When it comes to marketing success, it’s becoming increasingly clear that disconnects in your dealership’s data are no longer a minor issue– they are costing you sales every month.
Why is disconnected data such a problem? Here are two major reasons:
1.) If your website has data disconnects, you are missing opportunities to create a relevant, personalized customer journey. Nearly three quarters of customers are frustrated by irrelevant digital content, with 61% of customers leaving companies that give them a poor digital experience(1). Disconnected data means lost customers, which costs you sales.
2.) If your marketing reporting has data disconnects, your true ROI is invisible. That means your strategy involves a lot of very expensive guessing. Studies show that disconnected data costs companies in the U.S. and UK $140 billion every year.(2) Identifying and isolating true ROI is critical to efficient and effective business marketing management. These are big issues, but solving them is within your reach.
Here’s how to close the data gaps and stop leaving money on the table.
1: Identify the gaps in your digital customer experience
It’s crucial to understand where data disconnects are keeping your customers from having the best digital experience and choosing your dealership. To figure out where this is happening, take a deep dive into what car shoppers are really experiencing online.
You’ve heard about shopping your own site, but to really figure out what’s missing in the dealership digital experience, you need an objective, critical eye. So go to a competitor’s site instead, and track your experiences. Ask:
Are interactions relevant?
Let’s say you’re looking at lease information. Are the on-site engagements you see relevant to leasing? Or are you seeing only sales offers? If you’re a service customer, do you see relevant service content? As you shop, track the website’s responsiveness to your actions. If it reacts to your interests, guiding you to the right content, that’s good. If it’s ignoring you, offering something irrelevant, or even worse, taking you to a third-party site, then you have, you guessed it, a data gap.
Do engagement and conversion tools communicate with each other?
When you interact with an on-site tool, especially if you convert, what happens next? Do you see another engagement that picks up where you left off, or does the conversation end, or worse, repeat what just happened? For example, let’s say you convert on a special offer. Do you now see an engagement for booking a test drive or valuing your trade? Or does nothing happen? Or, does an offer for another vehicle appear? Keep track of how the website handles your buying process: whether it helps you move forward in a logical, seamless way, or whether it slows you down with repetition and irrelevance – or misses opportunities by not guiding you to the next step. If the website isn’t helping you move forward, then there is a data gap, and that costs the dealership frustrated customers– and sales.
Are tools redundant?
A lot of websites have multiple ways to engage one-on-one via text, chat, etc. If you encounter this, and you actually want a one-on-one engagement, how do you choose one? Note whether or not you encounter friction by being asked to do the same thing multiple times. Similarly, if you submit your lead information, notice if you are asked to submit the same information again on a different engagement. This happens when a website has disjointed data. And it usually results in frustrated customers who opt to leave the site.
Now that you’ve shopped your competitor’s site, you are ready to look at your own website with a critical eye. Go through all the same steps you did above and make sure you are having the experience you would want. If you’re not, you have yourself some data gaps.
2: Find the data gaps
Next, it’s time to find points of disconnect in all your reporting dashboards. Take a look at your data sources– your CRM, Google Analytics, vendor dashboards– and see how easy it is for you to get what you need. In particular, ask yourself the following:
Are you able to connect your data?
Look at the entire customer journey– or try to. Can you see the story of your customers from your data– how they found you, what ad campaigns they clicked, which tools they engaged, how many times they shopped your site? Do your ad campaigns connect to third-party tools? To your website behavior? To your CRM? To your showroom data? See if there are holes in your customer journey mapping, anything that’s preventing you from really understanding your customers’ full journeys, and from assessing the success of each of your marketing efforts.
Is the data you’re seeing actually important?
It’s a problem that’s far too common: taking time, lots of time, to pull and analyze data that is ultimately not even useful for you. Maybe you have a vendor that provides you with a vanity metric that’s irrelevant to your bottom line. Maybe you’re focusing on clicks and impressions but aren’t able to see how they affect sales. If your data isn’t helping with your dealership goals, you have gaps you need to fill.
How hard it is to pull reports?
Maybe you’ve heard stories of systems where every individual query needs to be keyed in, only for reports to take 20+ minutes each. Maybe you unfortunately have to deal with a system like that yourself. Either way, you know that when each question you ask takes too much time to compute, you’re not able to compare large sets of data. There are simply not enough hours in the day. And that means you have unanswered questions.
3: Close the gaps – get the data connected
After you’ve taken an honest look at your website and data reporting and noted all the missing pieces, it’s time to make a plan for better data connectivity that leads to more sales. Here are some strategies:
Prioritize a streamlined customer experience by using the right tools
Better data connectivity benefits customers, and at the same time, builds loyalty to your dealership. Look for tools that can communicate with each other and actually guide shoppers down the buying funnel. This means that all your on-site tools should share data to be able to tell what steps and interactions customers have already taken, and guide them to the next step without friction or redundancy. This kind of connectivity provides a better customer experience, which means more traffic to your showroom.
Focus your data analysis on the information you really need
The first step to getting more out of your data and filling in the gaps is determining your priorities. Which information is the most important to your dealership? Slash all the time you spend analyzing data that doesn’t answer your most important questions, and streamline your time by pulling the most important data sets. The second step to take is to seek out tools that put all– or a lot of– your data together so you can actually get a clear picture of your marketing ROI. When you can see where your marketing dollars tie to sales, you can make more strategic decisions on where to invest budget and maximize your spend.
Streamlining and connecting your data is not simply a technical matter– it’s the way to provide a better digital experience for customers and make the most of your marketing efforts. Clear away the clutter, build your connectivity, and you’ll be better positioned for more sales. Learn more about how to provide a better digital experience by attending AutoLeadStar’s session at Digital Dealer 26.
Source:
(1) https://www.accenture-insights.nl/en-us/articles/digital-market-personalization
(2) https://www.appseconnect.com/10-ways-disconnected-data-is-harming-your-business/