Car Dealer Marketing - Birthday Marketing At Your Dealership

Using your customers’ birthdays is an excellent way to boost sales and service at your local Dealership.

Here are some ideas to make your customers’ birthdays a branding, loyalty and revenue-generating event.

What’s in a Birthday?
Quick answer: a lot. Knowing a customer’s birthday is especially important if can created gift material. Many companies go all out when marketing for gift-giving holidays. A birthday is a personal gift-giving, gift-receiving holiday, and e-mail is the perfect channel for targeted messages to take advantage of the opportunity.

Don’t Have it? Ask.
Make providing a birth date voluntary. Tell customers what is in it for them (such as a free oil change or a tire rotation / check when they come to your Dealership during their birth month). Your best customers should have no problem giving you that information.

Before the Big Day
Send the e-mail a few weeks before the customer’s birthday. Remind them to view your gift idea and forward gift ideas to people who are shopping for them. Think about it: If you get 100 customers to view birthday gift and they send gift ideas to ten of their friends, you will receive exposure to 1,000 new potential customers. Now that’s powerful.

Happy Birthday to You
This is part two of your one-two birthday punch. On or around the big day, send a second e-mail acknowledging the occasion.

 E-mail messages that perform the obligatory, “Happy Birthday from everyone here at ABC Dealership" are nice sentiments, but you can go beyond them to address your bottom-line goals. Offer gift-appropriate items (an oil change / tire rotation) or other. You will generate customer loyalty and appreciation. Additionally, many people may bring someone in with them to receive this gift.

Don’t Skimp on Copy or Design
Use a professional e-mail marketing tool, and do not send from your personal e-mail account. Your e-mails need not be elaborate, but they do need to be engaging, like any other marketing message.

Birthdays can easily leverage the power of marketing and increase your return on investment from one of your most valuable assets—your existing customers. Give it a try and let me know how you do.

Is your Dealership interested in becoming King-Of-The-Hill for your area? If so, contact us now as our 6-month special is available to new clients to showcase our results.

Contact us at: 866-927-0947 ext. 4

Automotive Take-Away Selling Techniques - Strategy # 10

When your Dealership limits the supply of your inventory or services in some way (i.e. takeaway selling), basic economics dictates that the demand will rise.

In other words, people will generally respond better to an offer if they believe the offer is about to become unavailable or restricted in some way.

And of course, the opposite is also true. If a prospect knows your vehicles will be around whenever they need it, there’s no need for them to act now. And when your ad is put aside by the prospect, the chance of closing the sale diminishes greatly.

It’s your job, therefore, to get your prospect to buy, and buy now. Using scarcity to sell is a great way to accomplish that. 

There are basically three types of takeaways:

1)     Limiting the quantity

2)     Limiting the time

3)     Limiting the offer

In the first method, limiting the quantity, you are presenting a fixed number of widgets available for sale. After they’re gone, that’s it.

Some good ways to limit the quantity include:

• only so many vehicles available
• selling off old inventory to make room for new
• limited number of non-certified vehicles, or a fire sale
• only a limited number being sold so as not to saturate the market
• etc.

In the second method, limiting the time, a deadline is added to your offer. It should be a realistic deadline, not one that changes all the time (especially on a website, where the deadline date always seems to be that very day at midnight…when you return the next day, the deadline date has mysteriously changed again to the new day).

Deadlines that change decrease your credibility.

This approach works well when your offer or the price will change, or the vehicles or sale will become unavailable, after the deadline.

The third method, limiting the offer, is accomplished by limiting other parts of the offer, such as the guarantee, bonuses or premiums, the price, and so on.

When using takeaway selling, you must be sure to follow-through with your restrictions. If you say you only have 20 "Kia Rio's" to sell, then don’t sell 21. If you say your offer will expire at the end of the month, make sure it does. Otherwise your credibility will take a hit. Prospects will remember the next time another offer from you makes its way into their hands.

Another important thing you should do is explain the reason why the offer is being restricted. Don’t just say the price will be going up in three weeks, but decline to tell them why.

Here are some examples of good takeaway selling:

“Unfortunately, we can only handle so many clients. Once our plate is full, we will be unable to accept any new business. So if you’re serious about grabbing the deal of a life-time and building your credit faster than ever before, you should contact us ASAP.”

“Remember…you must act by [date] at 5:00pm in order to get our 2 service bonuses. These bonuses have been provided by [third-party company], and we have no control over their availability after that time.”

“We’ve obtained only 90 of these premiums from our vendor. Once they are gone, we won’t be able to get any more until next year. And even then we can’t guarantee the price will remain the same. In fact, because of the increasing demand, it’s very likely the price could double or triple by then!”

Remember when I said earlier that people buy based on emotions, then back up their decision to buy with logic? Well, by using takeaway selling, that restriction becomes part of that logic to buy and buy now.

Is your Dealership interested in becoming King-Of-The-Hill for your area?  If so, contact us now as our 6-month special is available to new clients to showcase our results.

Contact us at:  866-927-0947 ext. 4