Even if you’re not a tech aficionado, chances are artificial intelligence, best known as AI, is already part of your everyday life. Maybe you use a virtual assistant like Alexa or Siri, maybe you enjoy Netflix’s recommendations for future movies, maybe you’re fascinated by Amazon Go. Either way, you are likely already living in the world of artificial intelligence.
In the automotive industry, we typically think of AI in terms of autonomous and connected vehicles. But in fact, AI is also already being used in the world of digital marketing, and is becoming more and more relevant– and crucial– to automotive dealership marketing. Current AI marketing applications can create significant positive impact for dealerships by increasing personalization, scalability, and customer retention, thus reducing dealership workloads while increasing profits.
As everyone looks to digital today, learn how implementing an AI strategy can turn around your dealership business to increase efficiency and supercharge sales.
Personalization
Personalization has become a major marketing imperative. Customers report higher satisfaction with companies that provide it. Companies with successful personalization strategies report better business results. But how can dealerships provide personalization online?
In your brick and mortar store, personalization is intuitive, and most dealerships excel at it: relationships are a hallmark of the successful dealership. The challenges of bringing this personalization online are vast: without the ability to meet customers in person, ask them questions, and observe their behavior, responding to their needs and individual interests seems nearly impossible.
AI can bridge that gap with tools and application to reach customers in real time without ever having to meet them. Instead of guessing what customers want, AI’s technology can understand each person’s needs and actually give them the information, tools, and resources they need, on an individual level, on and off of dealership websites.
The result is the newfound powerful ability to reach customers with insight, even online. And dealerships that take the time to learn and implement these tools will see the benefits AI has already started bringing to other industries, giving them a huge advantage in sales and profits.
Scalability
Even if you’re sold on the idea of personalization, without AI, it can be hard to implement for all your customers. Dedicated BDC, sales, and service teams can provide a great deal of personalized customer service to shoppers, but customization takes a lot of time, from tracking leads down by phone to providing relevant follow-up to communicating updates to scheduling repairs. Therefore, the scale of follow-up is fairly limited when done exclusively by a human staff.
One of the key features of AI is the ability to scale personalization so that it becomes available to a much wider audience, with even less effort. This capability allows dealership teams to reach more people while freeing their time to focus on the leads, customers, and processes that are most profitable. Understanding this capability is a must for dealerships today.
Customer Retention
Staying top of mind for sold customers is a huge challenge facing today’s dealership. Competition from repair and service chains, the common misconception that dealership service is more expensive, the distance customers sometimes live from dealerships– all of these create a strong temptation to look elsewhere, and chip away at loyalty.
To meet this challenge, dealerships provide incentives, service packages, and various communications to stay in touch and bring customers back. These are great strategies, but hard to implement on a large scale for each and every customer.
Here too, the AI solutions of today can help dealerships provide regular, personalized communication with customers to bring them back and generate more repeat business. And the AI solutions of tomorrow will kick this up even further, allowing communication with every customer for their entire buying and owning cycle, long after purchase, leading to seamlessly heightened retention.
AI is the key to the smart dealership’s future marketing strategy. It can lead to a 45% increase in conversions. Its messages for customer engagement perform almost four times better than non-AI messaging. These are the benefits awaiting the AI-focused dealership.
And there’s more. Across industries, 60% of marketers struggle with real-time personalization– largely due to technological challenges – yet 77% believe it’s crucial to their success going forward. Your dealership can take the lead, edge out the competition, and dramatically grow your sales with the AI tools of the future. Don’t miss out on learning how to leverage this technology to boost your bottom line.
Learn more about how to leverage AI and machine learning to affect your dealership’s bottom line in Ilana Zur’s session at the Digital Dealer 23 Conference & Expo.