repeat business simply because you didn’t create amazing aftersales marketing campaigns that both keep customers spending at your dealership and also make them much more likely to repurchase from you long after the deal is done.
So how can you ensure your customers keep coming back for more?
Aftersales Marketing
As the above heading suggests, the key to success lies in your aftersales marketing efforts. Aftersales marketing is a way of saying “hello, we’re still here and we can still add value” to your customers.
By regularly engaging with your customers after a purchase is complete, you not only show that they are truly valued, but also that you are consistently reminding them that there are further ways you can simplify and add value to their life. This might be through offering upgrades (software and hardware), servicing, warranty extensions, courtesy calls and other marketing, event invitations, and more.
In this post, we outline three unique aftersales marketing strategies to ensure customers won’t lose interest in your dealership for years to come.
Segment your data
With the nature of your business, you will likely have lots of customers at very different stages in their journey with your dealership, which means you cannot target your entire customer base with one blanket message and hope for the best.
Segmenting your data by where each customer is on their journey with you allows you to really make your messaging specific to them. There are lots of ways you can segment your data – this could be by customer persona, vehicle type (used, new, make and model), lifetime spend and more. Here, we outline one example based on marketing to customers depending on how long ago they purchased their vehicle:
Target drivers with 0 – 3 year old vehicles with:
- Messaging that tells them why your service department is the best option for them and their vehicle
- Upgrade options if trade-in is available to get a newer vehicle
- If their finance term is 3 years, messaging to remind them their agreement is almost up when relevant, and showcase newer product options / discounts for loyalty, etc.
Target drivers with 4 – 6 year old vehicles with:
- If a new customer has bought a used car from your dealership, target with similar service department messaging as the customers purchasing newer vehicles, but tailor the angle to focus more on why older vehicles need premium care
- Part-exchange messaging, inviting them to trade in their vehicle for a newer model
- Valet offers to keep vehicle interior looking as good as new
Target drivers with 7-year old vehicles & beyond with:
- Unique offers to re-engage interest in your dealership
- Why upgrading your vehicle after X years is important
- Offers, deals and pricing
Clean, segmented data can ensure that you are targeting the right people, with the right messaging in order to get the best levels of traction from your customer base.
Personalised Print
Personalisation as a whole is key in the automotive industry. As we’ve mentioned previously, each customer is entirely unique in terms of their journey and should be treated as such. That’s why we advise personalising your print efforts when sending out routine, annual reminders to your customers, whether this be MOT, Services or Parts notifications.
Instead of sending out a basic letter of plain text to your customer as a reminder, engage them more effectively by presenting the material in a far more eye-catching way that is fully personal to them.
You can use the data you hold to inform this process, for example using your customers’ name, vehicle model and vehicle colour, to send a piece of collateral with images of their vehicle that they will instantly resonate with when inviting them to book for their service or MOT.
At AlphaGraphics, we can fully automate this process for you with a unique system developed by our tech gurus. We can collect the data, convert it, print it and dispatch in large quantities to ensure each customer receives their personalised invitation, exactly when they’re supposed to.
Multi Channel Approach
Again, the nature of a dealership means that your customer demographics are likely to span across a large range. This means that the way that each of your customers likes to receive messaging is likely to be very different. For example, some customers may prefer to be contacted offline (via post, text or call), rather than online (email, online advertising, social media).
Providing the option for how your customers wish to be contacted can be a great way to make your marketing efforts even more personal, and more likely to encourage your customers to re-engage with you.
You can use Direct Mail, Email and SMS messaging as part of a wider marketing mix to best engage your customer. Each of these methods should offer something a little different, for example a Direct Mail as an initial service reminder, an email once an appointment has been confirmed, and then an SMS reminder the day before the appointment.
Why is it important to target customers across various channels? Because you must be wherever your customers are. It may be that a customer never checks their email, but always has their phone in hand, or alternatively they don’t use a mobile phone and prefer to have something tangible like a letter to remind them of actions they need to take.
Being flexible with the ways customers can engage with your brand can change your future relationships, making you more accessible than your competitors. Having multi-touch points for each campaign that span fluidly can add extra value to your customer.
You can use response levels from each channel to inform the best way to interact with specific customers, so not only will using multiple channels boost your current campaigns, it can be a great way to streamline future campaigns.
Ready to up your aftersales game? At AlphaGraphics we specialise in creating fully integrated aftersales programs that automate your process and deliver significant results. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you.
