As a dealership, you’ve probably heard of marketing automation. I am going to bet though, that 90 percent of you have no clue what the term means. But don’t blame you — ‘marketing automation’ is a mouthful to say, and there probably should be a better way to describe the concept from an automotive industry perspective.
As a dealer grows it’s impossible to maintain 1 to 1 relationships with everybody. At this point, it’s time to hire a marketing director who can build performance-driven, conversion-centric programs at scale.
Eventually, the dealership marketing program will get so big that you can’t manage all electroinc marketing via Outlook, Word, and Excel spreadsheets. You could always hire a team of marketing, but eventually, you’re going to start wasting cash on redundant tasks like emailing new leads and customers, setting up social media-to-email programs, and emailing your users every time you post dealership blog content on a specific model or service offering.
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would have otherwise been performed manually much more efficient, and makes new processes possible. Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management.
Automated Communication combines customer acquisition and retention channels to conform to conform to your dealerhsip’s conversion funnel.
It’s common for dealership internet managers to talk about marketing automation and email marketing interchangeably. The fact is that email marketing is a component of marketing automation, but the two are far from the same thing – communication also includes text, voice and social channels.
Dealership conversion paths are unique. Imagine trying to chase down hundreds of them – it’s impossible. That’s where marketing automation comes in.
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