Updated: October 21, 2016

“A designer and a data analyst walk into a room.”

Sound like the set-up to a joke? Maybe it’s because most people have some pretty big assumptions about “analytics,” including the idea that it has no bearing on creative decisions. Traditionally companies have utilized analytics to make “unsexy” decisions regarding selection criteria, timing, and media channel. After all, the creative will take care of the rest…

…Right?

But bringing analytics and creative together is more than just a bright idea. It’s how some of today’s most progressive dealerships are moving away from a discount-dependent mindset and leveraging content to identify customers who are most likely to buy.

Let your customer response do the talking

As a dealership, you’re always looking for feedback from customers to help serve them better. But there’s a whole conversation you’re missing if you’re not paying attention to the way customers are responding to creative.

We’ve found that the level of engagement with creative pieces is highly predictive. Consider this:

 

Customers who engage with creative have a 4x higher vehicle purchase rate than those who don’t.*

 

But not every customer responds to the same type of content. While budget-minded customers may be on the lookout for your latest sales ad (and thus likely to jump ship when they find a better deal), other customers may show an affinity for educational articles about the latest technology or non-promotional family-oriented content.

Because this engagement is so predictive, it’s important to create a variety of content (promotional and non-promotional) so you can determine where each customer’s interests lie. And when your creative is tied to these predictive models, you get campaigns that more closely match your customers’ purchase intent.

As you’ve no doubt discovered, though, developing a single customer view across channels is easier said than done when you’re trying to wrangle your data from multiple vendors. That’s where we come in.

The 3 Birds approach to integrated digital marketing

From the beginning, we’ve designed the 3 Birds platform as a robust Content Management System for sharing and tracking all of your digital messaging, including social media; newsletters; email campaigns; and our newest addition, live inventory listings.

With the 3 Birds approach, every click provides greater insights into your customer’s next steps and purchase needs. That makes it easy for our in-house designers and writers to create smart, optimized messaging across your target audiences.

Since the original publication of this piece, our clients have continued to see the success of this integrated marketing approach in action. Recently, 3 Birds analyzed over 4.3 million marketing sends for a representative sample of dealerships (including monthly Digital Newsletters and targeted sales, buy-back, and service campaigns) and found a significant impact on total sales and database retention.

As your marketing team well knows, most leads close while they’re still hot—within the first 1-30 days. However, our analysis found that aging leads (30 days and older) converted at significant rates as a result of 3 Birds’ communications, especially targeted sales campaigns. Through our proprietary predictive modeling and Smart Stream technology, these campaigns utilized the data collected by the newsletter and other communications to design offers specifically tailored to lead people down the path to purchase—and the results speak for themselves. Across all clients, 3 Birds directly influenced:

  • 5.0 sales per month by aging leads between 30 and 45 days
  • 5.4 leads per month by aging leads 45 days and older

These leads were otherwise languishing in the clients’ databases, and while they may have still had a clear purchase intent, they would likely not have been reached by the dealerships’ in-store processes. Across all dealerships in the representative sample, 3 Birds directly influenced an average of 11.1 incremental sales/month and $38K/month of GP.

If your emails aren’t delivering this kind of ROI, it’s time to take another look at your communications strategy and what’s driving it. Bridging the gap between analytics and creative is no joke – it’s the effective way to maximize the return on your marketing investment. For more information, contact us today.

*Based on analysis of over 100K customers.