Targeted personalized marketing can help boost automobile sales

For an automobile company trying to sell its various categories of vehicles meant for various customer segments is always the most challenging of all tasks. With competition increasing and new players entering the field with their own brand of vehicles, staying ahead of the competition would require segmenting the market to understand and plan targeted campaigns based on customers’ demand.

Gauging the market

The first step towards segmenting is to evaluate the market. This can be done on the basis of geographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioural and other factors. These factors help in understanding customers’ intent that is derived from their interactions, responses, or sentiments.

Preferences galore

It is natural that different customers will be driven by their varied reasons before they make up their mind about purchasing a particular vehicle. Some may want to have a vehicle for transportation or luxury travel purposes. Some customers may take into account issues like safety, fuel efficiency before zeroing in on the vehicle of their choice. Still, a few others would like to own a top-brand car only because it reinforces his or her social status. Identifying preferences is a good way of compiling actionable customers-data for personalized marketing.

Real buyers

However, this brings us to the next important point of how to turn each of these individuals with their unique set of preferences into real buyers. The first step towards that goal would be to identify the unique and different preferences and attributes associated with them. For example if a customer prefers to have car ‘A’ then what are the individual, market, social, economic and other factors that leads him or her to that particular brand of car only.

The next step is to find out if the different groups of individuals with their unique choices can be targeted through data collected from different points of contacts at dealers’ showroom or company websites using their e-mails or other means of communication, etc.

Once a company is able to identify its market based on various factors shaping his or her individual preferences it becomes much easier to target individual customers. But before launching any personalised marketing game plan, it is important to evaluate each customer segment in order to be able to convert them into actual buyers.

Analysing customer info

With such diverse and varied data, a fully integrated marketing platform helps businesses to import customer information from various channels and create a single customer view for personalized marketing. You could create deep segments over rich customer data and automate personalized marketing based on rules and scoring models

Plumb5 Real-time Marketing Platform offers auto businesses, a complete suite of personalization features that runs on 1:1 customer data, with intelligent automation functionalities

Customer Acquisition: Challenges & Opportunities

Amid volatility of global economy and market uncertainty  always hanging like a Damocles’ sword, an active customer database offers businesses much to cheer about- the power to carry on with their trade despite umpteen odds!

Customer demographic

It is true that for any type of business, online or otherwise, customers are its lifeline. But customers’ demographic is undergoing a generational change. Modern means of communication, especially social media, is spawning a new breed of knowledgeable and well informed customers. All these factors have thrown up new challenges of building on the existing customers’ base. Enterprises are faced with a daunting task: how to acquire new customers and ensure the return of old ones to their stores.

New customers

It is in this backdrop that businesses and enterprises are increasingly focusing their time and energy on customer acquisition. But while doing so, as per the market experts, it is also important to link the exercise to the overall marketing strategy. This is obviously to ensure that after a day’s hard toil you have the satisfaction of adding a few new customers to your data base.

Effective strategy

A result oriented customer acquisition plan is possible provided it is driven by a combined game-plan of intelligent marketing strategy and effective technology support. A effective data tagging and unified customer profiling helps build on and consolidate the process of customer acquisition for the businesses.

Sync with social media

Marketers running customer acquisition campaigns and social campaigns in isolation, can miss out crucial insights.People who are likely to turn into your prospective valued customers, form an integral part of the social channel. So, enterprises may ignore this medium at the cost of their long term gains. But it is important that businesses are able to track all leads and new prospects to the source.

Engaging with customers

The first step towards customer acquisition is to undertake analysis of places witnessing customers’ engagement with business product or service. This needs to be followed by efforts to make customer engagement with your business interesting. Customers can be engaged effectively using new tools and techniques while working and reworking on fresh acquisition plans, simultaneously.

Personalized communication

A direct interface with customers at your stores provides with a golden opportunity to personally know them better and make acquisition exercises, more meaningful. It is always useful to add window-shoppers to your mailing lists and know about his or her liking for a particular product or service.

One can also collect useful customer data, which can bring relevance and making it a starting block for building a long relationship through personalized communications.

 

Spend Optimization

Visitor Scoring and Segmentation

Start monitoring customer’s behavior on the store, by integrating customer id of your store platform, to sessions on Plumb5.   You can assign scores to their behavior and start automating conversion campaigns

The above graphic represents the profile of the visitor, where you can find scores assign to him. The above graphic tells us that the visitor frequency to the site has lowered, though he had visited recently. You can also see that the visitors page depth has lowered too which is an indication that the visitor is drifting away.

In this situation, you can enable a personalized tactical message to this user to be able to drive more excitement

Visualizing Visitor Flows

Plumb5 visitor-flow report helps marketers, to visualize user-paths on their website or on their store,  with source and location filters. These reports provide insights on visitor depth and the contributing source or city. The interaction tabs help in analyzing the deviations at each interaction point.

You can even select a individual profile and check his flow based on historical data.

1. Visitor Flow by Source
Measure visitors flow to your website with source as the primary filter

Aligning interaction data to monitor customer spends

Customer Transaction Cards is a customer profitability application designed to create statement of transactions of each customer to effectively manage customer spends.

The application is integrated with the CUI string module, to align interaction data of a single customer, in date sequence, so as to understand the staging process of the customer and the relevant costs involved at each touch-point

Each customer’s interaction history is designed like a bank statement with credits and debits added to each interaction, where revenue earned is considered as credits and every spend on invitations or, product discount or periodic interests, is considered as debits

The following statement example shows how customer interaction data is aligned by interactions along with associated credits, debits and balance.

Building Profiles for Anonymous Website Visitors

One of the biggest challenges faced by marketers is to convert anonymous visitors into customers. Converting these visitors would require that these frequent anonymous visitors are identified by a unique key along with their behavioral pattern to be able to personalize content or gather more information about this visitor. Based on this information or insight, the marketers need to adapt strategies on their website to secure contact information.

Content Measurement with Plumb5

Targeted Messages lead to increased conversions. Test and measure all content elements, media elements, forms, downloads and social badges. Set up multivariate tests with rules to arrive at the right message. Automate effective results all on a single dashboard. If you want to test it out, write to support@plumb5.com.

Sweet Dreams (are made of this)

For a business, sweet dreams are all about growth and profits. To keep up with their sweet dreams, businesses have to take care of their risks. Business risks can be many, from not being able to generate new business to losing customers to incompetent people to myopic leaders to process lacuna to fund-vacuum.

From our experience, we believe that is one of the core factors that makes or breaks a business, ‘Customer Acquisition and Retention’, as all business performance indicators are directly dependent on this factor. Profitable businesses are built with increase in revenue per customer, year-on-year.

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