How Equity Mining Has Changed for Dealerships

All equity and data mining vendors recognize equity opportunities within a margin of error of each other. What most vendors don’t easily allow for is the ability to flex around market conditions and industry shifts, such as:

• Demand for personalized messaging
• Fewer people coming into the dealerships (90% of customers say they want an online purchasing option)
• The trend toward pre-orders
• The need for a reliable and consistent vehicle buy-back process

These changes in engagement and buying patterns can cause dealers to miss essential opportunities, not just to make a sale but also to build ongoing trust and top-of-mind awareness. 

Dealers must be able to identify customers who are telling you they are ready to buy (based on behavior and actions they’ve taken) and have them teed up in a meaningful way so that you can do what you do best. 

Equity Mining in the Modern Dealership

Let’s face it: the vast majority of your customers and leads are not ready to buy. For those who are not ready to transact, you have to continue to engage and send relevant messages through their preferred channels. Those channels seemingly proliferate over time, giving dealers multiple ways to connect with customers but also complicating the outreach process because so many channels must be mastered and leveraged. 

Most importantly, you have to be able to actually reach customers with their preferred method. They’re more likely to see your marketing messages and can act on them if they’re sent in a convenient and familiar manner. And if you try to connect via a channel a customer doesn’t prefer, you risk eroding brand image, trust, and rapport. (We see this often with younger generations, who actually get angry if you call them directly.)

Historically, sales teams or individual salespeople have owned the equity outreach process. But this process is fraught with inefficiencies when done manually: it’s time-consuming to comb through customer profiles and send personalized messaging to each lead. There’s also a chance that the data may be stale or inaccurate, resulting in wasted time chasing leads that will never turn into equity deals.

It’s just one of many aspects in dealership sales that can be improved with better data and automation. 

For example, we’ve found that over 20% of the customers in a dealer’s DMS are not able to be reached via email or direct mail. Just by adding SMS text messaging, you can fill that gap and increase your reach by 20-30%. This gives sales teams a better chance to convert those who have shown readiness to buy.

Leveraging Activator’s Equity Mining Platform for Increasing Wins

Activator is building the next generation of equity marketing by combining the latest Customer Data Platform (CDP) technology with deep equity data. Our platform helps dealers to verify ownership, unify data from multiple sources, review engagement, and send multichannel, personalized marketing when it’s most relevant. 

We’re directly addressing the limitations of traditional equity and data mining to help dealers meet customers wherever they are, maximize their time and resources, and create more wins in long-term customer relationships.

Want to see Activator in action? Reach out today to schedule a free test drive.