Like many auto dealers, you may have received a lot of email inquiries and web clicks of late. Your attention has now turned to lead conversion. How do you get those digital leads to walk through your showroom door? 

The answer is inbound marketing. CRM insights provide new ways to improve the car buying experience. Old direct marketing methods, meanwhile, are less and less effective. 

Here's how dealer management software is rewriting the rules of auto dealer sales and marketing. 

Offer the Best Prices and Perks

In the past, a direct sales solicitation offering low prices was necessary to get a sales prospect to visit your dealership. In the digital marketing world, customer loyalty is no longer about price. A positive and personalized customer experience is more important than the price and content being marketed. 

CRM provides the data-driven insight into customer preferences to create an exceptional customer engagement experience. With this insight, you can build multiple campaigns and target each campaign prospect with personalized content and messages. The auto buyer interest level, preferences, buying history, and so on drive the content.

Don't Waste Your Time on Unresponsive Leads

While it's true marketing efforts should focus on the most promising leads, automated marketing never has to go to sleep. Actionable insights from dealer management software can indicate when it's time to ratchet marketing efforts up or down. Auto dealers that use CRM insights to manage customer email engagement receive an 11 percent reply rate. By pivoting to a passive digital marketing campaign, you can continue to nurture and eventually convert leads from unresponsive sales prospects.

Use the Soft Sell

When dealer software intelligence indicates the buyer has moved to a different place in the buying cycle, this actionable data can be put to work. Automated marketing adopts a more active sales engagement approach on the fly. Campaign content changes to more precisely target your prospect's place in the buying cycle. 

A car shopper ready to buy, for example, wants actionable information. They want a form to book a test drive. They want the information they need to decide between car A or car B. The faster they receive this information, the quicker they will make a decision. As time lapses, your chance of engaging this prospect diminishes.

Dealer management software provides ways to improve all aspects of the car buying experience. With the ability to deploy actionable CRM data in auto dealer sales and marketing, the cost-benefit of conventional sales tactics may no longer make sense.