How to Leverage Labor Day to Sell More Cars

by automotiveMastermind

How to Leverage Labor Day to Sell More Cars

Holidays are traditional tentpoles in automotive dealership marketing campaigns, whether it’s end-of-year holiday sales events, quirky Halloween TV commercials or even made-up holidays like “Truck Month.” But regardless of what time of year you’re targeting, successful car sales events in general and holiday auto sales specifically depend on understanding your customer’s motivations, then effectively structuring and delivering the personalized marketing materials that get them in your dealership’s doors.

With Labor Day coming up, dealers can take a fresh look at how they approach holiday auto sales. Is your dealership effectively applying your customer data and personalized marketing capabilities when leveraging traditional types of dealership promotions? In this blog post, automotiveMastermind gets in the holiday spirit by discussing how to:

Align your dealership business realities with your customers’ buying motives
Use personalized marketing to fine-tune your holiday sales campaign
Leverage the service drive to turn pre-road trip maintenance into new car sales

Finding the Right Offer for the Right Customer

One of the traditional reasons for Labor Day sales at car dealerships has been to make room for manufacturers’ fall new model releases. While that’s less of an all-or-nothing timeframe today than it used to be as manufacturers diversify when new models hit showroom floors, it’s still a business reality for the vast majority of dealers that the end of summer is when lot space is freed for new product.

This also means there’s often manufacturer sales incentives, captive financing offers and other support on the table, so dealers who are looking to make the most out of OEM support recognize Labor Day as a key opportunity to leverage those relationships to sell more cars.

This is where a dealer sales platform like Mastermind’s Market EyeQ shows its value, by identifying the prospects who are most likely to respond to your Labor Day offers and are in-market to buy a car. It factors the upcoming incentives into its existing analysis of potential customers, applying equity mining and data mining capabilities to surface the prospects who show the greatest possible response to your specific offers. It then works with your dealership’s existing DMS to help create targeted marketing campaigns that deliver the right information and customized messaging about your sales promotion to the right prospects, in the right format and at the right time to get them in to the dealership’s doors and buying a new car.

Improve the Car Buying Experience with Personalized Marketing

Even in today’s data-driven world, the expertise of seasoned dealership veterans still matters. By pairing those best practices with the customer data and analytics-driven capabilities of a modern digital sales platform, dealers can improve both the efficiency and efficacy of their marketing efforts with a personalized approach.

For example, one common theme of a late-summer sales campaign is “back to school.” With or without manufacturer support, a dealer can put together an incentive package aimed at families with young children, targeting them for a new high-margin SUV or minivan.

Tailoring offers isn’t a new concept, but the ROI is much greater when the efforts are powered by predictive analytics and personalized marketing campaigns. Mastermind’s access to IHS Markit’s proprietary household demographic data, key vehicle history details through the Carfax Snapshot tool and consumer financial information from TransUnion, allows dealers to not just target families that fit your “back-to-school” demographic, but actually go so far as to generate a Behavior Prediction Score® that identifies the actual customers who are most likely to respond to your offer and buy a car.

When you move from targeting “families with small children” to targeting the specific families in your community who have the right mix of children, existing vehicle characteristics, financial resources and other attributes to make them the highest quality prospects available, your holiday auto sales campaign will generate the highest possible ROI.

Leverage Road Trips to Turn Service Drive Visits into New Car Sales

Labor Day is one of the busiest travel weekends of the year, often putting more American families on the road than other holidays such as Thanksgiving or Christmas. It’s the last chance for a three-day summer road trip, making it a great opportunity for dealers to turn a pre-road trip service visit into a high-quality sales opportunity.

We’ve written before about best practices for turning service drive customers into sales prospects and integrating service into sales as part of an overall strategy to increase fixed ops profitability. Labor Day is the perfect time for dealers to execute on these capabilities with tools like Service Conquest, a feature of the Market EyeQ sales platform.

Dealers can use their sales platform’s equity mining capabilities to identify prospects who are good prospects for a high-quality trade-in. This is especially valuable during holidays where new vehicle sales or lease promotions might be available, but not all customers who fit that profile are ready to consider themselves in the market for a new vehicle right off the bat.

For those prospects, the pre-Labor Day service offer not only generates potential service revenues, but also gets the customer into the dealership where your sales team can present them with a targeted, personalized offer for a new car in an environment that helps move them deeper down the sales funnel. The connection to the manufacturer incentives also creates additional urgency, as those incentives have a sunset date.

Make Your Holidays Happier and Your Dealership More Profitable

Whether it’s Labor Day, Groundhog Day, “Truck Month” or Halloween, your dealership’s holiday sales strategies will benefit from the market-leading data, sophisticated marketing and in-depth customer insights provided by Market EyeQ. Interested in how your dealership can leverage these capabilities to sell more cars the next time a holiday rolls around? Contact us to set up a demo today.

Read more about how the Market EyeQ sales platform can help with car sales.