Over the summer we talked about how Marketing Automation accelerates the efficiency of email marketing, but it would be doing the service an injustice if we stopped there. With a tool as powerful as Marketing Automation, it’s crucial that we also cover the other ways that it can give your dealership a serious edge in converting online leads to sales.
By integrating with your website platform, Marketing Automation can identify online visitors on your site who were anonymous before. After filling out a lead form, Marketing Automation stores a lead’s information and begins tracking all movements and actions that the lead takes on your site. This gives you a full picture of what each online lead is truly interested in. Before, you may have only received the prospect’s name, email address, and maybe a brief description of the unit they were looking for (if you were lucky). Now you can see things like the pages they visited, the buttons they clicked on, how many times they visited your site or certain pages on your site, and more. You can even monitor a lead’s behavior on social media as it relates to your dealership – if they engage with your posts or mention your business, that activity is tracked as well.
While tracking the actions of your leads gives you a great birds-eye view into what you can do to communicate with them more efficiently, Lead Scoring makes it simple to see which are your hottest leads. Based on settings that you apply based on your dealership’s business goals, each online lead is assigned a score that indicates how high of a priority they are for your sales team. For example, visiting a website page with Honda ATVs over three times could contribute to a lead’s score and indicate to your sales team that follow-up on a potential ATV purchase is needed. Lead Scoring can also be applied to additional actions, such as a lead engaging with your email marketing efforts or interacting with your dealership on social media.
What lead tracking and scoring ultimately comes down to is the ability to form personalized messages that are specific to leads’ wants and needs, as well as a custom sales pitch that is going to speak directly to your lead’s interests. Your sales team has access to the complete life of that lead and their path to purchase, so there is no reason not to have the perfect sales pitch.
The ability to cater a sales pitch based on proven wants and needs of a prospect is invaluable. Imagine the prospective sales that have fallen through in the past – what may have been different if that prospect had received follow-up specific to the unit he or she was interested in? What if your sales team had known exactly what to say to bring that prospect into the dealership? Marketing Automation gives your sales team the support it needs to make personal connections that turn leads into sales.