Loyalty programs, done well, really work!

Customer Loyalty Programs that Really Work

Numerous studies have shown that loyalty programs, when done well, make a big difference for the company. We’ve blogged about several of them already. The catch, of course, is that – like anything else – they need to be handled correctly to be worthwhile. An article in Business Insider lists aspects that these programs need to have to be successful.

The first is to “integrate loyalty into the full experience.” Your program shouldn’t be something that feels like an afterthought or that requires plenty of extra unnecessary-seeming steps for the consumer.

Another is to “Solve customer and industry pain points.” They refer to Amazon’s highly successful Prime program where loyal users get free two-day shipping, free digital content and more. They’ve identified pain points (having to wait lengthy amounts of times for books and other products, costly shipping fees and more) and dealt with them effectively. And, although “Prime’s stand-alone profitability is a closely guarded secret, it is estimated that members spend over four times more with Amazon than non-members.” Can you imagine if your loyal customers spent over four times more at your dealership? Another recommendation is to use the data collected from your program to target customers in the most personalized way possible, just like Amazon does.

We also took a look at an article at HubSpot that discusses how to maximize loyalty program benefits. One strategy was to also include non-monetary programs – and, when you do, make sure they are structured around your customers’ values. There is nothing wrong with providing discounts and other monetary rewards! Customers definitely appreciate them. But, when you go beyond that, then it’s crucial to make sure that the program meshes with your customers’ points of view and what matters to them.

The example they used was Patagonia, an outdoor apparel company whose clients value eco-friendly living. So, Patagonia partnered with eBay to create a program in which they could resell their Patagonia clothing that they no longer wear. This program “builds on Patagonia’s brand of sustainability and creating a high-quality product. Plus, it matches perfectly with the company’s target audience by providing a value they know customers really care about.” What really matters to your dealership’s customers?

Automotive CRM Software Provides Insights You Need

Before you can target your loyalty programs to your customer base, you need to have a clear understanding of those customers! That’s where Flexstat® comes in. This proprietary customer management system provides you with the insights you need to laser-target your customer base. Find more information about our automotive CRM software here.

With that business intelligence, you can then craft the dealer loyalty program that makes sense for you! Contact us online or call 302-696-6000 today.

Automotive customer retention: useful strategies

Customer Relationship Management: Silver Bullet of Dealership Success

“Leaders who don’t focus on their customers often fail. A relationship with individuals who might buy their products is essential, but for some reason, many miss this absolutely critical aspect of their business. All too often, entrepreneurs spend their energy on everything but having conversations with current and potential customers.” So says Forbes contributor Alan Hall, who is the founder of Grow America, an organization dedicated to helping business builders nationwide and worldwide.

Missing the target about what your customers need is an expensive proposition. Yet, in a recent study, marketers of 80% of brands lacked the right data to produce effective marketing campaigns. Old school demographics such as age and gender are not sufficient to generate increased market share. What proved substantially more potent was the harnessing of “relationship-oriented data,” such as information gleaned from social media and online behavior.

Making Customers’ Lives Better

No matter the size of your business, implementing a system to gather details about the wants, needs, and preferences of your customers is the silver bullet of success. When you have, at your fingertips, your customers profile along with an understanding of their daily life (where they work, their family structure, their hobbies and associations) you can begin to intuit, with much greater accuracy, how your business can make their lives better.

Examples abound that this principle works across industries. A case in point is Stitch Fix, Inc., a company that provides women with customized fashion, delivered right to their door. The concept has resonated powerfully with a whole segment of working women who are too busy to spend time in a store trying on clothes. Customers are in contact with a personal stylist online, answer questions regarding their style preferences, and are sent a package of five clothing items or accessories. Then they are free to decide which items to keep and which to send back, all from the privacy of their own homes. The service, now six years old, is growing by leaps and bounds. In June of 2014 the company was nearing $150 million annual revenue run rate.

Authentic Partnerships

Dynamic businesses are built not on programs but partnerships between an entrepreneur and his customers. You secure their loyalty and support as you listen to them. Even in our high tech 21st century business culture, nothing works like authentic relationship. While it requires communication, understanding and, yes, some risks, the payoff is worth it. Customers will always return to those who seek to understand their world and provide innovative ways to improve their quality of life.

Build Lasting Relationships with Automotive CRM Software

No matter the size or scope of your business, AutoAwards can assist you in building lasting relationships with your clients. Flexstat, our proprietary automotive CRM software, is designed to deliver precise and detailed data regarding your consumer base. There’s no magic involved here, just accurate, comprehensive information that will take your business to the next level. Want to know more? Contact us at 309-696-6000 to talk about your automotive customer retention needs, and to find the right solutions for your dealership.

What a sport has in common w/ dealership customer retention

Automotive Customer Retention: Lessons Learned from Watching Basketball

If you’re a basketball fan, then you’ve had plenty of exciting action to watch during the NBA playoffs – and, if you think about it, successful teams have certain facets in common: they have knowledge of other people involved, they create a solid plan involving the entire court – and then they are proactive. Dealerships that want to successfully retain customers need to sharpen the same skills.

Know Who Else is in the Game

On a sales floor, you need to know information about potential customers and Info Entrepreneur shares ten questions to which you ideally will have the answers. These include knowing what makes customers feel good about buying – is it getting the best value? Choosing a vehicle that presents the right image for their careers? Having cutting-edge technical features and accessories? The way you’d sell to the value-seeking person isn’t at all the way you’d sell to people in the other two categories – and, before you can make that call, you need to know the other person.

The time tested way to learn more about someone else: listening. To quote Alan Hall, entrepreneur and columnist for Forbes, “Individuals and families are looking to fulfill basic human needs with products and services that will improve their lives. Wise business executives listen to their customers.”

Create a Solid Court-wide Plan

Basketball is a fluid sport, with participants in constant motion. And, it’s not enough for a player to be aware of what just one other player is doing. They need, instead, to know the big picture. In business, data collection and analytics tools can help your dealership understand customer patterns – the big picture – and results can be surprising.

Using an example from another industry: UK retailer, Tesco will put beer as a value item for its Clubcard holders when they buy baby diapers. Seems strange, right? But, here’s the connection. New dads weren’t going out to the pub with their mates very often after their babies were born, so they were more likely to purchase beer to drink at home.

So, you’ll want to use big data for your dealership to determine what people are buying, when they’re buying it, how they’re paying for it and more, putting preconceived notions to the side. This leads us to our third point.

Be Proactive

In basketball, winning teams play the game their way, making the first moves. At your dealership, if you know car-buying patterns and trends, you can anticipate customer needs – and already have solutions waiting for them. Hall notes that Steve Jobs of Apple was a genius at this: Jobs not only knew the current needs and wants of people, but he also possessed the uncanny ability to foresee future wishes.

Automotive CRM Software: Key to Dealership Customer Retention

Use AutoAwards’ Flexstat, the automotive customer retention software that provides you with a clear snapshot of customer behavior and allows you to proactively provide customers with what they want, when they need it. Contact us to talk about automotive customer retention strategies and tools or call 302-696-6000 today!

Automotive customer retention strategies that really work

Five Straightforward Ways to Achieve Dealership Customer Retention

The goal is to retain customers – and the best way to do that is to know their wants and needs by heart. Here are five key strategies.

Target a Very Specific Audience

After you’ve targeted a niche audience – and your dealership will likely have multiple audiences to consider – then spend time learning everything there is to know about them. Don’t stop at gender and age. Also find ways to gather information about marital status, interests, income and psychographics (how they perceive themselves and what motivates them). The old axiom that knowledge is power rings true here. The more specific and precise your data about your customer, the more effectively you can create a customer experience that suits their needs. Nothing is sweeter to a prospective customer than discovering a company that anticipates his/her needs. The magic happens when you reveal a marketing strategy with that customer uniquely in mind.

Take Time to Build a Long-term Relationship

If you want to achieve connection and to increase retention with your customers, then find opportunities to create another purchase down the road. Using inbound marketing campaigns is an excellent approach. The strategy involves developing useful resources that your customer base will gain the support they need to benefit from them. By making available relevant information, or rewards for their loyalty, you are conveying to your clients that you care about them, and are not taking them for granted. Personalized service and thoughtfulness, combined with the careful study of the right data, can go a long way towards securing customer loyalty over months and even years.

Give Your Customers Real Value

Nothing will inspire loyalty as much as quality of service. Do what you need to do to get this right. Be in continual communication with your clientele to learn what they are thinking. Be patient and invest your time and effort to discover what your customers are looking for. Then commit yourself to find ways to respond. The investment you make in listening to your customers will improve your quality of service tremendously, build trust and loyalty, and set you apart from the competition.

Stay Current with Industry Developments

We all know of businesses that seemed to be fixtures in their sector, but then faded from view because of a lack of responsiveness to changes in the marketplace. Don’t let that be you! There will always be a myriad of choices presented to consumers. Innovation translates into added value. You are responsible for keeping up with trends as part of your ongoing conversation with that most important person, your customer. Listen to him or her, not your competitor, if you desire to innovate well. Remember, you want to be the engine of ingenuity, not the caboose of a fading fashion.

Be Proactive and Think like a Big Business (even if you’re not)

Whether it is a spreadsheet or a fancy in-house system, implement a tool to gather useful information about your customers. Personal contact is a superlative way to gather meaningful facts about what your clients want. Social data is another oft neglected avenue that is available through means such as Facebook Analytics (and it is free). Beware of the notion that what worked two years ago will do the job now. Always be looking to reframe and update your information. Be humble enough to accept that there will always be more that you can learn about the needs of your clients and how your products/services can impact their lives for the better.

Here are helpful resources:

• To Succeed as an Entrepreneur, Know Your Customer
• 7 Ways to (Really) Know Your Customer
• Know Your Customers
• Is Your Content Marketing Strategy Customer-centric? Here’s Why It Needs to Be

Excellent Starting Point: Automotive CRM Software

AutoAwards has developed Flexstat, a powerful automotive CRM software program, to help you fine tune your data collecting process. Flexstat is designed to provide you with information about your clientele that is precise, detailed, and accurate so that you can create the marketing programs that lead to dealership customer retention.

We are confident that our customer management system will give you the insights you need to create meaningful and long term engagement with your customer base. At AutoAwards, we believe in the growth potential of your business. Come and talk with us about how we can make good things happen. Contact our office today to talk about your automotive customer retention strategies or call us at 309-696-6000.

Numbers prove our automotive marketing solution success!

Mind-blowing Automotive Marketing Consultant Numbers

For 25 years, AutoAwards by Nucar Consulting has been widely recognized as a leader in creating automotive marketing solutions for dealerships – and we thought we’d share some crazy statistics about our influence so far.

First, there has been a 1 BILLION dollar spend with our programs in dealerships to date. One billion is a hard number to wrap your mind around, but here is a great way to put it somewhat into context:

“How big is a billion? If a billion kids made a human tower, they would stand up past the moon. If you sat down to count from one to one billion, you would be counting for 95 years. If you found a goldfish bowl large enough hold a billion goldfish, it would be as big as a stadium.”

Here’s another way. Imagine how quickly a second goes whooshing by. Now, do you know how long it would take for one billion seconds to go by? Thirty-one years!

Here are a couple more amazing figures to consider. There are 1.9 million members enrolled in our programs. To put that into context, think about this. A webpage, undated, shares that one million hours ago, it was . . . 1885! To put THAT into context, 1885 was the year that the world’s first motorcycle was road-tested for three kilometers by Adolf Daimler.

And, we have nearly two million members enrolled, remember – so 1.9 million hours ago, it was somewhere around the decade of the 1750s. This, of course, was long before any motorized vehicle was traveling down a road. In fact, in that era, “The passage to America was treacherous by any standard. Many of the immigrants were too poor to pay for the journey and therefore indentured themselves to wealthier colonialists – selling their services for a period of years in return for the price of the passage. Crammed into a small wooden ship, rolling and rocking at the mercy of the sea, the voyagers – men, women and children – endured hardships unimaginable to us today. Misery was the most common description of a journey that typically lasted seven weeks.”

Finally, one more stat to ponder. Members have earned 150.1 million points from participating in our automotive marketing programs. To put that number into context, the sun is 150 million kilometers from Earth!

Automotive Marketing Solutions

The bottom line is that we’ve been helping dealerships for quite some time now, with incredible numbers of success stories – and we’d like to help you, too. Contact us online to talk to one of our professional automotive marketing consultants or call us at 309-696-6000.

Habit of being proactive: vehicle maintenance plans and more

Importance of Being Proactive (in Vehicle Maintenance and in Life!)

FranklinCovey is well known, worldwide, for its leadership development program titled 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. When asked if any one of these habits was the most important, the FranklinCovey blogger points out that they are all important, creating an “inter-connected whole or a continuum.”

However, the blogger also acknowledges that one crucial habit forms the foundation of them all. That habit reads: “Be Proactive.” All other habits depend upon having a proactive state of mind, and it’s important to remember that you always have a choice about how to respond to a particular situation.

Most people, of course, don’t plan to NOT be proactive. Their intentions are good! Some people miss opportunities to be proactive because their lives are especially hectic at the moment, while others have developed patterns of procrastination (Psychology Today says that 20 percent of people self-identify as chronic procrastinators! Here is a test to see if you have procrastination tendencies.)

If you do procrastinate, MindTools.com offers a three-step program to overcome this:

• Recognize that you’re procrastinating.
• Work out why you’re procrastinating.
• Adopt anti-procrastination strategies.

You can find significantly more detail about each step in the article, and here is a helpful video:

Dealers, Help Customers: Proactive Automotive Prepaid Maintenance Programs

Here are three realities:

• Many, perhaps even most, of your customers are busy people.
• When they add car shopping to their schedules, they become even busier.
• If you can help your busy customers to make smart financial decisions, this will help them to develop more loyalty to your dealership.

One excellent service that you can provide to your customers to help them make smart choices is an automotive prepaid maintenance program. When people invest in a maintenance program, they are far more likely to have timely maintenance done on their vehicles, which helps to keep the vehicles running well, to get good fuel economy and to maintain resale value. (Conversely, when someone doesn’t properly maintain a vehicle, then warranties may become void, among other challenges.) When you provide this type of program to your customers, you help them to protect their investment.

AutoAwards offers dealerships prepaid vehicle maintenance plans that put you – the dealership – in the driver’s seat. Our program has no high administrative fees and there is no pre-authorization required, and no third-party interaction.

Our program is called OwnerZONE and it will help your dealership to build loyalty and F&I revenue. Other advantages of our program include:

• Fully customizable
• Branded to your store; not OEM specific
• Suitable with any new or pre-owned vehicle, regardless of actual mileage

Here’s our promise to you: OwnerZONE provides you with the flexibility to build the most profitable plans that are designed specifically for your store, your brand demographics, your cost structure and your geographic marketplace.

Discover more about OwnerZONE, our prepaid vehicle maintenance plan, today.

Prepaid vehicle maintenance plans: sales tips for your team

Selling Automotive Prepaid Maintenance Programs to Customers

When you get new team members at your dealership, a key focus becomes their training. Here are some tips to share to help them sell prepaid vehicle maintenance plans.

Prepaid Maintenance versus Extended Warranties

First, make sure your new employees clearly understand the differences between a prepaid maintenance program and an extended warranty. Prepaid maintenance is appropriate for used cars sold by your dealership – or new cars that don’t come with a maintenance plan from the manufacturer.

Ensure that your new employees know exactly how long a maintenance plan will be in effect. Is it based on a specific number of months or years? Or mileage? And, as anyone studying to be a teacher knows, it’s one thing to understand something – and another thing altogether to clearly and concisely communicate that information to someone else. How can you help your new staff to appropriately sell these plans?

Role Playing as Sales Training

One of the best ways to teach new salespeople how to explain prepaid vehicle maintenance plans is through role playing. You could have an experienced salesperson play the role of a customer, or you could have someone else play the customer role with the experienced salesperson observing so that he or she can offer tips for even more effective communication.

For more specifics, we turn to the Harvard Business Review, and here is a tip we love: “Challenge the salespeople by encouraging the individuals portraying the customers to be at least somewhat demanding, standoffish, or resistant to making a purchase. As your salespeople develop greater competence, the ‘customers’ should raise the challenge level.”

It’s important to then tell the new employees what they have done especially well, along with tips for improvement, with the latter presented in a positive way. And, here is another outstanding tip:

“Do not try to teach a single way to respond to a circumstance on the selling floor. Generally, there is no one way. Role playing encourages participants to use their imaginations and their instincts in responding to the myriad situations that confront them. Our company once hired a professional trainer who used the role-playing approach to show how he would handle a given situation. Then he role-played and re-role-played the salespeople until he had them robotized to act just like him. The result was stilted salespeople who were reluctant to act like themselves or treat customers as individuals.”

Choosing the Right Automotive Prepaid Maintenance Programs

The best thing you can do for your customers is to provide a prepaid vehicle maintenance plan that fits their needs, and provides value at a fair price. For your sales staff, the best thing is to provide a prepaid vehicle maintenance plan that’s clear to understand and that provides value to customers so they can be proud of and confident in what they’re selling.

We’re asking you to consider Auto Awards’ program, OwnerZONE. This program puts your dealership in the driver’s seat, allowing you to create a fully customizable program that makes sense for:

• Your store (not OEM specific)
• Your brand demographics
• Your cost structure
• Your geographic marketplace
• Your customers
• Your sales team

Other benefits include:

• No high administrative fees
• No pre-authorization required
• No third-party interaction
• Suitable with any new or pre-owned vehicle, regardless of actual mileage

Here’s our promise to you: OwnerZONE provides you with the flexibility to build the most profitable plans that are designed specifically for your store, your brand demographics, your cost structure and your geographic marketplace.

Discover more about OwnerZONE, our automotive prepaid maintenance program, today.

Communicating automotive prepaid maintenance programs

Benefits of Prepaid Vehicle Maintenance Plans for Your Customers

Although no two prepaid vehicle maintenance plans are exactly alike, they all tend to have certain benefits in common. The first one will be important for budget-conscious customers of your dealership: the costs of maintenance are locked in. This helps to prevent unpleasant jolts to the checkbook when it’s time for maintenance to be performed – and, the better that a car is maintained, the more likely it is that it will run smoothly for a longer amount of time, which helps reduce cash outlay for car repairs.

As another option, the cost of the automotive prepaid maintenance program can typically be rolled into the car financing itself, which spreads the cost of the plan over the life of the car loan. This does mean that the customer will be paying interest on the maintenance plan; this won’t appeal to some buyers, but it’s good to have as an option for those who find it beneficial.

When you sell prepaid vehicle maintenance plans to customers, the cost of the maintenance is most likely discounted when compared to what a customer would pay if each individual maintenance appointment was paid for separately. Emphasize that!

Plus, your customers tend to be busy people. Although many to most probably intend to regularly maintain their cars, life gets hectic and non-urgent issues get pushed to the back burner. But, with an automotive prepaid maintenance plan, the customer will be notified when a certain service needs performed on a vehicle, streamlining the process.

And, here’s one more benefit. Some people, budget-wise, need to purchase previously owned vehicles – and a stumbling block to the purchase may be their worry about maintenance costs. Prepaid plans can be a way to put that worry to rest, as there will be a set cost attached to that maintenance.

Selling Prepaid Vehicle Maintenance Plans

As a dealer, you know the ins-and-outs of cars, and so you know that properly maintaining a car makes sense, dollar-wise.  Not all customers will be that car-repair savvy, though, plus they’ve got lots on their minds when deciding which vehicles to purchase.

So, it’s crucial that your sales team clearly outlines the benefits of the plan – and be sure that you’re not taking some of the benefits for granted. For example, perhaps you offer priority scheduling for customers who have the prepaid plan. If so, make sure your customers know that! Time is money – and, for people with hectic schedules, this priority scheduling can be a real plus.

If a customer has come to your dealership’s repair shop in the past, it might be helpful to review with him or her the actual maintenance costs paid in the past, to highlight how a prepaid plan could save money.

Also discuss downtime. If a customer doesn’t regularly maintain a vehicle, then emergency issues are more likely to arise. How challenging would it be to have a car out of commission at a crucial time, perhaps when there was a big work meeting or children needing to be transported?

Fully Customizable Automotive Prepaid Maintenance Programs

The easiest plan to sell is one that your customers really want and need. That’s why Auto Awards program, OwnerZONE, is fully customizable to fit the needs of your dealership, your brand demographics, your cost structure and your geographic marketplace.

Discover more about OwnerZONE, our automotive prepaid maintenance program, today.

Benefits of loyalty programs for dealer loyalty growth

Importance of Customer Loyalty: Mind-blowing Statistics

In February 2016, Social Annex collected dozens of incredible statistics. Some show the value of customer retention (7 statistics); others focus on how customers view loyalty programs (32 statistics); or how marketers view them (5 statistics).

Customer Retention

Although it has long been known that having long-term customers is more profitable than having to find new ones, here’s another angle on that topic: If you need to bring a new customer up to the same level of profitability as a longstanding one, the cost is 16 times as high! And, on average, a loyal customer is worth ten times the value of his or her first purchase.

Customer Viewpoints

This statistic shows why a loyalty program shouldn’t be an add-on or afterthought: 48% of shoppers say that businesses should work on gaining loyalty during the first purchase, calling that the most critical bonding time. And, 54 percent of consumers have increased their business with a company because of this type of program.

Marketer Viewpoints

Seventy-five percent of US companies with these programs experience a positive ROI and 64 percent of retailers have found that these programs are the most effective ways of connecting with customers.

And, here are a few more stats to mull over:

• Loyalty programs boost overall revenue by 5-10 percent
• Members of loyalty programs spend 5-20 percent more than non-members

AccessDevelopment.com has also gathered together a large collection of stats. Here is an interesting sample:

• Consumers continue participation in these types of programs because:
  • They are easy to understand (81%)
  • Offers are relevant (75%)
• 86% of people who participate in these programs believe they are worth the effort
• Loyalty programs are likely to increase in effectiveness, given that 63 percent of millennials joined one within the past year (compared to 55% of the general population)

Proven Worth: Choose the Right Automotive Loyalty Program

It’s a competitive world out there, and one proven way to cut through the noise and focus attention on your dealership is through a quality automotive loyalty program. AutoAwards by Nucar Consulting has been helping dealerships grow for more than 25 years now, and we provide dealer loyalty plans where customers earn exclusive rebate points and rewards based upon customized program parameters.

Don’t wait. Talk to our specialists today about how you can consistently reward your best customers for dealer loyalty.

Ready to get started? Contact us online to discuss your own automotive loyalty program or call 302-696-6000 now!

Automotive loyalty programs deepen customer relationships

Value of Automotive Loyalty Programs: Looking at Research

Independent research has repeatedly shown the value of loyalty programs – and, for a quick visual, take a look at MarketingProfs.com’s infographic. Highlights include:

• 75 percent of companies in the United States with a loyalty program generate a positive ROI
• 83 percent of customers agree that loyalty programs cause them to continue a relationship with companies
• 67 percent of returning customers spend more money than brand new customers

Meanwhile, another article in MarketingProfs.com shares eight reasons that your company should start a loyalty program. Reasons include that a quality loyalty program is not as expensive as you might estimate. Plus, since studies have shown that retaining an existing customer is much less expensive that obtaining a new one (many say it’s seven times less expensive!), “even the resources you utilize in a loyalty program will most likely pale in comparison to the expense of finding new buyers.”

Loyalty programs also help your customers to feel valued by your company – and, when people feel valued, it’s only natural for them to share that experience with friends and family. So, these programs can kick-start the process of free (and very effective!) word-of-mouth marketing. These customers can in fact be transformed into brand evangelists.

Here’s another reason to start this type of program: it serves as a market research tool. Once you understand why a particular demographic buys in the way that it does, you can create a strategic marketing plan to entice more of that demographic to choose your company.

Plus, this article points out, once you start a program, it becomes self-sustaining because “the more a client purchases, the more rewards he or she receives, thus inspiring him or her to continue purchasing. Continuously updating the rewards will keep your customers engaged, but the work it takes to perform this will be overshadowed by the growth your company experiences.”

If you’re interested in even more reasons why loyalty programs make good sense for businesses, we encourage you to read the entire article.

Important Step: Choosing the RIGHT Automotive Loyalty Program

AutoAwards by Nucar Consulting was founded in 1991. So, for the past 25+ years, we’ve been helping dealerships to grow as their customers earn exclusive rebate points and rewards based on customized program parameters. Unlike nationally sponsored credit card programs, this custom incentives program is designed to continually invite and consistently reward your best customers for remaining loyal to your business, not the competition and not the factory.

Discover more about our automotive loyalty program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Uo5b_awc4

Ready to get started? Contact us online to discuss your own automotive customer loyalty program or call 302-696-6000 now!