If you’re constantly on the lookout for creative and inexpensive ways to reach conquest vehicle owners and shoppers around your dealership, you’re going to love this article.
Here’s why:
I found a way to combine two powerful marketing components that you’re probably familiar with, but in an unusual way that produces surprising, and more importantly, instant leads and results for our dealers.
Now I’ll be upfront with you. This solution is not for everybody. Your team needs to be on-the-ball with phone-ups because your phone is going to blow up with inbound calls from vehicle owners around your dealership wanting a trade appraisal.
You also need to be aware that since we’re targeting conquest data with this tactic, the people calling back won’t be like existing customers who know you, love you and trust you. They will be curious and interested, but you will need to win their trust over the phone before you can book the appointment.
If you can’t handle the calls and appraisals from conquest prospects, this might not be for you. But if you can, get ready to put some deals together!
Let Me Show You Under The Hood
The two pillars of the solution are simple: we’re using conquest data and ringless voicemails.
As you can see, the components are quite unglamorous; but don’t make the mistake of confusing unglamorous with unsophisticated.
All data is not created equal, and there is such a thing as a bad ringless voicemail message.
Many things can go wrong here, so we need to make sure you have access to quality data, a state of the art ringless voicemail technology, and finally, a voicemail message that tailors to conquest vehicle owners who haven’t purchased from you yet.
Using The Right Conquest Data
You don’t want to be sending your invitation to the wrong audience.
Just like it’s important to target the right prospects with the right offer when doing ads online, you need to find the right people around your dealership to target with your voicemail.
If you’re a luxury dealership, you want to target people with the proper household income, home valuation, etc. The same thing applies if you’re at the other end of the spectrum and you’re a special finance dealer targeting credit-challenged customers.
Now I’m not talking here about traditional non-addressed direct mail targeting tactics where you blanket certain areas around your dealership that are “known” to have a higher than average concentration of individuals fitting the required characteristics.
You want to have access to data that will allow you to target individual prospects based on the attributes you are looking for. There might be clusters of these prospects in certain areas, but you want to make sure the data allows you to single out people within a geographical area and not only zones.
That’s critical.
Recording The Right Message
There are a few important things to keep in mind at this stage:
1) The prospects you’re targeting don’t know you. They might know “of” your store, but they didn’t get to experience your dealership yet.
> This one is pretty easy to solve. Just acknowledge the fact that you realise they are probably not one of your customers from the getgo and present yourself, the dealership, and the reason you are calling in the first part of the message.
I also like to help potential prospect visualise where your dealership is located in town by associating your store with a nearby known landmark.
2) Statistically, 91-93% of the prospects you will be targeting are NOT currently in the market to buy a vehicle.
> Now you might think of this as an obstacle, but it is, in fact, the biggest asset of the conquest campaign. As you might be aware, here at Turbo Marketing Solutions, marketing to non-intenders is one of the three core principals of our automotive marketing philosophy.
The reason is simple. We believe everybody 18-88 would upgrade their vehicle for something bigger, better, faster, more fuel-efficient or electric, with more cargo space, more technology, more safety features… or whatever more they want. They just don’t know they can.
If you have listened to the video I did with Mike on selling cars to non-intenders, you know that what’s stopping non-intenders is their perception of one or a combination of these five sticky points: Price, Payment, Cash Required, Trade and Credit.
Price: they think it’s not the right time to get the best price.
Payment: they think the payment won’t fit in the budget
Cash: they think too much cash will be needed to complete the transaction
Trade: they think they owe too much on their trade, they won’t get enough, or need to finish their lease payments (or whatever other misperception they might have about their current vehicle)
Credit: they think they won’t qualify for the vehicle they want.
These non-intenders have an automotive need. They just wrongfully believe they can’t solve it.
But if you provide non-intenders with a marketing message that offers a solution to their problem while tackling these five wrong perception, these prospects will go from non-intenders to intenders instantly, and you will get first kick at the can.
Contrary to intenders, these prospects have not spent the last 3 months of their lives educating themselves about their next vehicle purchase and are much more open to the choices you have to offer.
In my experience, the top producing angles are (1) Trade and (2) Credit.
I particularly like the trade angle because it provides a more natural fit with the current sales and follow-up processes of most dealers. The credit angle is equally strong, but before launching a credit campaign, you need to make sure you have the right inventory, lenders, business managers, etc.
The trade angle usually “fits like a glove.”
3) Statistically again, of the 7-9% “in-market” for a vehicle, only a fraction will be considering the brands you sell.
> When it comes to intenders, you have to be realistic. These prospects have spent 16-19 hours online over the course of 2-3 months researching their next vehicle purchase.
Every dealer I speak to wants to target people at the bottom of the funnel, but the reality is that those people have already made their minds about what they want to buy.
If you haven’t yet, you should watch the video I did with Mike regarding the lies we tell ourselves when it comes to automotive conquest.
Bottom line: Incentives, discounts and special prices won’t change peoples minds once the decision to buy a model is made, and numbers show that truth with prospects visiting now only 1.2 dealerships before buying.
The only thing I found that had the horsepower to steer a prospect at the bottom of the funnel in a dealership that didn’t offer the model that had decided for was the lure of getting more for their trade.
As you most obviously see by now, the trade, again, seems to be the key to your ringless voicemail’s message.
And that’s why I love it so much!
It’s essential that you constantly remind yourself of these three principals if you want to put together the right message and record and effective voicemail.
In my experience, the best way to do this is to forget everything you know about marketing cars to your current customers and avoid any phrasing normally used when doing database marketing. I would also make it a rule not to mention any incentives or promotions. Make the message all about the prospect and their current vehicle. That’s it.
Follow-up and Best Practices
Now that you have the right data and the right message, make sure that you send your ringless voicemail broadcast at a throttle that will allow your sales team or BCD the time to take all the incoming calls as they come in.
I like to broadcast the voicemails at a speed of 30 messages an hour. This will keep your staff busy but not overwhelmed.
Just make sure that everybody who will be in contact with potential prospects is fully aware of the content of the voicemail message and can match the expectations created by the marketing.
There’s nothing worst than marketing that cries wolf. You know, the one that gets you excited but that you can’t experience at the store?
You should also tell everyone of your staff to be ready for lot-ups.
Conquest prospects are more finicky than existing customers and will look for ways to validate your message and appraisal offer without raising a flag or identifying themselves.
This can easily be solved with a few role-playing session during a sales meeting before the broadcast.
Need Some Help?
If you need some help putting this conquest ringless voicemail campaign together, don’t hesitate to reach out to my team at Turbo Marketing Solutions or me.
We’ll make sure you have the right data, the right voicemail message and we’ll help you avoid all the pitfalls so you can get the best results possible.
And the most exciting part of this remarkable combo tactic is that you won’t need to “hit” your database and current customer since this is a 100% conquest approach to car sales!
Sean Cassy is the Digital Marketing Specialist and Co-Owner of Turbo Marketing Solutions. You can contact him by email here or reach him by phone every weekday at Turbo Marketing’s head office