How Auto Dealers can Stay Ahead of Today's Car Buyers

Today’s car buyers are possibly the smartest ones that have ever been. They know how to get the most out of technology. Most importantly, these vehicle shoppers are also becoming increasingly more independent, with the help of new media channels.

Make no mistake, when your prospective customers walk into your showroom, they are much more informed than they ever used to be, because they spend so much more time conducting research online. As a result, car dealers need to be one step ahead, in order to gain the upper hand when negotiating a sales deal.

This is where big data and data analytics tools play such an important role for any auto dealership. By using these concepts, a dealership can access insights about clients, rivals, and the market in general. It also enables car dealers to segment their customers so that their marketing initiatives can be precisely targeted.

Having access to as many data points as possible is a blessing for vehicle dealerships, since it provides them the ability to cater to individual customer needs, without needing to actually interact with them.

In this article, we will give you a few helpful ideas on how a dealer can do exactly that.

Learn About the Industry

Industry data, in addition to demographic and behavioral data, is also quite important for auto dealers. By analyzing it, dealers can spot potentially which vehicles could become fast-selling models.

It can even determine when this upswing in sales numbers will take place.

Learn About Your Clients

As we mentioned earlier, the vast majority of customers these days come into your dealership knowing perfectly well what they want to buy. They also expect not be asked the same questions repeatedly, and not being made to wait for long.

Nearly 50% of them conduct research using multiple mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Additionally, about 80% of these customers use third party automotive websites and portals for gathering information and comparing different vehicle models and trim levels.

Understanding the employment stats and income levels of your potential customers will go a long way in enabling your car dealership in deciding the perfect way to approach them. It also offers a level of fraud protection and an early payment affordability test for the car dealer.

In order to get this done, make use of the recent advances in website tools to learn what your website visitors are interested in. Your sales staff can then use this information to get individual customers a highly exclusive purchasing experience.

For customer data analysis to be accurate, your auto dealership’s CRM system should contain data that is up to date, and in real time. Your web analytics should be wired to include details such as which website pages these customers visited, how much time they spent on each page, and what resulted in them converting.

Learn About New Technology

The third pillar that will help auto dealers to anticipate what customers expect from them is technology.

Customers do a lot of online research before spending their hard earned money on a car. It is an excellent idea to make sure that your sales and marketing teams are well versed about all the latest automotive tech in the industry, as they may be questioned about it by your prospective buyers.

Regular emails, bulletins and even training sessions that are conducted on a monthly or bi–monthly basis are great ways of keeping your sales staff at the top of their game. Having access to the latest data is one thing, but only by using every bit of information available to your advantage can a dealership become a smart data-centric auto dealership.

As always, it’s a good practice to develop a complete profile of your prospective customers. It isn’t sufficient to just get traditional credit data anymore. Data that includes their credit history, income bracket, employment tenures, financial priorities, payment behavior and so on are an absolute must in order to get a good picture of your customers.

With this information at hand, coupled with our modern data analytics software, auto dealerships are perfectly positioned to handle the sophisticated car buyers of today.

For more information on how auto dealers can stay ahead of modern car buyers, Contact Us.