Attract and Retain Clients With Good Communications

The Opportunity

The huge investments that go along with the attraction of new prospects and the retention of your current clientele demand that you as an automotive dealer must communicate to clients with an identifiable brand and a strong message. Obviously, these clients are people that want to invest their money and time with a dealership that is offering the best service, product and programs.

People Need to Feel Included, Important and Informed

A dealer newsletter can communicate to the best prospects. Consistent and clear communications with the sales channel—whether directly owned or independent business owners—is key to maintaining focus and retaining channel loyalty.

To enhance productivity and motivation, contact must be frequent and of high quality. However, you're clients receive so many different kinds of communications that it’s hard to imagine all of them are being read.

Some information is general to all sales channels, some is only relevant to a local geography, and the rest is personal to the individual prospect. Delivering all of this, one piece at a time, quickly leads to overload. A single, attractive document containing all of the above elements is one proven answer.

The Errington Group Advantage

A regularly scheduled newsletter that explains support programs, benefits and success stories is a great communications vehicle. A generic document with a newsletter cover and back, integrated with personalized dealership information inside, can not only inform, but also motivate.

Lead stories on the cover might be big company news or new product information important for all recipients. Regional and local stories in the cent er spread can be laid out graphically and in colour for eye appeal and enhanced readership.

Well-produced communications are read all over. This level of versioning, customization and personalization is a strong feature of many of the newsletter composition tools offered in The Errington Group portfolio. The format ensures that documents are opened, read and eagerly anticipated. The results are improved communication and enhanced loyalty; leaving your clients feeling more valued and salespeople being more motivated.

Stand Out From The Crowd With On-Demand Customized Brochures

The Opportunity

You as an Auto dealer must leverage every opportunity—including versioned brochures—to promote your role in the life of the automobile before, during and after the sale.

Why? Net dealership count in 2001 fell by 350, the largest drop since 1993. Still, that was better than the performance in the 1990–92 recession, when the net dealership decline averaged 600 per year. Acquisitions by large dealer groups, manufacturers’ efforts to reduce or freeze the number of dealership points, and sagging economies in many regions were largely responsible.

High volumes, high cost, high obsolescence.

Auto dealers who want to enhance the productivity of their dealership are beginning to invest co-marketing dollars to co-brand product brochures and enhance the value-add of individual dealerships. However, too many product brochures are produced in an offset process that usually dictates high volumes to keep the per-piece cost as low as possible. These large quantities must be distributed, stored and then destroyed when product changes occur.

The Errington Group Advantage

Your auto manufacturer’s corporate marketing department will clearly want to control the look, design and manufacturer’s brand presentation. Through the use of advanced web-based systems, you can also add brochure content, such as logo, location maps, service hours, featured specials, and more.

The Errington Group eliminates the need for long-run brochures. Personalized documents separate dealerships that will continue to grow from those destined to become next year’s statistic. Such personalized documents can be created by storing all static content—graphics and text—in an electronic repository, enabling brochures to be updated in real time, on demand, as needed. The Errington Group solution lets dealers make real time changes to designs and product offers and order the high quality brochures they need to serve their local markets. Dealers can add customized messages to reflect the specific car lines they carry, services they offer and programs specific to their clientele.

Consumer Satisfaction Begins Before the Deal Is Closed

The Opportunity

The past 20 years have seen significant shifts of auto market share from some brands to others based on perceived (or real) product and service quality issues. Manufacturers can counter some of this with mass advertising. However, since almost all vehicles are sold through dealerships, satisfaction survey programs must also exist to affect consumer opinions during encounters with dealership employees.

Surveys keep you informed.

To keep the quality of services in distributed dealer networks high and consistent, most automotive manufacturers administer satisfaction surveys to consumers. Dealers getting “excellent” ratings receive very favourable terms of doing business from the manufacturer.

Because of this, dealers solicit their own satisfaction ratings from each customer encounter. The results of these surveys directly affect the commissions sales associates receive. This makes the satisfaction survey a very important document throughout the manufacture-to-delivery value chain in the automotive industry.

The Errington Group Advantage

With both the financial well-being of the dealership and the paycheck of the salesperson dependent on satisfaction survey results, the document itself should be clear, brief, easy to understand and easy to accurately grade in large quantities (in the case of manufacturer-issued forms).

In short, surveys must be very user-friendly. Personalize the process. When customer satisfaction is “job one,” it’s critically important to understand clearly where, when and how well that job is getting done. Sometimes, forms are returned in the mail. Sometimes, they are presented at time of sale to the customer, who literally has to sign in front of a witness (remember, a paycheck rides on the rating).

Often, the information is collected over the phone (in spot-check sample surveys) and the customer service representative fills in the form. Whether the survey takes place face to face or through the mail, if the customer’s name is preprinted on the survey template, it helps to personalize the encounter. It also simplifies telephone surveys if a customer service representative can work from the same document, either on-screen or in hard copy.

The ability to create, track, edit and store customer survey forms is an essential tool in The Errington Group portfolio of solutions and services.

Maximize profits from service centre investment

The Opportunity

Franchised dealers who aggressively pursue customers on a regular basis via direct mail will increase their return on investment and capture a greater share of the total market. This approach will help pay off the big investments made in service and parts to maintain customer satisfaction.

In 2001, these dealers provided more than 373,000 service stalls, employed 265,500 technicians, and carried a parts inventory valued at $5.5 billion. To further boost customer convenience and make full use of their facilities, 61 percent of dealers offer either evening or weekend hours in their service departments. Today, the average dealership service department is open 54 hours a week.

Persistence needed to keep customers coming back.

In spite of these efforts, increased competition from independent service stations and quick lube centre's has cut into auto dealerships’ efforts to lure more customers back into the dealership for service work.

The Errington Group Advantage

One automotive industry consultant was recently quoted as saying “It’s more important to remember information for your customers than information about them.” That’s why the 50,000-km checkup reminder is such a consumer-friendly thing to do and an essential part of a continuing loyalty program.

The discounts and special offers are an additional benefit, providing the perfect time to leverage a cross-sell opportunity. Increase response rates with fast, personalized communications. The response rates to personalized direct mail are typically in the range of 30 to 35 percent, versus generic direct mail with response rates of only 1 to 2 percent.

Because the service department has one of the highest percentage rates of gross margin profits in the franchised car dealership, keeping activity levels at full process capacity is critical to the overall financial health of the dealership.

The Errington Group solutions and services does more than make the production of personalized documents a cost-effective tool. It also increases the chances that direct mail is opened, read and acted upon.