Leveraging Legacy “In-Market Shopper” Data for Automotive
Filed under: Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead Management, List Strategy, analytics
It has been an interesting Summer in the Automotive Marketing space. Tough to be in Michigan and not be impacted by the challenges faced to jumpstart this business sector.
The focus of today’s message is using Legacy In Market Shopper data in the Automotive Space. Typically, Automobile Manufacturers use the freshest data coming from sources like CarsDirect and Autobytel when prospecting for automotive sales. This makes sense, as they are likely to still be shopping for a vehicle … and influencing the prospect to consider your brand is a proven email and direct marketing strategy.
Through the past few years, we have developed an enhanced legacy database for automotive prospecting. While this might not make sense to you at first, our experience with the data has proven it to be a source of significant power for automotive prospecting:
- First, In-Market Shopper data represents a massive pool of people that historically shop for new cars. As we know in this space from our years of registration data experience, historic new car shoppers are most likely still new car buyers. That factor by itself is powerful.
- Second, Brand History is a very important indicator of future buying preferences. If you have a history of considering Mazda (for example), you are very likely to consider the brand for future new car considerations.
- Finally, with Enhanced Data, we can utilize shopping history and clustering products such as Mosaic or Personicx to analyze and identify those top clusters of the brand competitive set of the product you are focusing on. A fairly straight forward approach that has proven to yield excellent results.
While legacy In-Market Shopping data by itself is considered weak, we can use our experience and data enhancement capabilities to turn this data into very productive contributors to your email and direct marketing initiative. While you can take my word for it, I encourage you to consider testing these approaches in your next email or direct marketing intiative.
The Importance of Developing Handraisers for your Business
Filed under: Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Lead Management, Marketing Technology Solutions
So few companies fully understand and leverage the power of developing “handraisers”. In our world, this is someone who is interested in your company’s product, but not ready to purchase your products or services at this time. It applies to just about every business segment and industry.
I am sure you can relate this to your every day shopping experiences. You are shopping at a store or online for something you are looking for. Through your shopping experience you are exposed to the product or service, but you are just not ready to pull the trigger at this time. Possibly you want to shop around a bit, or receive additional details on the items you are looking at. While we tend to think retail, it could be any thing from a new car, to a charitable cause, to a service you need for your business.
If you haven’t developed a Handraiser channel for your business, you really need to make it a priority. It is typically not expensive, and it will provide you access to a very productive prospect segment. We typically see a handraiser Channel converting to customers a 5 to 15 times the best targeted competitive prospects. Often, they will even outperform your current customers when soliciting new business.
Where do you get started? Typically business owners will provide an opportunity within their website or retail location for prospects/shoppers to receive more information or to stay in touch with the company. This can be as simple as a sign up for a newsletter or an opportunity to receive “special value offers” from the company.
To fully maximize the potential of the Handraiser channel, every prospect / shopper touchpoint should provide an invitation to easily engage in this communication. Examples of these might include:
- A link on your website that offers prospects an avenue to stay in touch
- Point of Sale within your storefront that invites shoppers to sign up for special offers
- Reference in your marketing efforts (newletter, mass media, targeted media) to go to a landing page to sign up for ongoing special values
Handraiser Data Capture Example
The Email channel is an excellent avenue to communicate with this audience … taking advantage of the low cost and delivery speed of the medium.
Have you developed a Handraiser channel for your Business? While many businesses have integrated these systems as a part of the Lead Management process, still the majority of businesses have not. If you are one of these organizations, you are missing out on a powerful and inexpensive way to develop new customers.
